Sour Mash Sour Beers and a Recipe

Do you want to make a sour beer but don’t want to worry about contaminating all of your equipment with spoiler microbes?  The sour mashing technique might be for you, even if you are an extract brewer.  In a nutshell, the wort is allowed to sour during the mash, then the beer is boiled, killing any spoiler microbes before they can get to the rest of your equipment.

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Bread Recipe: Whole Wheat Sourdough Sandwich Bread

When I first started baking in earnest, I read all about the ingredients in bread and what they do in McGee’s On Food and Cooking.  From this, I constructed my own recipe and started tweaking it with each successive batch.  It was good at first, but thirty-something batches later, I have a recipe I am very happy with for sandwich bread.  I bake it weekly to make sandwiches for lunch- I go through about a loaf and a half in five days using pretty beefy slices.

Beer Recipe: “Lawn Dart” Saison

This spring I decided I wanted a nice summer beer.  I have a bit of a fascination with Belgian styles, so a moderate gravity saison seemed like the perfect choice.  I named this one after a game I used to love playing as a kid in the back yard: lawn darts.  And no, I’m not that old- there was a set in my grandparent’s shed from back before they were outlawed.  Something about giving kids and drunk people weighted objects with a 4 inch spike on the end to hurl high into the air apparently struck someone (no pun intended) as a bad idea after a couple of years on the market.  There’s just no having fun anymore I suppose.