How has your brewing changed in the past year?

I once had a beer score in the 25s, only to win a BOS a couple weeks later. I would try not to put too much stock in the results of any single competition. There are a few bad judges, and even a good judge can have a bad day. OTOH, averages/tendencies over the long term are more meaningful.

 

There can also be bottle variation, differences in the temp the beer is at, and so on.

 

Perfecting my base IPA recipe. Having fun with single hops in there to nail that down. Just kegged my first beer a couple weeks ago so trying to figure the best practices for that. I've got some recipes ready to go to make my take on table beers (really just low abv with a lot of flavor). I think that really interests me more right now than the 6 to 8 %er's. Maybe it's my old age .

 

Going from knowing nothing about brewing to 4 batches done. I was always curious about brewing, but it took my girlfriend buying me a how-to-brew 101 class from my LHBS before I made the jump. Now I just read all the damn time and, every so often, make a beer to see if anything I've learned has stuck.

 

I've certainly been brewing less and less sour and brett beer over the last year. Even though I LOVE the process, I just don't drink as much as I had been brewing. I'll keep it to IPAs and saisons for the foreseeable future.

 

The past year, due to both work and family crises, has definitely put a big hurting on homebrewing. Got a gallon jug fermented with a bunch of dregs in the closet that I'm waiting to unleash on a full batch at some point, but other than that, no real going.
Time away from brewing means I've been drinking way more commercial beer than I had since I started homebrewing. Makes me realize what I'm capable of with my set-up (cellar blindness has disappated). Gonna be variations on saisons (pure sacc, sacc & brett, sacc, brett, and bugs), with the exception of the dead of winter, at home for the foreseeable future once I start brewing again. Apartment is just too warm.

 

I've started giving a shit about homebrewing and beer in general again. SO I'm brewing some of my simpler recipes from my golden days of brewing.

 

My big brewing story for the last 18 months or so has been lack of time to brew... just too much shit going on. Like MrOH, my commercial beer consumption increased as a result, but I'm getting bored, even with the big selection of wonderful VT beers. I'm becoming more determined to carve out a few days to get back at it. My wife's stash of imperial stout is rapidly diminishing so she won't be too jealous of the time suck

 

I live in NYC, and I'm jealous of the beers available in VT. It's kind of ridiculous, the entire population of Vermont could fit in my borough (Brooklyn) four times over, and yet the beer selection is arguably better in Burlington, VT than it is in NYC as a whole. We could fit Vermont's population within NYC 13 times over, leaving aside the rest of the state. (I'm a big fan of FOAM, Zero Gravity, and... whatever the sour brewery is in town, I can't remember the name. House of Fermentology?)

Long story short... if NYC were even 1/4 as accomplished as Vermont on a per capita basis, our beer would be world class.

@skivtjerry, what are you planning on brewing?

 

Planning on a low ABV table saison next weekend, a weizenbock soon after and a sour before the summer is over, especially if our cherry trees are productive this year.

 

I figured out that I can brew an extract batch while I dough in and mash an all grain batch. My brewing is on hiatus as my wife is in the last year of a master's degree, and we just had kid numero dos. I've gotten cocky and brazen with my ales, and with lagers being added to my repetoir I have become cautious again.