Research Paper on beer!

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Germelli1

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I am back after a short break from brewing while getting settled back into school! I am currently taking (and sitting in) a course called Brewing Sciences and Technologies. For a large portion of our grade we have to write a 10 page paper on ANY topic relating to beer. The point of this thread is to help me get ideas from the bright minds out there!

So far I have settled on "The great debates of hombrew culture" for my topic. I feel like I could write a novel discussing both sides of the glass/plastic, secondary/none, etc etc debates.

Any ideas for that topic or a completely different one are welcomed!
 
I would write a research paper on which style of beer gets me drunk the quickest.
 
Of course. You can't just guess that stuff. This is a research paper dammit.......
 
I saw a piece a few weeks ago on the Discovery Channel (or one of those types of channels) that pretty much said that the whole history of mankind's evolution, industrialization, medical breakthrough revolved around the discovery of beer. Now that would make for an interesting paper.
 
Write a small section about the history of home brewing in the united states, then just keep a journal of a brewing session you're doing and you got a research paper and a new batch
 
Why don't you write about historical brewing practices compared to modern day practices. Maybe write a paper about the evolution and selection process that gave rise to the brewing yeasts we all love and buy today. I think you'd have a hard time writing a research paper based on a homebrew debate since you will be hard pressed to find any academic papers discussing ale pails vs glass carboys. I know there are plenty of papers and articles available on hops, yeast genetics, beer foam, and fermentation characteristics. I'd do a quick search for you but my school's library subscriptions don't give me access to the good beer related sources.
 
If you want to delve into some surface and interfacial chemistry, you could write something about beer foam. I did that as a group project in a materials class once. We got to present the topic of the paper, and drank beer at 10:30 in the morning. Was an ok paper, but I ended up learning a lot more about foam and lacing in the months to come. We split it up four ways:

Nucleation and growth
Critical bubble size and pressures
Foam drainage and stability
Guinness

Yes, a whole chapter on Guinness!
 
Why don't you write about historical brewing practices compared to modern day practices. Maybe write a paper about the evolution and selection process that gave rise to the brewing yeasts we all love and buy today. I think you'd have a hard time writing a research paper based on a homebrew debate since you will be hard pressed to find any academic papers discussing ale pails vs glass carboys. I know there are plenty of papers and articles available on hops, yeast genetics, beer foam, and fermentation characteristics. I'd do a quick search for you but my school's library subscriptions don't give me access to the good beer related sources.

+1 to this....what is important to homebrewers is pretty inconsequential to the rest of the world. That, and I'm not exactly what you "reasearch":

dingleberry424809 likes glass carboys.

chesterthemolester69 prefers ale-pails.

That is pretty much the extent of those "debates".
 
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