2025 Quarterly Styles

Monday, November 25, 2024

What are quarterly styles?

Each quarter of the year, the MVBC chooses a quarterly style. It is optional to brew a beer or beverage according to the style, though it is suggested! The quarterly style is intended to expand your brewing knowledge and give you an opportunity to speak with others about the style in a constructive way.

In the first month of the quarter, we will talk about the quarterly style. What does the style entail? What ingredients might you want to look for? What flavor components should be present or not (including taste, aroma, texture, appearance)? In this meeting, feel free bring in anything to share (homebrewed or not)!
In the second month of the quarter, we will taste commercial examples of the style. How do our observations while tasting the style line up with the knowledge that we got when discussing the style? Are the commercial examples well executed? What style elements do we like and not like, and what might we try to replicate? In this meeting, feel free to bring in a commercial example of the style.
In the third month of the quarter, we will bring our homebrewed examples of the style. How do our homebrewed version line up with the theoretical style definition and with the commercial examples? What did we achieve and what style elements might we want to improve? In this meeting, feel free to bring in your homebrew for the group to taste.

2025 Quarterly Styles

Q1 Low Gravity

Low gravity, or session, beers are generally 4% ABV or lower. These beers can be consumed in relative quantity over a period of a few hours. There's not a specific style associated with low-gravity beers, so pay attention to fermentable sugars and having good flavors with a decent mouthfeel.

Q2 SMaSH

SMaSH beers, or Single Malt and Single Hop beers are any style of beer that are made with exclusively one malt and one hop. You'll (of course) still use water and yeast, but this is a great way to get to learn your ingredients. Plus, you'd be surprised at how much yeast can change the flavors and aromas from a beer!

Q3 Coffee

Coming off of the very simple single-malt/single-hop beer, try deliberately spicing your beer using coffee. (If you're not that bold, use coffee malt instead.) For brownie points, adapt your SMaSH recipe to use coffee, then compare them!

Q4 Marijuana

Beer with weed. Marijuana is legal in the State of Ohio, but what happens if it meets its alcoholic counterpart? There are a couple of ways to approach the problem, so this is a great way to exBEERiment!

Hint: THC is fat-soluble (lipophilic), but alcohols (molecules that have the -OH group at the end of their long chain, like methanol and ethanol) can make water and lipids mix! Not sure where to start? Make a tincture (a solution with ethanol as the solvent) with THC and add it to the finished brew.

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