Homebrew for Hunger

Once again this year, our local homebrew shop, Fifth Season, is hosting a charity event called Homebrew for Hunger, which raises money for our local food bank. This year's event will be bigger than last year's, with 40 local homebrewers participating, as well as several of the local breweries.

Along with a healthy clutch of brewers from the Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale, I'll be pouring a couple of my beers.

• Genius 1883
• Red Coat East India Porter

Genius 1883 is basically the recipe for Guinness Extra Stout that is in Ron Pattinson's magnificent book of historical recipes scaled for homebrewers. My version ended up being 7.5% abv, a deep inky black (obviously), and if the sample was anything to go by dangerously moreish, I think I will have to brew this one again for my own consumption over the winter.

Red Coat East India Porter is a variation on a beer I brewed a few years ago, just when Black IPA was starting to become all the rage. Basically it was a snarky project where I took the grain bill from Widmer's W-10, as it appeared in Brew Your Own magazine, and ditched the American hops for British ones to get the same numbers of IBUs at each addition. I then entered said beer in a homebrew competition and it took gold in the robust porter category, scoring 42/50 in the process. This time the hops are slightly different, gone is the Admiral, and in come Fuggles and First Gold, to play with the East Kent Goldings. This beer is a bit lighter than the Genius 1883 at 7.3%, but is just as dark. In terms of calculated IBUs it sits at around 67, and most of the hop flavour and aroma will be coming from the First Gold and Goldings.

As I mentioned earlier, there are a slew of brewers from CAMRA taking part including Jamey with a couple of variants of his Foreign Extra Stout and Kölsch available. Tom will be there with a chocolate milk stout, Patrick with a cocoa, chipotle milk stout and Double IPA, and Noelle, who brewed the fabulous Raucous IPA, with a breakfast stout and an IPA, as well as several other brewers, and the club's resident cidermaker, Kevin.

As you can see from the banner above, the even takes place on Sunday October 26th, and runs from 1pm to 5pm. Tickets are still available either online or at the shop itself. So, if you're in the Charlottesville area that Sunday, I would encourage you to come along, support the food bank, and drink some good homebrew beer!