Pouring a pint of beer – you’ve done it before, but can you do it proper? A badly poured pint of beer can be excessively foamy, result in a quickly fading head, and vary in actual liquid volume quite a bit. A perfect pour will allow for the best aroma, appearance, and beer experience. Northern Brewer and Brewing TV are teaming up with the Better Beer Society to help educate homebrewers, craft brewers and beer service industry professionals on a variety of topics – the first of which is “How to Pour a Proper Pint.”

For more information on the Better Beer Society, please contact rob@betterbeersociety.com or visit their website at http://www.betterbeersociety.com/

The concept of a homebrew club is difficult to describe to the uninitiated. Like country club members, homebrewers appreciate periods of leisure with life’s finer things, though no homebrew club I’ve encountered would be so exclusive. Actually, the cadre of members in most clubs traces the memory of packs of neighborhood kids gathering in backyard treehouses or forts with the intent of finding new ways to create makeshift bottle rockets, build larger snow fortresses, or raid unguarded swimming pools to fill the void of idle time.
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A while back we released a kit called Emma’s Ale. This was our first kit to focus on a charitable cause – 100% of profits went towards pediatric cancer research. By the start of this year, we had raised over $13,500 through the sales of this kit, and it was clear that homebrewers cared and were touched by Emma’s story. We had homebrew clubs brewing the kit together, lots of affirmation from cancer-survivor homebrewers, and best of all Emma made it through a very difficult time and beat her cancer.
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Like many of you, I brew beer on my kitchen stove. I do have a Banjo Burner, and it does kick butt, but it’s just not practical during the winter months. The unfortunate downside to brewing indoors is that my electric stove burners aren’t powerful enough to do a full-volume boil. Back when I had a gas stove, I could put a 10 gallon Megapot across two burners and get a decent rolling boil. But the electric stove just can’t quite make it. Instead of scaling down my batch size, though, I use two medium-sized pots and split a 5 gallon batch of wort between them. It’s called the Texas Two-Step or Split Boil method.
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I just brewed a beer that I rarely drink or think about – an American Lager. Like many of you, my introduction to the world of beer was a pale, mass-produced American Lager. In my case this was a sip of Bud Ice with my family during a tour of the brewery connected to Busch Gardens in Virginia. After that taste, I recall wondering why any of my relatives drank beer at all. So you’ll understand that, like many homebrewers, I was pretty uninterested in trying my hand at the American Lager style.
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