This year was my third Homebrewcon, though second one in person. Compared to Providence in 2019, it was a much smaller show but after 2 years of cancellations it completely makes sense. It was also our first time visiting the United States since 2020 to judge at the annual Amber Waves of Grain competition.

With Pittsburgh being so close to us, we drove down which was about a 6 hour drive. We’d never been to the city before and it was really interesting how much Hamilton and Pittsburgh are similar (though Hamilton is still way smaller!). We arrived a night before the conference officially started and went to a Pirates game to experience an American ballpark as well as enjoy some outdoor baseball. Sadly, the Pirates did pretty badly with the Cubs beating them 14 – 5.

This year the lineup of speakers was a lot smaller than in the past and based on some conversations with the governing committee we might see less of a focus on non-stop talks, which was definitely the case in 2019! Outside of club night and the homebrew circle on the convention floor, there were 4 scheduled social meetups. The “online forum” event was replaced with a “New to Brewing” meetup that was intended to introduce new and experienced homebrewers to eachother. Other meetups were for non-beer fermentation (the mead makers came out in force!), alternative fermentation and a meetup for women in beer and homebrew.

Of all the talks I went to, the following are (or will be) links to my notes of some of the talks that I thought stood out at Homebrewcon 2022. I’ll be filling them in as separate blog posts to keep things easier for myself to release and to make it easier for you to skip over things you aren’t super interested in.

• Essentials of Recipe Design & Revision
• English Ales – From Classics to Class
• Comparison of 5 different yeast strains in a German Helles
• Party Like it’s 1.099 and 1.045 — Partigyle Brewing
• BJCP Meeting & BJCP Examination Tips