So I've decided I want to brew a Leuven witbier. It's too crazy not to attempt. The procedure seems utterly insane, but at least it doesn't include 12 hour boils or anything stupid like that.

Obviously the book's not a neatly packaged homebrew recipe, so there's a bit of work involved in figuring out what to do.

Here's what I've come up with.

I wrote about my attempts to grow hops from cuttings here.

Yesterday they went into the ground, so I got a chance to see just how well the rhizomes had grown. As you can see, they turned out pretty well.

Actually, this was easily the biggest set of roots, from a Mount Hood cutting which went nuts and had bines more than 2m long.

The Cascade cuttings which grew quite well and had a long time to develop had relatively small root systems, whereas the Goldings cuttings which were tiny and done very late had relatively large roots. Varietal difference or just coincidence? It's hard to say with such a small sample I suppose.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the little fellas can do in a couple of months' time.

"Excellent beer, not quite to style." Sound familiar?

Anyone who's had the, ahem, pleasure of discussing beer judging with me will know that I'm not entirely convinced on this whole judging to style thing.

Judging to style clearly isn't a perfect system (none are), but I'm vexed by the lack of discussion about how and why this system has reached the status of orthodoxy in homebrew competitions.

So I want to try running a competition without style guidelines. Tastiest beer wins. Sounds simple, right?

Don't even think about clicking through if you don't have fifteen minutes to spare.

I recently spent quite a bit of money on a beer which isn't even ready for sale yet. And it's got me pondering the direction of craft beer in this country.

I don't have a problem with the price as such, it's more the delay. And I'm not pissed off or anything, but I wonder what this means for the craft beer market.

The idea of an en primeur wine purchase is that you guarantee yourself bottles of a hard-to-come-by wine from a future vintage at the current release's price. That's not the case here. They're just getting my money a month earlier than they would otherwise. And I get... exactly the same as if they made it for sale once it was ready to sell. There's still the exact same likelihood of it selling out before I get to ordering.

Of course if I ran a business and could get everyone to pay a month before delivering a product I'd do it too. It's good business.

But I wonder whether this is a harbinger of crazier things to come.

Are we headed down the path of bottle limits, people queuing for hours for beers and Ebay? Do Australian micros even want to court that kind of craziness?

It's a nice problem to have I suppose.

[Incidentally, one of the more hilarious things I've read on the web was a guy who intended to camp out overnight in front of a brewery before a release. In Minnesota. In January. Luckily people told him there was a fair chance of, you know, death with that plan.]