The Story of Hops Part Two: Breeding meets Science
By Mark Bowers (continuation of The Story of Hops Part One) From Roadside Attraction to Mainstream Crop With the expansion of commercial beer in the 1800s, especially the later part of the century, hops too became big business. However, farming hops still was a risky proposition for farmers. For example, in the 1800s a hop […]
The Story of Hops Part One: What the Fuggle are Hops?
By Mark Bowers Seriously, What are Hops? What exactly are hops? Why do brewers all around the world add them to beer? And why does it seem like everyone and their uncle is smitten with them? When I was growing up before I could legally drink beer (I won’t tell you when but it was […]
Butternut miss this one!
Gather close, dear reader, and let me tell you a tale of our latest saga: the makings of our first ever production batch of Lagerfeuer, a smoked butternut squash rauchbier. Though we brewed this beer in September of this year, the story really starts back in September 2013. Construction hadn’t even begun on Aeronaut Brewing Co., […]
Sumac Attack
O brave new world that has such berries in it! Our beer experimentation has taken us to strange new places. This weekend, we are introducing our sumac beer, which we’ve named “Field Day” for reasons that should become apparent. The concept for sumac beer came about around a year ago, back when we were still prototyping beers […]
Co-hoperation
Making a fresh-hopped beer is in many ways like performing an organ transplant (except lower stakes). It’s all about timing and coordination. The whole object is to get the hops harvested and into a beer in as short a time as possible, while handling them ever so gently. We decided to make an IPA featuring […]
Myrcene’s in the air
It’s that time of year! Hops are getting heavy on the bine and need to be cut loose. Hops are widely known to be one of the four classic beer ingredients (along with yeast, barley malt and water), but are still probably the most mysterious to many beer drinkers. I believe the reason is that hops do […]