Beer Thoughts

Beer Blogging Friday: The Session is a monthly event for the beer blogging community, begun in March of 2007 by Stan Hieronymus of Appellation Beer and Jay Brooks of the Brookston Beer Bulletin . This month, Tom Cizaukas of Yours for Good Fermentables poses beer bloggers of the question What is a Beer Garden?  Is it a specific type of place, or is it a feeling?  It's not exactly an existential question, but it is something that baits a beer geek's sense of order.  Beer writers classify the beverage into hundreds of styles, with very specific and at times subtle distinctions.  We're all too happy to point out details that keep something true to style, and where it all goes wrong.  Maybe this comes from beer's Teutonic heritage.   Today's phrase of interest is appropriated from the German biergarten .  I'll approach my discussion of the term by starting with the root, exploring traditions and alternative terms in it's native tongue, and the...

I clicked into a link to catch up activities at local brewery Jack's Abby , and was surprised by one of the ads on the site.  A Westfalia centrifuge?  Did clever ad AI figure out that I was a little interested in quoting a pilot unit for work?  Nope.  This ad was sold directly to the site. It just seemed wildly out of place on a Craft Beer and Brewery website There's a lot of respect for tradition among craft brewers, and frankly not many large scale breweries where this type of equipment makes financial sense.  The captains of industry the defined so many styles in the Victorian era never would have imagined the insanity that is a continuous flow disc stack centrifuge.  I can barely comprehend it despite having worked with them for six years.  GEA Westfalia's video on Separation technology is fairly instructive, even if the music makes me giggle. That's not to say centrifuges have no place in brewing.  They are nice pieces of equipment, and ...