It's been a couple of months since the last missive. In the meantime I took delivery of my kit from Homebrewbuilder, started laying it out in the garage and then decided that for the sake of a few quid, I could upgrade to 100L fermentors (not his conicals - yet) and get one of his thermopot mash tuns rather than trying to fit a pint into a half glass using my Igloo, so in a couple of weeks I should have a capacity of around 80 litres a batch. In the meantime, I managed to finish off most of my brews and so, in the spirit of exploration, have been looking at what my local offy and BeerRitz By Mail have to offer. As we've had a summer this year, the British beers available locally didn't appeal, so I ended up exploring the fridges and wasn't disappointed. Our offy, an outpost of the Rhythm and Booze empire, stocks a pretty good selection of American, Belgian and German beers of a non-lager nature, so I have been happily exploring them and finding out that tiny beers of a considerable strength are really quite a good thing, including Flying Dog's (appallingly named) Raging Bitch Belgian IPA and Snake Dog IPA, and yeractual Belgian beers from Chimay, Duvel and La Chouffe among others, a better choice than you'd expect from a High Street bucket shifter. They were just what the weather required as an alternative to guzzling lager or pales.

This week I had a box from Beer Ritz. I had no real theme in mind this time after trying their Belgian selection and putting together my own IPA box but as my recent theme has been strong beers I ended up with quite a few on the high side of 7%, several of which are described as Double or Extra IPAs. And now, knowing that a taste in beer is utterly personal and completely subjective and that this brush in my hand is really quite wide, I have to say I don't particularly like double IPAs. I've had three or four recently and they've all been, well, difficult to drink in differing ways, but mostly mouthpuckeringly bitter, and that, I've found, isn't what I want in a beer. A double IPA seems to be as much an intellectual exercise as a demonstration of craft brewing but for me doesn't often hit the mark. The Ghost Drinker has also recently said a similar thing, that balance in extreme beers is hard to find. I can see the temptation, and many of the tales in Mitch Steel's IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes & the Evolution of India Pale Ale

are of the continually and the heavily hopped, which sound great on paper but on evidence may be less enjoyable in the glass. Not that it would stop me trying if I was offered any of them, of course.

I've also just read Brew Like a Monk: Trappist, Abbey, and Strong Belgian Ales and How to Brew Them and been suitably enlightened. It doesn't involve wearing a cassock, well, not all the time anyway, but it involves understanding the different view that Belgians take of beer and explains the way in which they have elevated brewing to the heady heights that they sometimes achieve. Can't wait to get my pots and get started.