Our good friend Chip Walton of Chop & Brew filmed an interview with us back in June at the 2014 AHA National Homebrewers' Convention in Grand Rapids, MI. Maybe you should take a gander and enjoy the back and forth silliness of us.

Well, after living with the first 2 versions of the American Mild for a few weeks now, I have some thoughts and ideas about the direction of this project.....

I like goofy weird things - I'm not afraid to admit

I'm also not afraid to tell you that I love novel uses of things like liquid nitrogen. I'm just jealous I didn't think of this first! The brewers at Garage Project in New Zealand decided to play with using liquid nitrogen to separate "pure" lupulin from a bunch of Nelson Sauvin hops and then use that to produce their Hop # IPA. It's fairly novel and looks fairly straightforward.

To explain the process, they crafted a loving tribute to Breaking Bad.

Thought I'd start a thread to document my attempts at coming up with an "American Mild" ale. I want to end up with a sub 4% beer that doesn't have flavor and mouthfeel comparable to water! I'm basing it on the English Mild, obviously, but with American ingredients. My goal is to come up with a beer with the body and flavor impact of a traditional mild, although not the same flavor. I'm guessing this will take at least 3-6 attempts to get to what I have in mind.

A news story that I just read............
A Virile Beer?
According to a news item in Tokyo's Mainichi Daily News, a French brewery has started tests on a beer, said to contain natural aphrodisiacs, that does not affect the drinker's ability for making love. The Fischer brewery announced that the beer is currently being tested under strict medical control by 400 drinkers in France. The company insists that the announcement, made on April 3, was not an April Fools hoax.

A couple months ago, my friend Mitch Scheele, who writes for the Northwest Brewing News, contacted me about an experiment he wanted to do. He had invented a piece of equipment he calls the “Hop Screw”. It’s a stainless tell cylinder with holes in it, a bar across the top to attach it to your boil kettle, and a plate and screw handle on top. A bit like a stainless cider press. The idea is that you attach it to your kettle before you start collecting wort.

A friend who writes for the Northwest Brewing News contacted me recently about an experiment he wanted to do. It just so happens that it was an experiment we had written up for the book, so I was all for it. Since we haven't had the tasting yet, I won't give away what experiment it was, but in a couple weeks you can read the procedures and results here!

For a long time I've been a proponent of a very simple method of adding coffee to your beer. My process is a long cold steep - 1 cup coarse ground coffee, 2-3 cups of filtered cold water. Mix in a French press, soak for 8 to 12 hours, press, filter and add to the beer in the keg/secondary.

I do this process a few times a week because it's a way of making coffee that my un-caffeinated brain can handle. Press, pour over ice with a little water dilute, drink, repeat until brain screams for mercy. One pot of coffee concentrate can last for several days in the fridge.

Derek Dellinger, over at Bear-Flavored.com did some research by polling for information from the brewers of nationally ranked IPAs.

I'll let you discover the answer over at his site in this article.

Back? What do you think? If you had to choose a limited number of varieties to fit that "ideal" number - what would you choose?