What’s Brewing At Brülosophy? | New Contributor, New Series, New Glasses, and Other Updates!

Author: Marshall Schott

The last few months have been pretty crazy with all that goes into ensuring consistent output of articles and podcast episodes. Thanks to the support of our readers and listeners, we’ve been able to keep up and we also have some cool stuff going on I wanted to let everyone in on. Without further adieu…

New Contributor: Jason Cipriani

I occasionally get emails from folks asking about the possibility of contributing to Brülosophy and I always respond with a list of my admittedly stringent expectations, which is usually enough to immediately halt the conversation. This wasn’t the case for Brülosophy’s newest contributor, Jason Cipriani, who first connected with me before Homebrew Con 2017. Since then, I’ve learned a few things about him, namely that he shares my odd obsession with digging into brewing variables a bit deeper than most normal people are interested, and also that he writes for a living, contributing mobile technology articles to websites including ZDNet and CNET. Needless to say, I’m excited to announce that Jason is now an official member of the Brülosophy crew who, in addition to xBmts and The Hop Chronicles, will be helping to kick start a new series we’ll be introducing very soon…

New Series: Short & Shoddy

When I brewed the very first Short & Shoddy batch nearly 2 years ago, I fully expected the resultant beer to be terrible given the unconventional methods used. Surprisingly, it turned out just fine, in fact I thought it ended up tasting quite good. Since then, a few of us have messed around with abbreviated “shoddy” brew days that have surpassed our low expectations, which motivated me to turn it into its own series where we actually collect data from blind participants. The goal of this series is to make our way through every style listed in the 2015 BJCP Guidelines, sometimes using a popular homebrew recipe and other times relying on something we design ourselves, but always brewing in a very unconventional way. Participants will complete a brief survey simply evaluating a beer they know nothing about, the data of which will be shared in each article. We plan to publish Short & Shoddy articles at least once per month with the first one hitting the site very soon!

New Merchandise: Brütron Taster Glasses

Our last set of can style taster glasses sold out in a week and since then I receive requests daily to get more. Favoring change and desiring something with a tad more volume, I picked up a set of Rastal Willi Becher glasses that hold 0.2 L/7 oz of liquid, more than most tasters but less than a pint.

Learning from experience, we’ve decided to sell these glasses in sets of either 2 or 4 with shipping in the US included; those who want more than 4 can simply order multiple sets. They’re available now in the Brülosophy Store. We will happily ship internationally, please email laura@beerconnoisseur.local for an accurate price adjustment.

New Partnership: Yakima Valley Hops

Anyone who has been in the world of homebrewing for longer than a couple months has almost certainly heard of Yakima Valley Hops, the largest provider of the largest amount of hop varieties for the best prices on the internet. Over the last couple years, I’ve gotten to know the YVH crew including owners John Snyder and Jeff Perkins pretty well, they’ve been huge supporters of Brülosophy by providing us hops for The Hop Chronicles as well as advertising on The Brülosophy Podcast. If there’s one thing I’m absolutely certain of about YVH, it’s that they love homebrewing and want see it continue to grow, a sentiment shared by us here at Brülosophy!

A few weeks ago, contributor Brian Hall and I traveled to Yakima, WA to pal around with the YVH crew during the 2017 hop harvest. On our first full day in town, YVH’s Malissa Gatton took us to the incredible Bale Breaker Brewing Company where her boyfriend, Chris Baum, currently brews (he recently started his own brewery called Varietal Beer Company). With pints of delicious experimental hop beer in hand, we were taken on a private tour that included participating in Bale Breaker’s sensory analysis, which was cool enough on its own, as well as Citra and Mosaic hop selection.

After a quick stop at the YVH headquarters, we bounced over to Cowiche Creek Brewing to throw back some suds while soaking up the gorgeous scenery.

We then hit up an invite only soft opening of Yakima’s new Wandering Hop Brewing before beginning our east-to-west tour of the Yakima nightlife, which predictably ended with karaoke and tired.

The next day, we headed to Cornerstone Ranches where they happen to be processing the last hops of the season on one of coolest plants I’ve seen yet.

From there, we met up with some folks at John’s house before going to Bron Yr Aur Brewing Company for drinks and dinner. After that, we basically did a repeat of the night before, this time with the excuse that we were celebrating Jeff’s birthday. It was a late night and we slept in the next day. After eating brunch at a local bar and watching some football, we went to Hollingberry & Son Hops where owner Matt Hollingberry showed us around the lab, pelletizing facility, and hop selection area. On top of Matt’s ability to cut-a-rug, he was a rad host who is doing great things for the craft beer industry.

That evening, Malissa and Chris had a bunch of people over to their gorgeous place for a BBQ and beer share.

We headed back to Jeff’s house early to relax and watch a movie, as we needed to be well rested for the next day’s “business meeting” to discuss ideas hatched earlier on. I can’t say too much yet about some of the rad stuff we’ve got planned for the future, but trust that it is going to be badass. What I can tell you about is something that’s been in the works for nearly a year and I’m stoked is coming to fruition– Yakima Valley Hops will be taking over our merchandising!

This is huge for us. YVH has the storage space and infrastructure to do far more than I can do on my own. One of biggest positives to this arrangement is the centralization of our merchandise– all of our stuff will be available in a single place, ensuring customers receive genuine Brülosophy products that are of consistent quality. I’ll also be tapping the design genius of Malissa Gatton to help us come up with new ideas to keep things fresh and interesting.

Brülosophy merch will be available to all YVH customers, meaning one can snag a t-shirt when picking up hops, but rather than a large portion of the profits going to Amazon, it goes to people kicking ass to keep homebrewing the best hobby out there. Stay tuned, we’re currently in the process of getting this organized, I’ll be sure to announce when it’s good to go!

New Schedule: The Brülosophy Podcast Goes Weekly

We’ve produced 15 episodes of The Brülosophy Podcast since announcing it earlier this year and since then I’ve learned a couple things, particularly that they require a lot more time than I expected. That said, based on the incredibly positive feedback we’ve been receiving and the requests for more shows, we plan to start pumping out weekly episodes starting January 2018. This is both exciting and daunting…

Real talk. Podcasts require time and, as my grandpa used to say often, time is money. I spend anywhere from 6 to 10 hours planning, recording, and editing each episode of The Brülosophy Podcast, time that I have to steal from other areas of my life. I don’t mean to whine, I love this shit and have learned that sleep isn’t nearly as important as I used to think, but I would like to ask those who enjoy what we’re doing to consider helping us out. There are numerous ways this can be done such as using our affiliate links to sites like Amazon and MoreBeer, committing to a monthly Patreon contribution of as little as $1 per month in exchange for a reward, leaving positive reviews wherever it is you listen to your podcasts, and sharing our content with your friends. These simple things can make all the difference in the world! Head over to our Support page for more information on how you can help Brülosophy continue doing what we do.

Update on The Brü Club

A couple months back, we put out a survey asking people their thoughts about Brülosophy starting a new club. The response was far bigger than expected with hundreds of people expressing interest in joining and a majority saying they’d commit to submitting Short & Shoddy beers into competitions. Cool beans! Only problem is finding the time to manage things, as the crew and I tend to stay busy enough as it is brewing, writing, recording, and doing all our normal life stuff.

This got me thinking– why not have someone who has experience with something like this, time to invest, and might even get some enjoyment out of it handle things? If this sounds like something you might be interested in, let me know via email or the comments section below and I’ll get in touch!

Thanks again for all of your support, we appreciate it immensely! If you have any questions or thoughts you’d like to share, please don’t hesitate to comment in the section below.

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