Check it out:

With their apartment-friendly beer-making kits, Erica Shea and Stephen Valand of the Brooklyn Brew Shop make it easy to craft artisanal beer – right in your own kitchen. Showcasing the finest barley, hops, yeast and spices, your all-natural home-crafted brew will taste as great as the premium artisanal beers served at the best brew pubs.

Choose either fresh summer wheat beer or India Pale Ale (IPA), a pub favorite with bold, hops-intensive flavor.
Includes the specialty equipment and ingredients you’ll need for home-brewing, including enough grain, hops and yeast for your first batch.
Additional equipment and ingredients required: six-quart pot, fine-mesh strainer, funnel, honey and ice.
Step-by-step instructions guide you through every stage: the mash, the sparge, the boil, fermentation and bottling.
The entire brewing process takes approximately 17 days.
Each mix produces 1 gal. of IPA beer or fresh summer wheat beer.
Equipment can be reused over and over to make more fresh beer.

Kit includes:

1-gal. glass fermenting jug.
Screw-cap stopper.
3-piece chambered airlock.
Racking cane.
4′ tubing.
Tube clamp.
12″ laboratory thermometer.
Sanitizer packet.
Ingredient mix (choose summer wheat or IPA).

jump for the burning questions…

Now, I have my own opinions about this, especially when we have such fine Homebrewing resources right in our own backyard. But I’d like to hear from the real homebrewers out there—the weekend warriors, the basement brewers. What thinkest thou about this? More specifically:

Can a mail order kit provide the instruction necessary for the novice homebrewer to be successful, or will this prove more frustrating than fruitful?

Should a copy of The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing (3rd edition) be included?

What about the price? Is $39.95 going to undercut our mom & pop homebrew shops?

And more importantly, is anyone out there willing to try this out and give us their opinion?

The third annual event is set for next Sunday, May 22 from 4 to 8 pm, and will draw hundreds of homebrew lovers to the Bishop Arts district to sample some amazing homebrews.This year, organizers are adding the Backyard Burger Throwdown. Bring your own grill and 10 lbs. of meat and see if you’ve got what it takes to be named the Bishop Arts Backyard Burger Champ.

Last year, Blockhead Brewing Company won the People’s Choice Award, and St Canterbury Home Brew Club walked away with two prizes: Best Dark Ale and Best Pale Ale. This year’s homebrew judges will include for-real microbrewers as well as our own Todd Johnson.

jump for the categories…

Categories:

• Light Lager- Pilsner, Kolsch, Light Lager, Light Hybrids
• Dark Lager- Bock, Amber Lager, Dark Lager, Dark Hybrids
• Dark Ale- Porter, Stout, Brown Ale, Amber Ale
• IPA / Pale Ale- IPA, Pale Ale, ESB, Imperial IPA
• Specialty– Any category excluding the above Cider

Think you’ve got what it takes to face the local homebrew competition? Click here to register.

For everyone else: entry is $10. Dogs & kids welcome.

Events kick off tomorrow at 7 pm with a Sunset Brews Cruise at the Pier 121 Marina in Lewisville (1481 E. Park Hill Road). To participate in this part of the event, attendees must purchase the $ $119 VIP ExBEERience package.

On Sunday at 3pm, duffers can head to the Top It Off Charity Golf Tournament. Registration is $95 per person and proceeds benefit the Good Samaritan Inn. The event will be held at Top Golf, 1500 Allen Station Parkway.

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On their website, NTFB explains the event thusly:

“In a state full of beer enthusiasts, a festival dedicated to beer in DFW has been notably absent until now…Guests can sample the beers represented and vote for their favorites naming one the People’s Choice. We will also have home brewing demonstrations. Guests can purchase their favorite brews, wines, mixed drinks and food in our outdoor Bier Garten while listening to live music. Notable brewers will speak in our Brewer’s Breakout. Local chefs will conduct classes on cooking with beer and pairings. We will have auctions and raffles benefiting local charities as well and door prizes for some lucky guests. This is an all-inclusive event. Once you’re in, you’re in to all of it. There will be no additional charges to attend classes, demonstrations or any other event at the festival. Space is limited in some areas so all events are on a first come first served basis.”

Visit www.northtexasbeerfestival.com for tickets to all events.
May 13-15, 2011

Here are some favorite passages:

Mr. Donley said he worries that their products could be shipped to dry counties or to minors. “This regulatory system has worked well since Prohibition,” Mr. Donley said. “Why anybody wants to disrupt it is a question I can never quite get an answer to.”

and

…while the locally brewed beer business is booming nationally, it is lagging in Texas, where the laws governing distribution are restrictive.

You may recall that we broached this issue in our October 2010 issue; many of you echoed our frustrations. Now’s the time to keep pushing, folks, especially since the lunacy of our regulatory system is qualifying as national news. Want to join the fight? Check out Texas Beer Freedom, a non-profit lobbying group on OUR side of the issue.

I encourage you to read the entire article to get how truly transparent and ludicrous Donley’s argument is. (And let us know if you, to, see obvious parallels to a certain family values argument that makes levelheaded people boil in their boots.)

(Many thanks and props to Christopher Smith who wrote and researched the NYT/Texas Tribune article.)

On Discovery Channel's new show Brew Masters, Dogfish Head Brewery's Sam Calagione and archaeologist Alexei Vranich meet with a traditional chicha maker in Cusco, Peru who carries generations of knowledge about brewing up all the variations of the drink. (photo courtesy of Discovery Channel)

When the Discovery channel announced the development of Brew Masters, a new shadow-style reality show following the men behind the malt, specifically the brew-ventures of Dogfish Head Brewery’s brewer-founder Sam Calagione, we jumped for joy (or would have if we hadn’t had so much beer last night).

We thought we couldn’t be happier as we marked our calendars for the Nov. 21 premier.

Flash forward to last Saturday morning when I received an email from my buddy Jeff Fryman, in-house cicerone at The Common Table, who told me that, starting with the premier episode at 9pm on the 21st, The Common Table will be throwing Sunday evening viewing parties.

Happiness officially compounded.

“Hey,” says Jeff, “if people can have Sex in the City parties we damn sure can have one for our favorite beverage, right?”

Be sure to call ahead if you want them to save you a seat. But beware if you’re seated next to one of us; we SideDishers can get a little mouthy, I mean handsy, I mean excitable when we drink.

Consider yourself forewarned.

Grains and hydrometer - the building blocks of homebrew

Let it not be said that brewing is without its drama – it’s marriages, its breakups, it’s longing glances. Oh, who am I kidding. Even at its most scandalous, craft brewing drama is pretty tame. Take the on-again/off-again collegiality of Homebrew Headquarters owner & chief brewing educator Kelly Harris and his former employee and student Ben Motley, the current beer curator at Central Market. The two, who co-taught Sunday afternoon’s Homebrewing Workshop (the final scheduled event in the store’s Brewtopia extravaganza), have a history as colleagues, pseudo-competitors, and now conspirators.

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The result: a workshop that provided enough information to jazz the beginner and buoy the already initiated. Both Kelly and Motley were keen to teach and, surprisingly, the Cooking School format provided enough time and visibility for students to feel informed and, thanks to bird’s-eye-view video, moderately involved.

Interested in brewing your own ales and lagers? Stop by Homebrew Headquarters to start your journey.

Insider tip: Homebrew Headquarters is poised to venture into cheesemaking (as if beer and wine weren’t enough). And just in time to coincide with Central Market’s Hail to the Cheese event (October 13-26). Check back for more info.