This section is all about the brews I’ve concocted.

All of them represent original recipes. Even before I really I knew what I was doing, I naively wanted to craft my own recipes – not use kits or others’ recipes. Despite that fact, the early batches were mostly decent. I think my luck came from my approach: to find several recipes for a given style (from books, online, etc…) and then combine ideas (ingredients, techniques) from several of them into one recipe.

Nowadays I usually formulate my recipes from scratch. I use important lessons learned from one of my favorite brewing books: Ray Daniels’s Designing Great Beers. I’ve also gotten lots of useful information from Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer. I’ve never brewed a Jamil recipe, but the recipes in the book and the information available from The Jamil Show (online radio show on The Brewing Network) have lots of great information on each style. The recipes are great reference points for what kind of grain bills and techniques can/should be employed for each style.

The beers are organized by the year in which they were brewed and bottled. Click on one of the pages below to see the beers from that year. You’ll find descriptions and tasting notes. You will also find a rank indicating how good the batch was (from 1 to 5 stars). On the later ones (starting in 2006), you’ll find more quantitative judgments.

More recently, there is also a page showing the contests to which our beers have been entered and information on how they did in those contests (including judges’ comments/scoresheets where available). We just started sending brews to competition in 2010.