Where Has Sicotte the Homebrewer Been?

Where have I been?!

Well, brewing for starters.

A new year brings forth a whole new year of brewing competitions.

I was named Competition Chair for my local home brew club, so I have been on the trail of all the great area competitions going on.

From club competitions, to county fairs … all the way up to the American Homebrewers Association national competition (the deadline to register your beers was Super Bowl Sunday).

A great place to start to look for local competitions is at the AHA website. It’s free to look at: http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/aha-events/calendar/

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The Sacramento Bee published this news release from Survey Analytics in late January describing the “Secret Life” of a beer buyer.

I’m encouraged by some the results.

“The King of Beer” is the most loved (51 percent)…and hated (46 percent) beer in America according to the numbers, which were compiled by numerous channels including web, e-mail, social media and mobile.

The price of a sixer isn’t a deciding factor either. The No. 1 reason to buy? Best ads.

*sigh*

The part of the survey that I would like to dig into is the 14 percent of people who have said they have homebrewed.

The interesting part of this survey is that 56 percent of the 300 responders were female. I applaud the approximate 23.5 women that are diving into the brewing world (on average). My mashing paddle waves happily in your direction.

Details of study published here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/01/27/6104502/the-secret-life-of-the-american.html

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I’ve been experimenting with random recipes and tweaking them after getting feedback from last year’s competitions.

I’m looking forward to see if I can get a better score on my Nut Brown Ale that won a few medals around the local counties last year. A tad more chocolate malt, a little less corn sugar in the bottle.

A few places I visit online to check my stats are brewersfriend.com and brewtoad.com.

The former is a great (free) way to check if you are close to BJCP stats while the latter is a great way to “create” a recipe by searching for certain items and it narrows down to already inputted files. Like CarFinder for beer!

Raise one up!

~Jon

Fermenter: Imperial Cream Ale

Secondary: Strong Scottish Ale

Bottled: Taddy Porter, Nut Brown Ale, Blonde Ale

Up next: I’ve run out of bottles!!! AHHHH!!! Making three 5-gallon batches have sapped me dry of my supply of washed bottles. A few bombers are left. Maybe I can convince the wife this is the time to get a kegging system! Haha