Jim Busch

Jim Busch lives in Colesville, Maryland, just north of Washington D.C. The communications systems he develops have been used to process satellite data for many NASA projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the X-Ray Timing Explorer, and the NASA/European Space Agency's SOHO spacecraft.

An electrical engineer by day, Jim's real passion is beer hunting, beer brewing, beer writing, and just plain talking about beer. He began home brewing in late 1988; four years later he custom-built his own backyard pilot brewery. Now an afficianado, Jim has written for zymurgy, BarleyCorn, and BrewingTechniques and has been featured in Brew Your Own magazine. He now writes a regular column for BrewingTechniques covering intermediate to advanced brewing topics, and provides occasional writes book reviews. Jim has also lectured at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. -- on beer, of course!

In 1995, Jim developed and brewed the special commemorative beer for the AHA conference in Baltimore (where he also gave a lecture on brewing Belgian ales.) The drink he invented, Esprit de Boire (Spirit of Drink), is a Belgian strong ale spiced with coriander and sweet orange peel. The beer would be a category S product in Belgium, weighing in at 8% ABV. Jim produced it using DeWolf Cosyns malts -- including pils, Munich, and caramel malts -- genuine candi sugar, and cultured La Chouffe yeast. He brewed and bottle-conditioned two barrels of the Esprit de Boire. It subsequently won first in the Spirit of Belgium II strong ale category.

Jim's latest beer endeavor is promoting Victory Brewing Company, in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Victory is a shipping microbrewery with an on-premise restaurant specializing in brick-oven pizzas and calzones. It's a "brewer's microbrewery," started by accomplished professional brewers interested in creating the highest-quality German-style lagers and English and American ales. Victory uses exclusively German malt imported from Bamberg, a region of Franconia known for having the highest density of breweries in the world. Victory is also one of the few microbreweries in the U.S. using only whole hops.

Jim, both an investor and a board member of Victory, also brews the occasional pilot batch. His claim to fame is that one of the recipes he worked on last year became HopDevil IPA, one of three of Victory's flagship products, the other two being: Victory Festbier, a traditional Oktoberfest style beer; and Brandywine Valley Lager, a German export style lager.

Victory is located 30 miles west of Philadelphia at 420 Acorn Lane in Downingtown, Pennsylvania.
For more information on Victory Brewing see:
http://wanda.pond.com/~clrleaf/victory/Victory.html
and in the near future:
http://www.victorybeer.com
Jim can be reached on the internet at:
busch@daacdevl.stx.com

Articles by Jim Busch Published on-line:
Reinheitsgebot and the Fifth