In 2017, I started a project that was meant to be a one-off pursuit. I decided to really try to nail down a recipe for a red IPA, and I did so by only brewing different versions of that red IPA that year. I started with an old recipe and decided to make one small change to the recipe each time I brewed it, resulting in an iterative process that would not only help me improve my recipe, but would also help me really see the impact of those changes.
But brewing the same thing over and over again can get tedious, in spite of the learning involved. So I started a blog to help keep me accountable and give me a reason to keep brewing the beer that year when I inevitably got tired of it. More people than I expected became interested in this year-long project, so as that project was nearing completion, I had the idea to involve others in the same iterative process and create a less-insular look at how various people approach recipe creation. I wanted to learn from others, too.
So I continued brewing and writing for the blog with no real plan to continue it or not. But something happened in me as I continued. An interest in recipe creation, how ingredients get used by others, and the interplay of those ingredients with each other started to grow in me. I became more and more fascinated by how often the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, and I’m now convinced that as much as we can know a single ingredient, how that ingredient interacts with others and the variation of that interaction at different levels of use—I’m convinced that this is something that can be a lifelong pursuit and still only scratch the surface.
Because of all that, Brew U is not a hub of brewing information, nor is it meant to be. Brew U is about exploration and discovery and learning. It is about recipe creation and creativity. It is about ingredients and their interplay. It is as much about the process and it is the product. Though the iterative brewing projects that started this whole thing will continue, there will also be other projects that seek to explore these aspects of recipe creation.