I got mine on Tuesday - same day as the May-June Zymurgy hit the mail box.
Quite handy really, because the trams are offline in Adelaide just now, and the buses add another 20 minutes to the commute, so I needed additional reading material.
Also a chance to do a bit of a comparison between the two mags, whilst they are side by side, and fresh in the mind.
Zymurgy has undergone a revamp in the last year, and has a much more glossy and professional feel to it. If anything the paper stock of Zymurgy is thicker and more luxurious now. Both are 64 pages long, but my hop scales say BYO is 140g and Zymurgy 180g.
But, on to more weighty matters - content. Both have evolved into a similar format, 4 to 5 lead articles supported by regular columns.
This issue Zymurgy demonstrates that it is the home journal of the AMERICAN homebrewers association with lead article on 1) Beer in Colonial America, 2) Beer in Baltimore (home of the 2005 AHA conference), 3) Posting beer to comps in the US. The other lead articles are pretty esoteric - 4) Sorghum beer making in Burkina Faso!, and 5) Homebrewing for new dads.
BYO this issue leads with 1) Annual label contest, 2) Recipes of 10 summer beers (we are talking Northern hemisphere, remember). 3) International Lagers - recipe for Heineken clone and discussion of other "green bottle" euro lagers, 4) Saison - profile and recipes, 5) North German style profile and recipe (this is is part of a regular series on beer styles - but is substantial enough to count as a lead article on its own.
Both have technique sections, newsy bits, "dear professor/wizard help coloumns", letters etc.
If you are looking for recipes in a mag, BYO has 19, Zymurgy 7, though the Zymurgy editor promises more in future (7 must be an all time low for the mag).
Zymurgy's geeky bits are probably a bit more geeky- the technique article on maximizing your mash has my eyes spinning, even though I have yet to read it!
This time round I will be getting a lot more use out of BYO, but that is not always the case.
Once a year Zymurgy produces an "annual" special edition, which can almost be worth the price of admission itself.
Happy to share them around Adelaide flocculators of all sizes, perhaips give me a week or so to get through with them first though.
awrabest, stu