Take the plunge!!

For years I thought it would be awesome to brew my own beer. When I was in college I thought about how fantastic it would be to own and operate my own microbrewery. I looked a little into buying beer making supplies but I was a poor college student and I didn’t have a local homebrew store to help get me going. So in the end I just went to the store and bought the beer and drank it rather making it myself.

Fast forwarding to October of last year, I discovered the Joplin Homebrew Club. They met every second Tuesday of the month at my favorite bar, as it turns out, and it was open to anybody who wanted to attend.

I walked in and was instantly greeted by half-a-dozen beer geeks (and I mean that with the utmost respect since I am now a member of their clan) who introduced themselves and asked me if I brewed, etc. I told them I was new to home brewing and was looking for information on how I should get started. Instantly I saw this glaze form over their eyes and I think a couple started salivating just a bit.

After five minutes of the onslaught of information I received, most people would have went crossed-eyed and just ran out the bar as quickly as possible. But I stayed and I learned. Everyone had their suggestions on what kits to buy; where to get them; should I go extract or all-grain. You could tell they were getting REALLY excited at this point. It quickly evolved into how I need to brew and what methods work and don’t work. And of course everyone had their own opinions which from that point the conversation swayed away from providing me with information on getting started to an argument as to what was the proper method creating a yeast starter or something. After being in the club for a year I find that 99.9% percent of conversations end up as arguments in attempts to show who knows more about <enter home brew subject here>. But I digress.

About a week after attending the meeting, one of the members, Joel, texted me and asked me if I wanted to come over and brew. It just happened to fall on Learn to Homebrew Day. This just happened to be the day that changed everything. The smell of that savory sweet goodness piping out of the mash tun and then the boiling kettle. There is nothing better than that whiff of hops as it is pitched into that torrid sweet brew. I was hooked aaannnnd after trying all of his homebrews and maybe dipping into his insane collection of fine scotches and rye whiskeys was feeling no pain!

It was a fantastic experience to say the least and I learned a lot about brewing that day. Within a week my new homebrew kit from Northern Brewer was sitting on my door step. Also, by this time I had read cover to cover John Palmer’s How to Brew.

Along with my purchase of the new homebrew kit NB was nice enough to throw in an extract kit of their Caribou Slobber brown ale to get me started. (My first experience brewing this excellent ale can be found in its own post.) By the time I boiled up my water, steeped my specialty grains, added my DME and LME, and finally my hops; I had come to a conclusion that there was a huge piece of the homebrew experience that I was missing.

By thanksgiving I had purchased a ten gallon cooler from Home Depot, purchased my faucet and manifold, and by the first week of December I was attempting my first solo run at ALL GRAIN brewing. From that point on, there has been no looking back. My homebrew equipment inventory continually grows with each passing month and the number of brews under my belt continues to increase.