American Hops: From Soil to Serve
In this inside look at how American hops are grown, harvested, processed, and used, Nick Zeigler will share insights on how to use different hop products to deliver the quality you want. You’ll learn to choose the right hop products for different steps in the brewing process and discover varied approaches to achieving your desired results.
Coffee Beer: How Much Buzz Is in Your Brew?
Have you ever brewed with coffee and wondered how much caffeine was in your beer? In this presentation, we’ll discuss caffeine levels of different commercial beers and how different extraction techniques can affect the caffeine in your beer. The presentation will show how caffeine is extracted from beans and explain…
Experimenting with Smoked Hops
A must for those who enjoy beers made with smoked malts, this course introduces homebrewers to an alternative method of introducing smoke flavor: smoked hops. Smoked hops can be added in the boil or as dry hops to deliver a unique smoke flavor different from that of traditional rauchbier. Participants…
Hops Hops and How to use Hops
It's hoppy hour! Come join us for an examination of hops, the spice of beer, from both a brewer's perspective and a hop industry insider. We will examine how hops are used, flavor profiles, hop varieties, substitutions, and storage.
Lupulin Love: Pursuing Hop Quality Through Reading Hop Oil Analysis and Selection Techniques
We all want the best hops. In this presentation, you will learn to read a hop oil report that breaks down what is in each cultivar and how these attributes affect flavors and aromas in the hops you love. We’ll spend time practicing hands-on hop selection techniques and discover what…
Putting Brewing Water in Perspective
Brewing water can have a noticeable effect on beer flavor. This seminar reviews the science behind these effects and demonstrates them with three different waters used to brew the same beer recipe. The base waters and the beers will be served to the audience for evaluation.
Spruce Beer Two Ways: Experiences from West Virginia and Oregon
Spruce tips come in many varieties, and spruce forests are found across the United States. Tedd Huffman draws on his experience brewing with classic Sitka spruce tips from Oregon and the less-than-classic red spruce tips from the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. Spruce tips work in many beer styles, so…
True Confessions of a Homebrew Ingredient Hoarder
Through the years, “some” homebrewers collect massive amounts of hops, bulk barley, yeast cultures, and adjuncts. Learn how to properly store, manage, and protect those ingredients from bugs, mold, mice, oxygen, fruit flies, light, and time. This seminar will discuss several types of homebrew ingredients and reveal best practices for…
Bitterness and the IBU: What’s It All About?
This talk covers the basics of bitterness and the truth about the International Bitterness Unit. We’ll have an in-depth overview of how raw materials contribute to bitterness in multiple ways, as well as how organic compounds contribute to the measurement known as the IBU. We will also discuss methods of…
Compound Interest: The Essentials of Essential Oils
Why does a beer dry hopped with Centennial smell different than one dry hopped with Saaz? When you can’t get Citra, what other hops should you look for to create similar aromas? Will five parts Cascade and one part Lemondrop really pass for Amarillo? After starting with the basics, we’ll…
Does Base Malt Flavor Matter? The Relationship Between Base Malt Flavor Preference and Beer Flavor Preference
Does preferred base malt flavor translate to preferred beer flavor? Does base malt flavor really matter? Find out in this Homebrew Con seminar recording!
Using Trees in Unsual Ways to Create Unique Flavor Profiles
Using maple, hickory, juniper, and oak trees as guides, we describe how to create unique flavors from leaves, bark, sap, nuts, buds, berries, and branches. We’ll discuss historical uses of each tree and the different ways they add complexity to beer. We’ll also describe how to harvest different tree parts,…
Beers That Flunked The Reinheitsgebot— Or How to Brew with Ingredients from Your Yard Without Killing Your Neighbors
Brewing with ingredients from the garden, yard, and nearby woods is older than the famous German beer purity law. Learn about using cultivated ingredients or foraged ingredients—even yeast collected in the wild—to make beers that are as pleasant to drink as they are to talk about. You’ll learn tips on…
Brewing with Honey
Honey is the perfect ingredient for homebrewers, providing flavor and functional benefits in a unique ingredient that’s accessible to all. This technical presentation will detail how honey's composition impacts brewing, and the flavor and functional properties the ingredient brings to beer when added during different stages of the brewing process.
Hoppy Sour Beers: Taking the Bitter out of IPA
Conventional brewing wisdom was that hoppy beers shouldn’t be sour and sour beers shouldn’t be hoppy. Luckily, innovative brewers have discovered that hops’ citrusy, tropical and spicy aromatics meld beautifully with acidity. But what is the best process: mixed-fermentation with dry hops, kettle soured with a hop-stand, maybe 100 percent…
How Cold Steeping Malt Can Elevate Your Beer
Learn how cold steeping techniques can be used to create truly innovative beer that is maltier, more colorful, and cleaner than previously thought possible.
Brewing with Coffee: Approaches & Techniques from Dry-Beaning to Home Roasting
Do you dream of making a coffee beer that really stands out from the pack? Jacob McKean, Amy Krone and Michael Tonsmeire will provide an overview of their years of experiments with coffee beers at both the homebrewing and professional levels. They’ll delve into how coffee origins and roast profiles…
Brewing With Experimental Hops: A New Hop Variety Just For Homebrewers
Until now, all experimental hop varieties have been tested and run through the craft beer industry first. For the first time a new hop has been bred and developed for homebrewers. Jason Perrault of the Hop Breeding Company and Perrault Farms, Karl Vanevenhoven of Yakima Chief-Hopunion, and Vinnie Cilurzo of…
Confessions of a Celebrity Hop Variety: How Did I End Up Beer?
The odds of creating a wildly successful new hop variety are one in several million (so we’re saying there’s a chance…), but every once in a while, we hit a home run. This is the story of a hop variety that was developed over a 10-year period to capture a…
Hops: Grow and Enjoy Your Own
Grow, harvest, brew, drink, repeat! Backyard hops are increasingly common and homebrewers should join in. Practical guidelines will give seminar attendess the opportunity to grow and enjoy their own fresh hops.
Kilned Versus Roasted: Do You Really Know Your Specialty Malt?
There are only two commercial maltsters in the U.S. operating roasters to produce specialty malt, so there is not a lot of information available on roasted specialty malts. David will provide a basic understanding of the malting process before delving into the differences between producing malt on a kiln and…
Malt
Enter the world of malt, the soul of beer. Beer is often cited as being at least one of the causes for civilization, and it was the deliberate cultivation and malting of beer that was the catalyst. From cultivation to harvest, from steeping to kilning to brewing, John Mallett (Bell's…
Mastering the Art of Hop-Fu!
Do you want to know the secrets to brewing amazing, award-winning IPAs? Over the last five years, Kelsey McNair has earned dozens of awards for his IPAs including one silver and three gold medals in the final round of the National Homebrew Competition. This seminar will cover the history, techniques…
Motivating Club Member Participation
The greatest thing you can do to encourage people to participate is provide consistency, entertainment and opportunity! Lauren and Joe of Carolina BrewMasters, 2014 Radegast Club of the Year, will present the things that are working for their club. From meetings to brew sessions to competitions to social events to…
Why Good Tasting Water Can’t Guarantee You Great Beer
How water tastes is no indicator of its suitability for brewing. A water used to produce great beer in one range of styles may make poor examples of other styles. There is no water source that can create great examples of all beer styles without treatment. A variety of simple…
Cohumulone: Friend or Foe?
The word on the street is that Cohumulone is bad, but what if it is just misunderstood? Mike Karnowski has a controversial theory that might change the way we think about the bad boy of alpha acids. Multiple beers brewed with various levels of cohumulone are analyzed to determine if…
Farm to Glass: Brewing with Local Ingredients
Have you ever considered sourcing your malt, hops or even yeast locally? Join Michigan homebrewer Nick Rodammer, hop grower Brian Tennis and malt producer Erik May as they discuss the emerging trend of sourcing locally grown and produced brewing ingredients.
No Boil Hop Beer
Brewing a balanced beer with no boil hops—is it possible? As part of the AHA's Research & Education Fund, a unique method of using hops in the brewing process was utilized to add clean bitterness to beer. Matthew Brown will describe the history of the idea and how the beer…
Really Understanding Honey
Honey is a remarkable substance: it's hygroscopic, has intense osmotic pressure, weighs in at a specific gravity of 1.425, and can remain edible for centuries without preservative measures. This seminar explores honey's composition, varieties, key flavor and aroma elements, handling, acquisition, and the metabolic details of honey fermentation. It addresses…
Scaling Hops: A Comparison of Homebrew & Commercial Utilization
This talk will compare both the technical and perceived differences between homebrew and commercial hop utilization, hop flavor and aromas. We’ll look at several beers made both commercially and homebrewed using the same wort and hops, varying the hop additions. Lab comparisons documenting the bittering units will be presented along…
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