Like most people, I rarely rely on my own knowledge to recall anything and I almost exclusively rely on various software, apps, and algorithms to determine how I move through my daily life. This reliance naturally extends to my homebrewing.

The virtue of whatever dish I'm making is that the individual ingredients taste good when you cook them into one dish - I'm not making toothpaste and orange juice casserole.

As an adult, some nights I spend my time looking over open enrollment paperwork, trying to decide which plan really feels like "me." Other nights I tell my husband not to fill up on dinner because we have seven different kinds of candy to pair with beer while we watch Stranger Things 2.

Let's get bananimated about esters! Why does some beer taste and smell like banana? That banana flavor and smell are caused by isoamyl acetate, an ester, which is the largest group of flavor compounds in alcoholic beverages. Esters are formed by the reaction of organic acids and alcohols created during fermentation.

"To-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another."

I held out on becoming a BJCP judge for a surprisingly long time for someone who is obsessed with getting points and advancing ranks. There are plenty of times, even for me, when I want to just. drink. a. beer. Not evaluate it.

It's been 77 days since I brewed my 100% Brett-fermented beer and I'm happy to report three things.

Lately I've been seeing gummies popping up made of wine, booze, and now beer. Curious about how to make them, I started researching recipes. As it turns out, beer gummies are super easy and quick to make.

The very best way to think of the difference between extract brewing and all grain brewing is to think of the difference between using a cake mix and baking a cake from scratch.

Kugler named his drink Radlermass - radler means cyclist in German and mass is an old Bavarian word for liter. Thus, the cyclist's liter was invented.

I imagine that the trajectory homebrew has taken in my household is akin to parents with babies - at first, everything has to be clean and sanitized nearly to the point of being sterile to protect your offspring/homebrew; after awhile, though, you realize that your baby will live even if it eats Cheerios off the couch cushions and that your beer will still be drinkable even if you forgot to sanitize the scissors you used to cut open your yeast packet.

"Meh" is not acceptable feedback for competitions. Or anywhere, really - stop leaving "Meh" as beer feedback, everyone

As I predicted, I did not pass. I missed it by a total of 9 points.

I wish I could tell you what I thought about all the beers, but another danger of drinking eight different samples is that by the end, you don't pay attention to where you put your scoresheets and now fear they may be lost forever.

I had never wondered about the corks in my beer (and sometimes wine) bottles beyond their abilities to put an eye out or to turn evidence of my beer drinking habits into quirky craft projects.

I was curious enough when I first wrote about the 45 Million-Year-Old beer that I contributed to its Indiegogo campaign and received my bottle a little before Christmas.

I've had a week now to digest my Advanced Cicerone exam experience. It's been weird not having to stress out about when I'm going to squeeze in studying and I feel a little bad for my box of now-neglected study materials. They were getting so much attention for so long and now they've been discarded like so many old toys.

The brand I bought fell into the euphemistically-named subcategory of "supermarket sherry," so my suspicions about the quality of my sherry choice were confirmed.

Even allowing for the fact that much of what we know about topics such as medicine and longstanding popular commercial products was the result of old-timey people saying "I wonder what this does. Death? Okay, then let's not do it quite like that anymore. How about when I do this?", getting from a fish to its bladder to use of said bladder in clarifying beer seemed like a huge leap. Like how many other things were people dumping in beer before they got around to thinking of drying a fish's bladder and then tossing it into beer?

Or, Nun is the Loneliest Number: Sister Doris, the Last Beer-Making Nun in Europe.

I can't decide. So many good nun puns!