Category: Receipts

Craft Beer Sampling

After making my own wine, I decided I would take on the craft of brewing my own beer. My recent purchase of Greg Hughes’ book, Home Brew Beer, pushed me to find out even more about brewing beer. I found The Homebrew Academy website while searching for some recipes. Created by Billy Broas, the site is basically an online training course for people looking to brew their first batch of beer. I signed up as a member to get access to the free training videos and interactive graphics.

A line on the About page really stood out to me: “You don’t need a book, you just need a computer and a beer in your hand.” This is quite true for many current recipes and how-to guides; you don’t need to buy cookbooks anymore. There are millions of websites providing recipes with step-by-step instructions for users to follow (About 142,000,000 results show up with a simple Google search of “recipes”). Broas’ Homebrew Academy takes it a step further and created video tutorials teaching users how to make their own craft beer. I must say that the videos are great quality and really helpful. I see recipe publishing trending towards interactive graphics, videos, and media overall. These make following recipes much easier for the everyday, busy and impatient American.

While my new Home Brew Beer book has beautiful photographs of equipment, ingredients and the final brew, the Homebrew Academy is extremely helpful and easy for beginners to follow. I think having a combination of books and online recipe resources makes for the most knowledgeable chef or brew master. Don’t get me wrong, I love surfing the web with a beer in my hand. I also like reading a physical hard-cover beer recipe book. Of course, with a beer in my hand. Don’t worry, beer is healthy for you. 

If you liked The Homebrew Academy site, check out its parent site, billybrew.com which was also created by Broas. This brew site contains more background information about Billy, recipes with beer, and food and beer pairing.