A couple years ago I began using Martin Brungard's excellent Bru'nwater spreadsheet to calculate additions to my water for various types of beers. I immediately began noticing improvements so I decided to dig a little deeper. I decided I'd concentrate on improving my IPAs with water adjustments. The main area I concentrated on was increasing my sulfate levels a step at a time and see what kind of effect it had. I decided to experiment on my Rye IPA recipe since I've brewed it dozens of times and know it well.

I just got done writing up the recipe for my Wee Shroomy for the book. Basically a wee heavy with chanterelle mushrooms added to it. After trying various methods of dealing with the mushrooms, the one definite thing I've decided is that I hate the "soak them in vodka and then add the vodka" method. It adds an undesirable heat to the beer. I simply chop and freeze the mushrooms before adding them. Many people, though, seem to be deathly afraid of not soaking additions in vodka, to the point of not even trying anything else.

No big surprise, but a fair amount of Experimental Brewing will be about playing with your beer and that means playing with ingredients. So, what can we use?

A few years back in Zymurgy (March/April 2011, to be precise - go, go handy Zymurgy Index), I wrote about making your brewery organized and neat and welcoming of brewery activities. (Got a lot of "Man, my wife just saw this and I have to clean up the brewery now. Thanks!" emails for that one.) Well, it's time for true confessions time - my brewery is a disaster area right now. You know how it goes. Stuff accumulates.

One of the things that Denny and I have been talking about behind y'alls back is some of the elements of the book. Listening to you kind folks it's definitely clear that we need some help with researching and experimenting to handle some of your thoughts. So here's our announcment - we're in need of some good I.G.O.R.s. The dots mean that it's an acronym! (Let's face it there's a shockingly large percentage of homebrewers who seem addicted to funny bacronyms. I'm looking at all the Q.U.A.F.F.s, M.A.L.T.S., S.A.A.Z, S.O.D.S., C.A.R.B.O.Y. of the brewing world.

You can learn something even with an unsuccessful experiment....

One of my biggest points in evaluating your experiments is knowing how to not fool yourself by letting what you think you know interfere with what you're trying to find out. Listening to an old podcast of America's Test Kitchen on my drive home last night, I learned about wine tastings conducted by Frederic Brochet. In a nutshell, in one tasting he served 2 glasses of the same white wine, only one was dyed red. Tasters proceeded to describe definite differences between the wines.

This year's edition of the Southern California Homebrewer's Festival featured 39 home brew clubs and a massive ton of beer. I saw everything I think you can make there from American Light Lagers to rip roaring super stupefying meads. Had some great beers like a brilliant Watermelon Sour where you could taste the rind. I never could find it again, so if you know who was pouring a watermelon sour beer at the SCHF, please let me know! ([email protected]).

Well, I hosted a Big Brew for the 14th time yesterday. 5 brewers, about a dozen drinkers. No strange ingredients used, unless you count all the crap that blew into kettles due to the high wind. every year, on the day after Big Brew as I clean up, I always seem to feel more than a year older since the last one!

Hey everyone, so I'm sitting here I just packed up for tomorrow's Southern California Homebrew Festival at beautiful Lake Casitas, CA near Ojai. 1800 homebrew enthusiasts will gather around the lake looking to sample beers from nearly 30 different clubs. Each club has it's own little booth and lots of fun pouring strange things. If you think I'm not researching like a mad man at this fest, you don't know me so well!