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Sour Beer-Making Kits Now Available to Home Brewers

This once-elusive beer style is becoming more popular and more accessible, and now you can make your own Gose at home.

The craft beer scene is a culture of experimentation, and few commercial brewers are content to sit back and rest on past successes. There’s an itch to try something different and surprising and new – and it’s an itch home brewers often want to scratch too.

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Maybe you’ve mastered your home brew recipe for an IPA or a Pilsner and now you want to move on to the next challenge. If you’re a fan of the funky, unpredictable flavor of sour beers, there is now a home brew kit dedicated to creation of a sour German wheat ale. The Brooklyn Brew Shop has just begun offering the Gose Gone Wild Beer Making Kit, allowing home brewers to replicate the Stillwater beer by the same name.

Gose Gone Wild is Stillwater Artisanal’s take on Westbrook Brewery’s Gose, a popular sour ale brewed with coriander and salt. Stillwater adds a huge helping of Citra & Amarillo hops before fermenting with various strains of Brettanomyces to turn up the volume on the sour, funky, hoppy notes.

Gose is a beer style that nearly went extinct when the last brewery commercially brewing Gose closed in the mid-1940s. But lucky for us, a former brewery employee continued making the beer and passing the recipe through generations. The style was brought to life again in the commercial world of craft beer in the 1980s, and now there are more than 100 versions of Gose being brewed in the US alone. These beers rely on wild yeast and bacteria for fermentation, a combination which creates a beer with a moderate amount of alcohol and a distinctly lemony sour, salty base.

The Gose Gone Wild Beer Making Kit includes all the ingredients you need to make this dry-hopped, sour German wheat ale. This kit uses a kettle souring method featuring lactobacillus, the same culture used in yogurt, sourdough and cheese.

Lee Heidel
Lee Heidel is the managing editor of Brew/Drink/Run, a website and podcast that promotes brewing your own beer, consuming the…
How to make beer at home: A guide for beginners
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At the very least, a hobby should be enjoyable -- something fun you like to do when you have free time. But, hobbies are usually even more gratifying when they’re productive. From cooking to quilting, candle making to gardening, if your hobby yields a product you can use, the activity can be especially motivating. Making your own beer at home, or delving into the world of home brewing, is a surprisingly approachable hobby and one you can get really good at with a little practice and tinkering.
If you learn to make your own beer at home, you can tailor your brews to your exact personal tastes, whether you're a fan of a hoppy IPA, a light lager, or a dark stout. Home brewing can also potentially save you money -- and last-minute runs to the liquor store if you realize you’re out of beer and want to enjoy one while watching the game. It can also allow you to be part chef, part scientist, and draw upon creative yet mathematical tendencies, and many people find that though it may seem daunting at first, learning to make beer at home is a fun hobby they end up sticking with and perfecting for years. Ready to roll up your sleeves and start fermenting? Keep reading to learn how to make beer at home.

Basics of making beer at home
Home brewing is sort of like cooking in that there is a basic recipe to follow, yet it can be tailored and modified to yield different types of beer. However, unlike cooking -- which is typically just a few hours from start to finish -- making beer takes about a month from the initial steps until you can enjoy the final product. That said, they do say good things are worth the wait.
The simplest way to venture into home brewing is to buy a beer brewing kit, which will contain all the equipment, instructions, and ingredients needed to make beer at home. There are also countertop home brewing appliances if you want to get fancier with your brewing. However, you can also pick up the specialized equipment and ingredients you need at an online home brewing retailer.

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Most of us start the day with coffee. Of course we do. It's the only socially acceptable drug of choice that magically transforms us into better, more alert, happier versions of ourselves before we take on hungry kids, agitating co-workers, and the hundreds of tasks we have to accomplish every day. For most of us, coffee isn't a luxury, but an absolute necessity, and honestly, we can't believe no one has yet cracked the code on feeding this beautiful bean juice directly into our veins. Unfortunately, though, as our tastes have evolved, a big pot of homemade black coffee just doesn't cut it for most of us anymore. We want the specialty brews that come from time and skill and general coffee know-how. And those brews too often come with long lines and high price tags. So if you're one of the many for whom an early morning trip to your favorite drive-thru coffee shop is getting to be either too time-consuming or too costly, Maxwell House has some good news.

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We've got you covered. New options may be coming to market in droves, but only the best make it big in beer land. As you shop for beer, scan the labels or talk up your bottle shop steward to see what hops are included. IPAs especially tend to wear the hop bill on its sleeve, a proud proclamation of what varieties made it into the brew. Think of hops like grape varieties in a good blended wine -- they play a key role in building the beer, and soon you'll begin to hone in on the ones you really like.

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