Author: Marshall Schott

We’ve officially made it through 25% of 2021, a year that so far hasn’t looked too much different than last year, though we have been keeping quite busy here at Brülosophy. 

A few times per year, we like to make a point to share what’s going on with us including new developments and what we’re looking forward to in the future, as well as seek feedback from readers. That’s exactly the point of today’s article.

Before we get going, I’d like to reiterate how much we appreciate the support we’ve received from readers of the site, listeners of the podcasts, Patrons of Brülosophy, and our sponsors, without which we wouldn’t be here today. Thank you!

| What’s Brewing At Brülosophy? |

COVID-19 UPDATES

While we were all very hopeful Covid-19 would be past us at this point and we’d be back to our normal lives, this unfortunately is not the case, though things do appear to be progressing in a positive direction. With vaccinations increasing and monitoring of proper social protocols, we’ve been able to start collecting some actual data from real participants, and it appears our ability to do this even more is looking good at this point. What does this mean for Brülosophy?

Website Updates
One of the more difficult decisions we had to make at the beginning of the Covid-19 quarantine was how to deal with our lack of access to participants, as data collection is perhaps what we’re best known for. Rather than putting things on hiatus, we opted to adapt our exBEERiment and Short & Shoddy data collection to include just the contributor who brewed the beer. Despite the very obvious (oh, we know) issues with relying on the person who brewed the beers to also be the sole participant, we felt there was still some value to be had in these results and made the decision to focus only on variables we’d previously tested. Judging by the feedback we’ve received from readers, it would appear this was mostly a success, though we’re beyond excited to start serving beers to others very soon!

One series we felt this wouldn’t work for is The Hop Chronicles, so we resorted to pressing the pause button on it for a bit. A few months ago, contributor Paul Amico and I came up with a plan to collect data in a safe way, which has worked out beautifully and allowed us to get back to publishing 2 articles from this series per month. Thanks to all of you shared with us how important The Hop Chronicles is to you, it was a huge motivator for us.

As states continue to loosen up restrictions and in-person meetings become a viable option, we’re committed to doing as much as we safely can to collect data, though things may look a little different during the transitional period. Whereas contributors living in certain areas may have the ability to collect real data, others may not, so they’ll continue to focus on redoing past xBmts with self-administered evaluations until they can safely meet with others. Also, given guidelines regarding group sizes and the fact some may opt to remain quarantined, obtaining a sample size of 20 participants or more may be difficult, so we’re considering loosening that standard until things are closer to normal. Hey, 15 blind participants is better than what we have been doing.

Podcast Updates
While initially worried about how Covid-19 was going to impact The Brülosophy Podcast, we’ve actually been able to keep up with our regular schedule without much additional hassle. Because of this, we were able to start an entirely new podcast called The Brü Lab where contributor Cade Jobe interviews a new scientist every week about research they’ve done on a brewing related topic.

The response since dropping the first episode a couple months ago has been tremendous, we’re regularly hearing from homebrewers, commercial brewers, and other brewing scientists about how much they’re enjoying The Brü Lab. Knowing how much work Cade has put into this show, we both view this as incredibly validating and look forward to continue producing it. 

If you are a brewing scientist or known one who might be interested in being on an episode, please reach out to Cade! We’re always looking for new and interesting topics to focus on, nothing if off limits as long as it’s brewing related. Also, we have a couple sponsorship slots open and highly prefer working with companies who have something valuable to offer brewers, if you have any interest in advertising with us, please hit me up and we can discuss details.

SCALING UP, OR GOING BRÜ-PRO!

I can’t count how many times a successful homebrewer has claimed to have no interest in making their hobby a career only to do just that within a few years. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so frank about it, but even after all this time, I can say with certainty I’ve no plans to stop what I’m currently doing to move into the world of commercial brewing. I like experimenting in the way we do at Brülosophy way too much to have to focus more on “making what sells,” which would bore the hell out of me. However, our friends at Crow & Wolf Brewing Company have a passion for both experimentation and making tasty beer, which is why we’ll be partnering with them with the goal of scaling things up.

One of the more common bits of feedback we receive has to do with the applicability of our homebrew findings on the commercial scale, and while I regularly hear from professional brewers about how they were influenced by our exBEERiment results, our partnership with Crow & Wolf will allow us to provide more cohesive information on the effect certain variables have on beer brewed on the larger scale.

Our plan for the initial phase of this project is to ease into things by performing The Hop Chronicles, though rather than focusing on a single hop beer, we’re thinking it’d be cool to do hop blends—50/50 BRU-1 and Sabro, anyone? Also, seeing as Crow & Wolf only has a single 20bbl brew system, we’re still working out how best to approach certain variables that are introduced prior to the boil and will likely focus on post-boil variables to start. 

Not only are we open to feedback on this, but we would love for you to share your thoughts on what you’d like to see come of the BrüPro Series with Crow & Wolf. Don’t be shy!  

Please don’t hesitate to share any thoughts or suggestions in the comments section below!

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