What are you cooking today?

YUM!!

freeze it to make water croutons to serve with whisky soup.

Maybe he likes it on the dry side.

I thought I saw honey listed on the ingredients. I know nothing about brewing beer, though. Just interested in various styles. I avoid flavored beers like pumpkin, orange, etc. but now see that a description like "winter" may be the production rather than a flavoring.

Just learning, one bottle at a time.

If you stick to Reinheitsgebot, you will be drinking beer.

so many of the "craft" breweries are marketing oddball beers which strike me as alcoholic soda pop...pumpkin, meat, donuts, even Oreos.  I guess if you can't brew a great pure beer, like Hill Farmstead Brewery in VT, then you have to resort to funny names, cool can graphics, and incompatible ingredients to be hipster beer of the day.

Thanks. I had assumed winter/xmas meant spice so I was half right.

And I completely agree about the gimmick factor that has rolled into the craft beer explosion; it reminds me of hot sauces that are bought for the label, not the contents. Many of the "features" like bourbon or oysters aren't really present in any noticeable form in many (but not all) of them. Same thing is happening with bourbon now, and to some degree, Scotch--including American "Scotch."

A couple years ago the gimmick was "how much hops can you add." Now it looks like flavored darker beers are "hot." And PBR.

Are there gimmick beers? Yes there are. They fall by the wayside. Have I drank extraordinary beers that fall way outside of of the water/barley/hops/yeast strictures? Oh hell yes. Not every beer is going to be great. Not every beer brewed in accordance to Reinheitsgebot is going to even be great or even good. That is just a limit imposed on brewers. Not a fan. Let brewers brew. If it's good people will drink it. If not, then your sales are limited to one per.

Reinheitsgebot to me is pretty much the equivalent to "When I was young we didn't have any fancy bottles or cans. Beer came in a bucket with a hole in it and we liked it now get off my lawn."

New hop varieties are showing up all the time. Brewers and hop growers love experimenting with different kinds. In fact, that's why I came up with the Xmas DIPA recipe - inspired by Star Hill's Debut #9, which uses the same hops.

I've had some very good rye beers. Adds some smoothness and light nuttiness. Made a few, too. In fact I make something similar to the Stone Arrogant Bastard ale using rye. Don't remember if Stone uses it in that beer or not.

Malt/barley is the same thing. It's malted barley. HOW you malt the barley is what determines the flavor, the color, all kinds of things. Barley only comes in 2-row and 6-row varieties, but it can be malted in a lot of different ways, from extra light pilsner style to dark chocolate (chocolate malt has no chocolate is just barley, malted to be very dark).

Many different yeasts, too.  A lot of wheat beers use hefeweizen style yeast, to give it that Wiess flavor people like out of a wheat beer.  Generally you use a yeast that will work with the gravity (amount of sugars that will be turned into alcohol) and color of your wort (what you call pre-fermented beer).  Since I mostly make blond ales and IPAs, I usually use the US-05 from Safale.

It's the type of malted barley and type and schedule of the hops that makes the big difference. Sour flavors in beer come from allowing it to get a little contaminated with bacteria (yep). Strangeways brewing here in RVA makes some of the best sour beers I've ever tasted.

Heineken and Tuborg use rice in addition to barley. That and the hops are what you're tasting in there.

Gee, I could talk about beer a lot!

I used to be an avid home brewer for quite a few years. We never used, or even heard of, clarity ferm and weren't even cognizant of gluten free anything at the time. We regularly used gypsum and Irish moss. Water might be the most important ingredient. 

The malting process really is an interesting thing. Encourage your grain to begin to sprout so that it begins creating enzymes that will convert the starches into sugars for the plant to feed on. Then kill that process with heat at just the right time to retain the enzymes and then roast under achieve your desired properties.

 Yeasts are also a huge contributer to the overall flavor. Belgians in particular have a common thread running thru them that is from the yeast. Breweries have propagated the same yeast strain for hundreds of years.

With the explosion in hop varieties, advances in microbiology as concerns yeast, the proliferation of breweries & home brewers, the rejuvenated interest in all things beer and the unfettered imagination of brewers, especially in the US, I say we are living in the golden age of beer.

I love beer and think I will enjoy at least one of them later this evening.

I was aghast at what they called BBQ over in the Latrobe area of PA. It was one of the reasons I decided against accepting a job there. 

Clarity ferm (called Brewers Clarex when you use it in large commercial batches) is a fairly new innovation (only 10 years), from White Labs (the company that sells a LOT of yeast for craft and home brewers).  They developed it as a clarifying enzyme, but it turned out to also break down the gluten proteins.

I think the first brewer to use it was Omission, they use it in all their beers.  Stone uses it in Delicious IPA, Triple Crossing uses it in Falcon Smash (in some batches), and another Virginia brewery announced some beers they were coming out with that would use it. I want to say it was Starr Hill, but it might have been Devil's Backbone or another one.

I use it in my homebrew because Donna has a gluten sensitivity. And the beer tastes the same.