This year marked a heavy focus on brewing Lagers. With easy access to lager strains and a love for that super nice sulphur character I figured they’d be great to brew all year. At the start of the year things went fairly well, however I started getting a bit lazy and over-pitching my lager yeasts to pretty high rates. Believe it or not, but overpitching can be a thing and does a fairly high risk of acetaldehyde. This was particularly noticeable in my last lager of the year, an American-style Leichtbier (German AF with a huge American hop blast at whirlpool).

I didn’t enter too many competitions this year however “swept” my entries in the local Because Beer homebrew competition. While I’m not necessarily going to up my BOTY competition game, I might enter a few more local competitions.

In the new year my plan is to focus on making low-gravity / low-alcohol beers. This is mostly motivated to reduce alcohol consumption, though there’s also a new interest in low-alc beer in general. I plan to try out various techniques to create beers that have low levels of alcohol and hope to create something that tastes like beer. Making these low gravity beers are going to be tough but I’m looking forward to the challenge.

I’ll still be brewing up some regular strength or stronger beers, however my general rule will be: below 3.5% it can go in a keg, above 3.5% it needs to be bottled and maxes out at 12L batches.