As I get ready to head out to Philly for the NHC, I thought I'd announce a shift in the book plan that we're engaged in, now. Feedback from y'all has been overwhelming and a sudden inspiration took over. You see, Denny and I are but two semi-techy-geeky guys who like to play with our beer. It's right there in the site's motto! When we announced the book originally, there was an incredible response of people looking for more experiments and ways to answer the strange questions you can only come up with while you're obsessed with a hobby.
There's not enough time to completely answer every question, but.. here's what we're thinking of doing and where the IGOR corps and other's can get involved! We want to write up a bunch of experiments (Experiment 49: Is there a noticeable difference between beer's with hops added immediately after flameout or after partially chilling the wort). Setup the parameters and let everyone on the internet document their experiments right here on ExperimentalBrew.com. They'll be in a special section, organized, categorized, cross-referenced, etc. It will allow us to not only make the book full of a bunch of crazy thoughts from two semi-hippieish brewing scientisty types, but it will become a living document of what people can discover at home. It will give you guys a chance to help us improve the state of our knowledge.
So IGORs and others! While I wend my way to the City of Brotherly love (and home of the irascible experimenter - Benny Franklin - who never said the beer quote attributed to him, sadly), comment below on what sort of experiments we can design that will be practical and useful and sharable! Expect plenty of updates from the road, so watch ExperimentalBrew.com for plenty of interesting updates!
And if you think this is a bad idea, let us know! If you think this is an awesome idea, let us know that too!
Yours in Brew!
-- Drew