Event Recap | Get Rowdy-ish

Atlas Brew Works hosted its first amateur homebrew competition on Friday night — the garage was buzzing with DC beer nerds on one of the first warm nights of the year.

The goal: Find a homebrew among the 20-some applicants that best imitated the spirit of Atlas’s Rowdy beer, the hop-forward rye ale that was originally created from a homebrew recipe.

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Atlas Wants Everyone to Get Rowdy

Atlas Brew Works announced on Tuesday that they are launching their first homebrew competition, in which they are asking brewers to try their best at imitating the essence of their … Read More

DC Homebrewers Hosts Fall Barbecue

If you are a homebrewer in the DC region and you’re aching to exchange recipes and improve your techniques, you need to get in touch with the awesome individuals at … Read More

Read, Drink, Repeat | Great Beer Books

You can’t buy your loved one a 6-pack every year. As holiday shopping begins, here are some great beer books from PorchDrinking for the hops aficionado in your life.

(Readers: Feel free to submit a comment below with your other recommendations. This is obviously not an extensive list.) Read More

AHA Learn to Homebrew Day

What: American Homebrewers Association Learn to Homebrew Day! Read More

Homebrewing: Brewing with Fruit

For many brewers like myself, brewing is a creative outlet. Water is the blank canvas on which we play with malt, yeast and hops. While many of the worlds best beers are made with those four ingredients, there are many avenues for furthering creativity. In this week’s post, titled Homebrewing: Brewing with Fruit, I will discuss the ways of imparting fruit flavors to your homebrew. Read More

Wet Hop Dream – Fresh Hopped Red IPA

As late August and early September hit, I begin to dream about Wet/Fresh Hop ales. Over 2 years ago I decided that I would take this passion for wet/fresh hop ales into my own hands. I planted my own hops and in turn would brew my own wet/fresh hop ale. The first year the hops grew rapidly and produced a good amount of Chinook, Cascade, and a small amount of Nugget. My girlfriend Lynn and I brewed a fresh hopped pale ale that was a hit at our Halloween party. The second year did not fare so well for our hops as they were attacked by some killer aphids. Our dreams were crushed as we were unable to harvest any hops. Going into 2013 I was very excited once again as the prospect of having fresh hops was on my mind. Read More

Homebrewing – Wild Porch Pounder

As many of you are aware, we had the pleasure of brewing our 1-year anniversary beer with the Mountain Sun. What you may not know is that the Mountain Sun graciously gave us 5 gallons to take home for a homebrewing experiment… and it got funky. In this homebrewing edition, I will be discussing the approach to making Porch Pounder Gone Wild. Read More

Homebrewing: Timing is Everything

If its not clear from previous posts, I LOVE to homebrew. It’s an scientifically artistic process that creates things that I can share with friends and family and bring a community together. The past few weeks I have enjoyed being on vacation and realized how important timing is. My mind and body needed the relaxation and escape of vacation. It inspired me to write this piece Homebrewing: Timing is Everything. Read More

Q&A with Mad Fox Brewing

Bill Madden has set much of the pace of the craft brewing scene in the Virginia-DC-Maryland region for the past few years. As the CEO and the executive brewer for … Read More

Homebrew Gadgets

Homebrewing is a great way to experiment, have fun and get your friends to tell you stories that they may not otherwise tell you. As I became a more advanced homebrewer, there were certain gadgets that I found that improved my brewing and some that frankly made things more stressful. Here are some of the more useful homebrew gadgets that I have come across. Read More

Homebrewing: Make a Hop Statement

Trying to keep up with the ever-popular double, triple and imperial IPAs is no easy task. It seems like every time you turn around some brewery is adding a new face-melting IPA to their line-up or collecting accolades for an exceptional year-rounder. So how do these breweries impart those incredible hop flavors and aromas in their beer and what can I do to make a better homebrewed IPA? In this weeks’ homebrew column, Homebrewing: Make a Hop Statement I’m going to share some of my favorite hopping techniques and the reasons behind using them.
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Homebrew: Make a Yeast Starter

I’m a huge advocate of the brewers’ saying that “Brewers make wort and yeast make beer.” Without healthy yeast, you cannot make the best beer possible. So step up your homebrew game with a yeast starter and improve your next batch of homebrew! Read More

Homebrew: Developing Your Recipe

While following clone recipes and recipes produced by others is a great way to get started and master your specific equipment, developing your own recipes is where the beauty of brewing really begins. The process of creating  a beautiful masterpiece and sharing something that is solely your own with friends and family is incredibly exciting. Other than ‘saving money’ which, lets be honest is not true at all, we want to make something that we’re proud to call our own. That is the joy of homebrewing. This weekend I will be brewing an IPA and want to share my methodology in hopes that it will help in developing your recipe. Read More

Homebrewing 101 – Your First Brew & Ingredients

This is part 2 of an ongoing series on homebrewing. For part one on equipment & pre-brewing prep, please go here.

Now that you have the right equipment, you need some ingredients for your first batch. If you are reading this article, you most likely know the four main ingredients in beer: Grains, Hops, Water, & Yeast. Quite simple, but within each of these categories there are a lot of options. While you might be intimidated by all of the selections, your first batch should be a simple one. I know you are probably excited to make the most amazing vanilla caramel mocha latte milk stout, complete with all sorts of fancy spices and ingredients, but that is not the way to start. You can’t be a five star chef without learning the ropes along the way, and the same can be said about being a brewer.

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Homebrewing: Building Your Library

Knowledge is power and becoming a powerful brewer takes lots of knowledge. In this week’s homebrewing post, Building Your Library, I’m going to break down three books that I own and recommend that other homebrewers read and reference.  Read More

Homebrewing – Define Your Style

From the first extract beer kit that I ever brewed (a Ferocious IPA kit, that turned out very well), I was hooked. With time my recipes got more and more complex and my kitchen stove and 3.5 gallon pot turned into a 20 gallon all-grain, three-tiered brewhemoth that takes up half of my garage. As I have developed as a brewer, my approach and outlook towards brewing beer has changed. Here are three major ways that I have developed and  practices that I employ in every batch of homebrew.

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Homebrewing Gingerbread Stout: Part 2

The brilliant thing about homebrewing is that as long as you have excellent sanitation practices, there’s no reason you can’t tweak a recipe once you’ve already brewed it and begun fermentation. With the exception of beer flaws, lots of changes can take place in beers post fermentation. One perfect example is dry-hopping beers. When our Gingerbread stout wasn’t quite up to snuff, we upped the ante.

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David Markham’s Avery IPA Winning Homebrew Recipe

We caught up with David Markham, the winner of the Avery IPA Fest homebrew contest, and he was nice enough to share some tips for starting your own homebrew as well as some info about his winning homebrew recipe. David’s Belgian Pale Ale had prominent yeast flavors, but it finished clean. It was not so strongly hop forward nor was it very citrus-y which differs from most traditional American IPAs, but matched well with it’s subtle malty flavors in the background. It would work well as a fall seasonal. Read More