The Wonderful World of Beer Podcasting
So now that I've started down this road of posting regularly again, I've started to feel obligated to post something. Also, the blog has been a bit knitting heavy of late. I had planned on rectifying that by posting about my Nut Brown Ale today, but I sampled one last night and it's still not carbonated yet. Why I feel like the beer has to completely ready to go before I post about it, I have no idea, but I do. I started two new knitting projects late last week, both of which I'm so far very happy with, but real life and *gasp* school work got in the way this weekend and I didn't make very much progress on them. The one thing I did manage to do this weekend is catch up on some of the podcasts that I like to listen to, so I thought I would tell you about the two beer podcasts that I really enjoy.
When I first discovered podcasts mid-summer last year (yeah, I know I was a little behind the times on that one), I subscribed to any beer podcast I could find. I quickly found that a lot of them were not that great. Many of them were about 10 minutes of good information and about 50 - 80 minutes listening to the hosts sit around bullshitting. As a parent and a graduate student, I just don't have time for that. Two really stood out from the crowd and they are the only ones that I still listen to these days.
The first one is Basic Brewing Radio. As the tagline says this one is "all about homebrewing". Basic Brewing Radio is hosted by a guy by the name of James Spencer out of Northwest Arkansas. It's broadcast weekly and the general format followed is to read and address email he has received and then conduct an interview with an expert on some homebrewing topic. A lot of the times the topics get way more advanced than I ever plan on being with my homebrewing, but even as a simple extract brewer, I have learned tons from listenting to this podcast. If you are interested in homebrewing, I highly recommend checking out the archives of this show.
The second one is Your Next Beer. The description of this one on itunes goes something a like two college friends talk to you about beer. I braced myself for it to be two guys talking about the frat party they went to last night, how crazy it got, and all of "The Beast" that they drank while there. I was pleasantly suprised. The two guys, Jim and Jake are their names, who host this podcast, are friends from college, not friends still in college, which is an important distinction for me. This podcast runs about 10 - 15 minutes an episode. They start off with beer news, then they address the beer of the week, first giving a little history about the brewery and then talking about how the beer tastes. The beers are covered in series, so they'll spend several weeks talking about IPA's, then several weeks talking about Pale Ales, etc, etc. It's designed to be an introduction for people to new styles of beer and is pretty basic, but I still enjoy it. I wish it would have been around a couple of years earlier when I first got really interested in trying new styles of beer. As it is, it has exposed me to some breweries I probably wouldn't be aware of otherwise, and I really enjoy the background information about the different breweries. If you are interested in this one, the episodes are short, so it's easy to catch up if you don't want to jump in the middle. Even now, I generally let 3-4 of these build-up on my ipod and then listen to them all in one sitting.
Happy Listening!
