Josh Weikert

Lagers can be every bit as intense as ales. Let's explore the world of intense lagers and discusses both style and production characteristics that will have you dazzling your friends’ palates in no time.

• Lager
• Pilsner
• Baltic Porter

The keyword today is balance. In whichever style you choose to smoke up, the smoke character should more or less equal in magnitude the strongest flavor in the profile and should complement and enhance the flavors present.

• Make Your Best
• Homebrew recipe
• All-Grain Recipe

Juicy doesn’t have to mean hazy. It’s time to call a truce by ramping up the juiciness of the style without resorting to murk-inducing techniques designed to send a visual signal of “juicy.”

• IPA
• New England-style IPA
• Hazy IPA

In this final installment of MYB, Josh Weikert outlines the keys to brewing any and every beer style well.

• Make Your Best
• Craft Beer Scene
• Homebrewing

Josh Weikert—contributing editor and columnist for Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine®, the author of the Beer: Simple blog, and a BJCP Grand Master—offers some of his top picks and beer experiences from the past year.

• Best of 2018
• Josh Weikert
• Philadelphia

Suffice to say, the beers in the experimental style (like this one) get a little weird. Not only are there no limits or guidelines, if there were, the beer wouldn’t be entered in this style. Swing for the fences.

• Make Your Best
• Colonial Stock Ale
• Experimental Beer

The beer you get from this recipe will seem like a lighter, brighter pale ale with a flavor that is probably pretty clean and fruity. Over time it might develop those barnyard “Brett” flavors, but they should complement the peach/pineapple flavors nicely.

• Make Your Best
• Pale Ale
• Brettanomyces

The style is a place for beers that represent a “harmonious marriage of sugar and beer,” in which the base style is recognizable but to which we add a noticeable flavor addition from an adjunct sugar product.

• Make Your Best
• Alternative Sugar Beer
• Homebrewing

Some specialty categories seem frivolous or unnecessary, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find uses for them in particular circumstances. So it was with my Light Altbier, and the resulting beer is a fun year-round lighter-bodied but fully-flavored option.

• Make Your Best
• Homebrewing
• Altbier

Replicating a beer is a different skill set (though it does overlap), but don’t worry too much about making an identical twin – making a great sibling is more than good enough, and who knows, you might even improve upon a classic!

• Make Your Best
• Clone Beer
• Homebrewing

This is an "Americanized" version of an existing style in the colonial sense – brewed using what was available in early America – rather than in the “extreme” sense, as we see with many other styles.

• Beer Recipe
• Pre-Prohibition Porter
• All Grain Recipe

Once you get the process down for your system and palate, you can play around with the amount and type of coffee involved, and you should also start playing around with the styles of coffee beer you brew!

• Make Your Best
• Coffee Beer