Brian Schoolcraft

I don't exactly remember it has been a long time, but when I started, all-grain wasn't a thing for homebrewers. I brewed my first batch in 2002. A neighbor taught me how to brew with extract using specialty grains. It was basically a turkey fryer set-up and a glass carboy as a fermenter that I kept in a cool closet. And the saying is absolutely true: 'Give a man a beer and he will waste a day. Teach a man to brew and he will waste a lifetime'

Eisbock! I brewed a recipe that has been handed down several times and the stars literally lined up the first time I brewed it. It took first at Bluebonnet and Nationals that year and Rabbit Hole selected it to brew (and invited me to help brew it) and called it School of Bock. The cool thing about this recipe (which you can find on the AHA website) is there is no freezing involved.

There was one winter our temps were expected to drop below freezing for a time and someone suggested it would be a good time to freeze a keg. I happened to have a dopplebock in a keg and set it out on the patio to make a traditional eisbock. I weighed it before it froze and after I racked off the non-frozen liquid to another keg. 20% remained in the original keg as ice. I set that keg aside for a year to let it lager and when I tasted it, it had picked up an infection and it went sour and I had to dump it.

I am a huge fan of Cowtown's Vienna. I can't tell you how much money I've dropped on that particular beer. Now I wished I had invested when they started. =) When I have commercial beer at the house, the styles are all over the place. I like a variety.

Unfortunately, nothing. I started my own business a little over 5-years ago and it takes up a lot of time and has severely reduced my ability to brew. When I do brew, I will try to knock out two beers over a weekend. I have managed to cobble seven entries together for Bluebonnet this year.

Oktoberfest for both. Every year as breweries produce their seasonal Oktoberfests I end up buying probably 8-10 different six-packs of Oktoberfest to see who's best. I usually hover toward Ayinger and Hacker-Pschorr. I am a big fan of German lagers and like to brew Helles, Vienna, Oktoberfest, and Doppelbocks.

t's a two-tier HERMS set-up. I bought the burner stand at Academy a long time ago. I welded in a banjo burner on the boil kettle side to get up to temp faster. If I have time to pre-plan my brew day I will get all the water ready the night before and will use a heat stick in the hot liquor tank overnight to get it up to about 160F which saves some time in the morning. I have two different mash-tuns depending on what I am brewing, a 10-gallon for lower OG beers and a 15-gallon for big beers or if I am splitting a batch with a friend. I have been through a couple different mashtuns and am sold on Blichmann.

I really like beer and the brewing process. I like having creative control over the process and trying to duplicate a good beer over again, which isn't always easy to do.