The State of the Beer Podcast

The State of the Beer is a weekly podcast discussing home brewing, brewing and beer news, trends and culture. Hosted by Tony Russo and Doug Griffith, the show is a great way to learn the language of beer and to participate remotely in the larger beer community.
Homebrewers will be an important part of the show. Each week, Doug and Tony will taste and review a home brew submitted by a listener. If the brewer is available, we will have them on for the beginning of the show. If not, we'll still record the tasting and initiate a conversation on our blog about the beer. If you are interested in being on the show, we record at 11 a.m. You can reach Tony socially on Twitter, Facebook, by posting to the show's Google+ page or commenting below.

Comments

Searching Philadelphia for Maryland Beer

The Van Pelt library at the University of Pennsylvania truly is the type you can get lost in. I know 'cause I did. Early in my research I discovered that there was a person named John Beale Bordley, who was a colonial hotshot and one of the first production-scale brewers in Maryland. Bordley was friendly with Thomas Jefferson and as concerned as he was about what we now call sustainable living. Part of that, for Bordley, was not having to rely upon the British for ale. After reading his book online and fumbling across some of his papers, it became clear to me that it might just be possible to find his recipe. Finding the first Eastern Shore beer recipe and including it in my book , would be a massive coup. I had to head to Philly to have my computer repaired. The best way to have your Mac die, it turns out, is to get behind on your writing schedule and then engage on a wild goose chase. The Apple people took it from me and sent it off to have the hard drive replaced. I thanked ...

Away we go

In a very, very technical sense, this was the first photo taken for the book. When +The History Press agreed to publish my book , I was a little worried about getting the right photos. But not quite as worried as they were at first. You see, Eastern Shore Beer was to be a pretty book, as well as an informative one. I got something like 32 color pages for a photo insert and was responsible for the cover and back cover art. When they asked if I thought I could get photos I said, "Kind of." There were three problems as I saw it. First of all, beer hasn't been all that well-documented on the Eastern Shore. Certainly, it hasn't been treasured until recently, so the archives that aren't bare, aren't well marked. Secondly, there weren't the kinds of high-profile prohibition busts in the 20s as there were in metropolitan areas, therefore there were no photos of colorful characters in bowlers smirking for the camera after destroying a beer barrel.

There's more to campus beer than frat boys

The recently-reported discovery of an o n-campus brewery at the +College of William & Mary highlights a point that we've forgotten, a little bit. Yes, it's cute to make jokes about having beer on campus, but where there are people, there is beer. This is a fact of civilization. What was difficult was making good beer. It not only took time, but also resources that most smaller places didn't have. Maltsters were rare in the country, but they could make a living in cities, larger communities and even on plantations, if the plantation owner was rich enough and liked beer that much. Anyone can make a passable cider, but colonists who liked beer had trouble getting good brews. What's exciting about the discovery is that we might get additional insight into the recipes they were using. A good beer recipe, like a good maltster, was, if not rare-ish, less common than we would like. Brewers wrote to one another about their processes and occasionally some of the ingredi...

The State of the Beer

Search This Blog