Experimentation is the name of the game for homebrewers – it’s why many brewers continue to develop their hobby and why they choose to brew the beer they drink, rather than (or in addition to) buying it commercially. Homebrewers experiment with different styles, different techniques and different flavors. They go from extract brewing, to the use of specialty grains, to mini or partial mashes and eventually to all-grain brewing techniques.

However, one thing which is overlooked by many – certainly not all – homebrewers is trying your hand at brewing something other than beer. The options are truly bountiful and the results are nearly as much fun and as tasty as homebrewed beer. Many homebrew supply shops provide the ingredients and equipment necessary to experiment with brewing your own wine, hard cider, mead (honey wine) or sake (rice wine), and many of the Web’s most popular homebrew forums and blogs have resources to help you learn the necessary techniques.

Brewing both cider and mead is a relatively simple jump from homebrewing beer because neither requires any additional equipment. WYeast Laboratories, the most popular liquid yeast choice in the homebrewing community, provides their well-known liquid yeast “Smack Packs” in both cider (or champagne yeast; a very common choice for ciders) and mead varieties. Really the only caveat to be weary of if you choose to venture into mead or cider making is that both, mead especially, take a VERY long time to ferment – three months or more for the beginner mead kits from NorthernBrewer.com – so you will want to be sure and have an extra carboy or two lying around to ferment in so you don’t have to forego brewing anything else while your mead experiment takes shape.

Making the Sake leap is a simple one as well, just not quite as simple. While the brewing equipment required for Sake kits is the same, and WYeast makes a liquid Sake yeast too, sake also requires the addition of white rice (long or short grain will do), citric acid and koji spores; ingredients that most homebrewers wouldn’t have in their home arsenal.

Home winemaking, though similar to all other above home fermented drinks, does require additional equipment and additional labor. Winemaking requires additional racking steps for clarity, so a number of free carboys are required (as well as racking equipment). Winemaking generally requires the addition of oak, either by adding oak chips to a carboy or by aging your wine in an oak barrel; a very costly investment. And lastly, probably the biggest difference for most homebrewers (unless you currently cork & cage your homebrew) is the necessity of corking your 750 ml bottles of wine. This requires the purchase of a corking machine, something most home beer brewers don’t have lying around.

However, clearly the options are abundant if you are looking to expand your brewing horizons beyond additional beer styles or techniques. Part of what makes the world of fermented beverages such a great hobby truly is the nearly limitless possibilities of experimentation. Go nuts!

There is little doubt that cans are fast becoming a mainstay on the American craft beer landscape. Cans began to appear in the craft market in 2002, when Oskar Blues Brewing Co. (now the 44th largest craft brewery in the country) of Lyons, Colorado purchased a manual, two-headed canning system from Cask Brewing Systems of North America (in Calgary, Alberta, CA).

Today, there are more than fifty craft breweries in the United States who are already canning some or all of their beers. With more, like Baxter Brewing Co – a start-up craft brewery in central Maine – or West Coast powerhouse, Pyramid Brewing – who announced recently that they will begin canning their summer seasonal release, Haywire American-Style Hefeweizen, this year – popping up daily.

Advocates of the canned craft beer revolution, as it’s often called, claim that craft beer in cans has three main advantages over its bottled cohorts. First, cans are much better for the environment than glass bottles. Cans require less energy to create and less energy to ship than glass bottles, they are made from more than 70% recycled material and Americans are statistically twice as likely to recycle aluminum than they are glass. Secondly, cans are better for beer because they are completely light and oxygen free, keeping the beer in them fresher longer. And third, cans have much superior portability to glass. You can take a can everywhere you can’t take glass bottles (because they’re either too dangerous or too cumbersome), like the beach, the boat, the golf course; camping, hiking, fishing, snowboarding, etc.

While craft cans are not yet as easily recognized or found as their bottled counterparts, there is little denying their renaissance is here to stay and is yet another example of craft breweries pushing the boundaries of the generally accepted and the mainstream. Have you begun drinking craft cans yet?