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Last year, I entered the 23rd annual homebrew competition at Barley's Ale House in Columbus. To my shock and amazement, I won the competition with my Belgian style Dark Strong Ale. On March 15, Angelo Signorino, Jr., and his brewing assistants Tate and Singer made my dream of brewing a professional-sized batch of beer a reality. Angelo preparing to load the first bag of barley, and me preparing to stir The day began at 10am when I arrived at Barley's. We went over the recipe to make sure it looked correct. Not surprisingly when dealing with pros like the guys at Barley's, it did. Seventeen bags of grain (plus a bit, I think) went into the mash tun. The Barley's crew did the heavy lifting since my shoulders are pretty arthritic, but I helped stir the mash for a while and helped load the hops. If you don't think that brewers like these work hard, then it's only because you've never seen them mash in. Lugging the big bags to the brewing system, dum...

Earlier this year, I won the 23rd Annual Homebrewing Competition at Barley's Ale House across from the Columbus Convention Center. The beer I won it with was a Belgian Dark Strong Ale, a favorite style of mine. There are only a few bottles left of the winning batch, and I have several friends and family who would love to try the beer. That means it's time to re-brew. I brewed the winning batch in November on The Grainfather. While I could fire up the device and brew a new batch following the old recipe, I'd rather work out how to brew it on the PicoBrew Zymatic, as that would be a much easier and more repeatable way to make it in the future. I used the Zymatic Recipe Crafter to scale the original recipe to the 2.5 gallon size and match the original beer's gravity. Then, because I've come to believe the Zymatic's recipe crafter drastically underestimates the bitterness of a beer relative to what I see in BeerSmith (where the original recipe was created), I us...

This was my second year as a competitor in the Barley's Annual Homebrew Competition . Last year I managed to take third place, losing to the very skilled A.J. Zanyk and his very nice Baltic Porter.  It's been on my "bucket list" to see a beer of mine on tap at a brewery or bar, and winning the Barley's competition would make that happen. I entered the following beers this year, listed below in the order I liked them, from most to least: Dark Abbey Belgian Strong Dark Ale (average score: 40.7) Bluegrass State Kentucky Common v1.0  (average score: 36.5) Tripel Turbinado Belgian Tripel (average score: 35.5) Salsbury's Saison v2.0 (average score: 25) Jamaican Me Thirsty Tropical Stout v1.0 (average score: 20.6) Salsbury's ESB v1.2 (average score: 30.3) Lonely Monk Trappist Single (average score: 27) To get into the final round of the competition, a beer had to score 40 or better.  My Dark Abbey beer managed that (just barely) and made it int...