Out of Pod Experience

Where? It's entirely possible you knew my sister - A veterinarian in Wasilla.

doubtful I am down on the kenai peninsula so a bit of a ways from wasilla.

Okay. Basially, start with an ale kit or "from scratch" recipe you like. Follow the directions for the most part, except for the tweaks.
Modifications are as follows:
ALL RECIPES: Intended for a five-gallon batch. Never use corn sugar as your bottling sugar, no matter what the recipe says. Use malt (substitute measure-for-measure). Corn sugar gives the ale a thin, sharp, sour edge I find unpleasant, while malt gives a round, rich, full-bodied finish.

Sidewinder: Begin with a pale ale recipe. De-stem, wash, pat dry and then dry roast, preferably in a dry cast iron skillet, one Anaheim, three serrano and one jalepeno pepper. If you want your beer spicier, leave the seeds in the Jalapeno; if not, take them out. THrow the roasted peppers into the primary fermentation vat, and continue on as usual with normal brewing instructions. (Adjust peppers to taste after you try this the first time; I find that the dry-roasting is essential, and that adding too many jalapenos makes the beer kind of oily/skunky.)

Sultry *****: use either a dark ale or a stout recipe, but substitute chocolate malt for half of the dark malt.

Grinch Heart: use a pale or medium ale recipe, but add a scant tablespoon of cinnamon to the primary vat. DO NOT DRINK THIS RIGHT AWAY. It will be WAY too cinnamony and make you hate it. Then you will let it sit for months (like about 6 or 8) and discover one day that you need some more bottles for your current batch of whatever. At that time, you will pour nearly an entire sixpack of Grinch Heart down the sink, intending to use the sterile bottles for your new batch, but on bottle number five you'll think, "Man, that kind of smells good..." and you'll give it a little sip. You will then hate yourself for pouring out five bottles of perfectly lovely, subtly spiced and beautifully blended ale.

Proud Cut (So named becuase it had more balls than I expected): Start with a pale ale recipe; add a pound of FROZEN raspberries to the primary fermentation vat (or if you use fresh, make sure A) no molds are present on them, and 2) you smash them up before adding them.) Frozen ones will have their skins pierced from the ice crystals as they thaw and release all the raspberry-y goodness into your ale. Fresh have to be smashed or they'll just keep that raspberry-y goodness to themselves, thank you very much.
NOTE: be aware that the fruit beers may ferment like crazy, so you may have to do some extra venting.
Variations: Use a medium ale recipe = Cryptorchid. Use a dark ale recipe = Dark Horse.

Tode Fuzz (Named for my brother Tode, for whose wedding I invented and brewed this recipe):
Start with a medium ale. Add one half pound of frozen cut peaches and one 12-oz jar of all-fruit peach preserves (or 1.5 to 2 jars of the preserves without the frozen) to the primary fermentation vat. NOTE: this one has a higher-than-usual alchohol content. I did not measure it because a) I am not that big a purist (embarrassing but true), 2) I was moving shortly after making this and had packed up half my stuff, and iii) I never measured the alchohol content in ANY of my beers, so it didn't occur to me. Ooopsie.

THere are lots of reasonable ale kits or basiec ale recipes out there; my brewing book (in shich I scribbled all the recipes) is lost; I loaned it out, didn't get it back, so this is all from memory. The variations are easy to remember, but the basic recipes = how many pounds of malt, etc - I don't recall.

I did once attempt a honey lager. It tasted like cow ****. Just saying.

Ah Ninkasi! There's a microbrew pub in Reykjavik called Micro, supplied mainly by a brewery called Gaedinger, that recently did a collaborative brew with the guys from Ninkasi. A really delicious double IPA!

They were just calling it a collaboration Double IPA. If I remember rightly, the pump had 22up/22ip written on it.