In the never ending quest to find new ways to tinker with our beers and produce better flavors, it's been promoted that to produce more ester and phenol characters in a brew, one should pitch less yeast. 

The theory is pretty simple - esters and phenols can be by product of poor yeast health or a stressful fermentation. This gets pounded into your head during BJCP training and is one of the reasons brewers have been recommended to make starters to ensure they have plenty of healthy yeast at the ready to tackle the job.

It's happened to us all - too many kegs, not enough time left to "properly" carbonate your beer before it needs to be served. Who knows, maybe you have a party or club meeting. Maybe you just need a beer, damnit. 

There's been a big kerfluffle in the online brewing world this year over "LoDO" brewing aka Low Dissolved Oxygen brewing. Proponents of the extremely complex methodology theorize that by reducing the amount of oxygen entrained at all times in the mash or the boil that you prevent oxidative reactions that damage the beer's flavor and reduces the overall malt character.

The reason they're obsessed is they're driven to recreate the "it" character they claim German beers have with their malts that they find lacking in many commercial and homebrews.

These days it seems like if you want to open a craft brewery you need 3 different styles of IPA, a few DIPAs for people to pound, a couple of bourbon barrel something or others, some sour projects to charge ridiculous amounts of money for and then my favorite style - saison. But there's a problem - the two primary strains people use Wyeast 3724 Belgian Saison and White Labs WLP565 Belgian Saison I both suffer from quirky fermentations.

In September 2005, Grady Hull of New Belgium, developed a new technique of strengthening yeast in storage by adding olive oil. The theory was that yeast use oxygen to synthesize sterols to build stronger, better cell walls so instead of introducing beer staling oxygen to the mix - why not add a tiny drop of cheap olive oil, a source of sterols, directly and let the yeast do it's thing. Cheap olive oil vs. expensive aeration equipment

If you're gunning for big hop aroma to your beer without the grassiness of dry hopping, traditional practice calls for a large dose of hops after the boil has concluded. These "whirlpool" hops, so called because properly the wort is cycled to create a whirlpool, are thought to give a big dose of aromatic hop oils that aren't volatilized by the high heat and action of a boil.