the Beer Sphere

The Food Network has Iron Chef, the face-off between celebrity cooks who are given unlikely ingredients from which to craft impressive dishes.

Fort Worth has Iron Mash, a contest for which some of the region's most competitive home brewers posse up to create ales and lagers whose ingredients must contain at least one of a changing lineup of ingredients to be thrown into the brewing kettle.

Every year for the past six, the local Cap and Hare Homebrew Club has invited bathroom and garage alchemists, usually in teams of two or three, to take up the challenge. The contest has been featured in Zymurgy, a popular home-brewing magazine, and enthusiasts in Ohio copied the Cowtown Iron Mash down to the most minute details. Read more