Fresh hops awaiting harvest. [Photograph: Deschutes Brewery] As Serious Eaters, you probably use a lot of fresh herbs in your cooking. Dried basil just doesn't have the aromatic sweetness of fresh basil. But have you considered whether there are dried or fresh hops are in your beer? Hop flowers provide the bitter backbone that makes beer taste the way it does. Some varieties of hops add a fruity citrus taste, while others give off a juniper-like scent. Most of the time, brewers use dried, compressed hop pellets to do the job. But once a year when hops are ready to be pulled from the vine, some brewers celebrate the season by heading out to local farms to harvest hops...
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Unlike other sake masters, Philip Harper has curly auburn hair, a degree from Oxford, and speaks Japanese as a second language. He is the only foreigner to earn the Japanese title of toji, or master brewer....
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Honor the ancient honey wine tomorrow with meadmakers across the country celebrating at registered sites. First described in the ancient Rigveda hymns, later in Beowulf, and beloved by ancient Celtic and Germanic tribes across centuries, mead has even inspired its own comprehensive book: The Compleat Meadmaker. Bees everywhere would want you to get your mead on....
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Following in the tradition of crafty potheads, some industrious folk brewed beer inside a hollowed-out pumpkin, and documented the process on a Flickr set. The beer had "a raw squash flavor up front and strong hop aftertaste. No bacterial contamination as far as we could tell."...
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