Honey Beer – Using Honey in Your Homebrew
You can make beer with (almost) anything. While some additions, such as coffee and dried fruit, are fairly common, other ingredients like habanero peppers, live lobsters, and even beard hair sound like they shouldn’t belong anywhere near a brew kettle. Even so, strange brews and experimentation are part all of what makes brewing beer at home so fun. So naturally when I […]
Black Friday 2015 – Goose Hunting in Des Moines
I never thought it would happen to me. Yet here I was, still groggy from the previous day’s overindulgence, leaving my driveway in the predawn hours (still dark to hide my shame!) to join in the lunacy of Black Friday shopping. However, my destination wasn’t Walmart, or Best Buy, or even Target. I was heading to […]
How To Buy Beer While Traveling
I love to travel. Not the TSA line/airport delay/missing luggage part so much…but the whole new experiences in new places thing really gets my juices flowing. At one point my dream job was to be a travel blogger. Or even better now? A traveling beer blogger. If only I could make a living off such […]
Plan Accordingly // 9.19.15
Is it just me, or has there been an over-abundance of bizarre, made-up holidays lately? Pancake Day. Left-Handers Day. IPA Day. Columbus Day. Well now we have one more to add to the list, but unlike a few others oddities, this one I’ll gladly partake in celebrating. You better get your drinking pants on, Des Moines, […]
Nothing Compares – Pouring Brews at the Iowa Craft Beer Tent
Confession: I love everything Iowa State Fair. Although a few of my friends and life-long Iowans do not share my same passion, it is truly a guilty pleasure for this non-native. Visions of butter cows, rock bands, fried foods on a stick, and blue-ribbon livestock flood my daydreams annually as July melts away into August. It’s a […]
The Curse of the Whale
It started with a Surly Furious. A four pack, actually. On sale at my neighborhood Hy-Vee for $9.99. (Hi, Sam!) Surly is brewed in the twin cities, and hasn’t been readily available outside of Minnesota until just this year. Twelve months ago I would have been ecstatic to find Furious on grocery store shelves in Des […]
Crafts on Court: Notes from ICBF 2015
Not long ago, back when you could count the number of Iowa microbreweries on one hand (and that term was still used to describe them), a festival, let alone an entire week, devoted to celebrating craft beer culture in Iowa was unheard of. Even the inaugural version just five years ago of what has become the state’s […]
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