Just a quick plug to check out The Missing BJCP Styles, part 2: Going Down Under with Australian Ales over on my personal blog. In this post, I cover Australian Pale/Sparkling Ale, Australian Dark Ale, and Australian Wheat Beer. I’ll be following that up shortly with a post on Australian Lagers. As with all the styles in the “Missing Styles” series, BrewSession will include these Australian styles in its style list.

Sticke Alt, Australian Sparkling Ale, Leipziger Gose, Classic American Cream Ale, Imperial Lager.  What do all these beer styles have in common?  Done guessing?  Hint: They’re not in the Beer Judges Certification Program Style Guidelines.  Nor are a lot of other lesser-known beer styles.  The BJCP Style Guide is the main source of style guidelines used by home and microbrewers in the US, and beyond.  But it has its purpose, educating beer judges.  For a brewer, it’s just not quite complete.

As noted previously, we’ll be including the FULL BJCP Beer Style Guidelines in BrewSession.  However, lately, as I’ve brewed my last few batches of beer that didn’t fall into a BJCP specified style, I started thinking about those “missing styles”.

Certainly there are many, many modern and ancient styles that aren’t in the BJCP style guidelines.  Some are just too obscure, some are even commercially extinct.  But there are some styles that, still, deserve to be recognized … somehow.

Some of these obscure styles even get brief mentions in the BJCP Style Guide as part of another similar or contrasting style.  Others are mentioned in BJCP Style Category 23A which is purposely labeled a “catch-all” category of beers that don’t have their own category.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have some guidelines to help you brew all those styles that haven’t made it into the official BJCP Style Guide?

There are well over 20 styles that are of major interest to the home and micro-brewer that I think need to be honored with a style guideline.  So, recently I started researching and posting about several of these “missing” styles on my own blog, “Food, Beer & Buffoonery” .  I started with two varieties of German Altbier that are different enough from the standard Alt to deserve mention: Sticke Ale and Münster Alt.

I’ll be periodically adding more posts about other non-BJCP beer styles that are of interest to us brewers.  I’ll also be continually updating previous style posts as new information comes in.  With all of these, I’ll be “attempting” (with big help from many of you) to create a BJCP-like style description for each of these, so that we can eventually include these “missing styles” into BrewSession. Then, when you have the guidelines at your fingertips, you’ll be able to accurately brew that Sticke Alt, that Australian Sparkling Ale, that Leipziger Gose, that Classic American Cream Ale …

Upcoming styles in the series will include, but are not limited to: Kellerbier, Gose, Wiess, Honey Beers, Classic American Cream Ale, Czech Dark Lager, English Pale Mild, Scottish 90/-, American Stock Ale, English Strong Ale, Non-alcoholic “Beer”, Malt Liquor, Australian Sparkling Ale, Imperial/Double Red Ale, Imperial/Double Brown Ale, Imperial Lager, Imperial Pilsner, Imperial Porter, Rye IPA, Dark American Wheat/Rye.

Last month the Beer Judges Certification Program (BJCP) released a minor update to their 2004 Style Guidelines. The new “2008 update to the 2004 style guidelines” (as it is officially called) includes some updated style parameters, changes to style descriptions, revised commericial examples for most beer styles and some significant rework to many Belgian ale styles.

In BrewSession we’re using the XML format of the BJCP style guidelines. So as soon as I saw that the 2008 updates had been released, I wanted to make sure we got those into BrewSession as soon as possible. I contacted the BJCP and found that no one was working on updating the BJCP XML. I attempted to contact the original author of the BJCP XML without success (Chris, if you’re out there, give us a hollar, I have some questions). So, I volunteered to update the BJCP XML to the 2008 version.

The BJCP describes it as a minor update, and while there aren’t any new beer styles in the 2008 update, or high level category changes, the number of revisions made to the “fine print” are fairly numerous. While tedious, comparing the 2008 styles with the 2004 XML and making the needed changes is quite interesting, as I’m getting to know the styles like I never did before. In fact, I started going through the styles on my own, buying 2-3 representatives of each style, taking some sips, and reflecting on the style guidelines. My own BJCP course! Dean’s already a certified BJCP judge, but I’m not. However, I think at the end of this I’ll be prepared to take the exam.

In addition to updating the text of the styles, I’m recommending that some elements of the XML be changed, enhanced and updated to make the BJCP Styles XML document more useful to a wider range of people and applications. I’ll be posting my proposals here shortly…

So you’re weighing out your ingredients. Perhaps you’re not in the US … or maybe you are in the US and have a degree in science … whichever, you may be weighing out your grains using the metric system. While the root unit of mass is the gram, the metric system of mass is calibrated to a known weight of 1 kilogram. More specifically to the weight of “a cylinder of platinum-iridium kept in a vault near Paris since 1889.”

The problem is, the kilogram is getting lighter… Discover magazine online published a recent article on this that I thought I’d share here. No, it doesn’t mean much for BrewSession. As long as we stick with the conversion of 1kg = 2.204622622 US pounds, I think we’ll be okay. If you read the article, you’ll find that the kg has only lessened in mass by about the weight of a grain of salt since 1889. Interesting nonetheless.

On another note, I’ve got 8 or so calculators ready to go…apart from the toggles having a slight issue that I’m working out. As soon as I’m finished there, we’ll be releasing them to beta testers. (I know, I know…we keep saying that…but honestly, they’re actually working!!!, I just need to get a few minor bugs ironed out before the beta release (we’re not getting paid for this, you know ;-)….and Dean’s been hounding me to get the design of the recipe formulation screen closer to final draft form as he has a generic Ruby on Rails + Ajax version almost ready to be styled up and and used. And I’m holding him back. Hmpf.)

I’ve also been looking into solutions for making BrewSession a desktop application as well as a web application. Most recently I’ve been really getting into Adobe’s AIR technology — going so far as to getting a calculator or two running as desktop apps using AIR technology. It’s really quite nice. The only catch is, you have to have the AIR runtime on your system in order for them to work (similar to having the Java runtime installed to run Java applications). But, AIR is a fairly small, painless download and install. Once you have it, each AIR application installs and runs with ease (though I think it’ll require some custom CSS to make BrewSession look really spiffy on the desktop). I wonder though….what does the general public, the home brewer, think of having to download the AIR runtime in order to run BrewSession?  I suppose we need to get a poll going… Feel free to post some opinions…

So, someone at work told me about Second Life a while back. I tried it out, and there’s certainly some interesting things there. I’ve now even had a couple virtual meetings there with colleagues. If it’s a good place to meet for work … why not chat about brewing too?

One of the main things we want to stress with BrewSession (apart from just helping you brew better beer) is a sense of community. And in that spirit, I’m happy to announce that BrewSession now has a presence in Second Life under the group name:

“Beer & Wine Makers Association”

And I do believe the Beer & Wine Makers Association is the only group of home brewers and wine makers in the land of Linden. So, until we get things running here, come join the Beer & Wine Makers Association in Second Life. We can talk home brew, drink a couple beers, maybe even build our own pub! For now, you can sometimes find me in The Blarney Stone.

Yours truely,

ummm…. Huppert Beerbaum

P.S. Join the group in Second Life and mention to me that you read about it here and I’ll refund your 1 Linden membership fee.