The Des Moines Brewster 47
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 […]
Father’s Day Gifts for the Craft Beer Connoisseur
What happened to June? The end of winter dragged on endlessly, April and May lasted forever…yet all of the sudden we’re staring down the barrel of July, just ten short days away. Memorial day weekend was forever ago, Flag Day has come and gone, and summer officially kicks off this Sunday. Oh, and in case […]
Des Moines Beer Week | Q&A with 818 Design’s Rachel and Melissa
If you know anything about the craft beer industry, it’s a very busy and growing one. With new breweries popping up in buildings monthly, it can be tough to keep up with everything. If you don’t know what IPA stands for, what craft beer means or still not sure if you enjoy a hoppy beer or a […]
Field Trip | Exile on (Walnut) Street
Now that craft beer boom in full swing, the grassroots rhetoric has become commonplace. As I’ve mentioned before, you don’t have to look far to find the “started from the bottom, now we’re here” success story of low-budget home brewers turning their fledgling passion into a full-time career. Nano-breweries that began in cramped basements and […]
Spent Grain Scones
As a Foodster, this may be the most Foodster thing you could do. I’ve been homebrewing – on my 5th brew – and learned that the spent grain can be more than just something that is simply thrown into your compost pile or fed to livestock. It’s something that can be composted right in your […]
Thoughts from a Home Brewer
There is a significant amount of time to kill during the home brewing process, which gives the home brewer a lot of time to think. On most occasions, such thoughts usually consist of sheer panic and “Oh crap, I think I just screwed this whole thing up.” But other times, a rather interesting stream of […]
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