Thursday, July 18, 2013

Weekend of the Nerds - Day 1

On Saturday I was one of the lucky attendees at the Queensland Bi-annual Homebrew Conference
You have to love a conference where in the opening remarks they warn you not to drive , and this is the morning tea served at 10.30am - there were also three other brews to try in this tasting session alone
It was a great day with a lot of interesting ideas on offer
This lecture wasn't what I was expecting as it was basically about how to add flavours to strong malt & hop brews - no mention of kimchi, tomatoes or sage. Maybe they try these things out before trying to sell them! It was also curious to hear obvious brew nerds behind me excitedly writing down ideas like 'use oak chips in your fermenter to replicate the concept of ageing in the barrel', which makes me realise that I may be on the more experimental end of the home-brew arc.

Having said that I walked away with both a 25kg bag of grain (best raffle prize ever?) and a headful of ideas. And not just about beer - a really interesting talk about brewing for prohibition-style whiskeys (accompanied by several sample nips, all before midday) has me thinking about a still that I could use (to make essential oils of course). And an afternoon talk on saki has had me looking at the bag of rice in our cupboard in a different light.

By the end of the day everyone was pretty relaxed  
and the next day one of the contents of the showbag turned out to be very useful....

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