Alright, my fellow IGORs and followers of the blog, yesterday's post on PB2 and its uses received good traction both here and on Facebook, so I'm now going to turn the floor over to you.

What crazy things have you used in your brews? What's your favorite way to add a twist to the brew day?

There's a ton of things like: coffee, chocolate, fruit, liquor, oak, spice! Share!

Our club had its annual Iron Brewer competition last Saturday. In case you've never seen Iron Chef, the TV show that inspired the event, teams of brewers arrive at the brewing location, set up their equipment and are given secret ingredients to use in a batch of beer which they have 5 hours to brew. The ingredients don't have to dominate the beer, but they do have to make a noticeable contribution to the beer. We had six teams of 2 brewers this year. Each team was given a selection of crystal malts (20, 60, and Special B) and a quart of pomegranate juice to use.

My job has a very unstructured schedule. Sometimes it's a day of work here and there, sometimes it's 2 weeks straight followed by a week or 2 off. I'm heading into a 10 day stretch of no work and looking forward to getting my brew on for the first time in a while! I'm planning on getting in at least 2 batches of relatively low alcohol, but (hopefully) flavorful beers. Both will be experiments because I haven't brewed either recipe before. One will be a low alcohol Belgian style beer, made with W3787 Westmalle yeast and some beautiful Hallertauer pellets I picked up.

think think think think write research research think think think get up walk around pet the cat play ball with the dog think think think write research go to work wish you had a beer

Sounds exotic, huh?

So, today I'm thinking about what types of suggestions for experiments to include in the book. The posts you've been making help a lot in knowing what you're interested in. That's a hint!

I feel like we've been remiss here. We totally forgot to mention that homebrewing will finally be legal in all 50 states! It's taken a few years, but once Mississippi's law goes into effect in July, you can no longer consider yourself a wanton criminal in these here states. So congratulations to Mississippi (signed in March) and Alabama (signed last week) and to the fleet of homebrewers who've worked for multiple years to finally get the hobby fully legalized.

Rather than thank everyone individually for every post in the forums, I wanted to just give everybody an overall thanks for your contributions. We're off to a great start and we've got a long way to go, but every post is valuable to us and hopefully it will be to other homebrewers.

My apologies - earlier when we launched, it seems that someone *cough* me *cough* forgot to give users the ability to make a forum post. It should be fixed now! Fire away.