Why I Started Homebrewing

For Christmas 2007, my mother-in-law got my husband a homebrew kit.  He and I were still just dating back then.  I didn't really know what homebrew was, and I wasn't overly excited about it -- it sounded like a lot of work, and I'll admit I'm pretty damn lazy.  And it sounded a little hectic, what with the strongly worded warnings about messy boil-overs and the need for stringent sanitation methods.

Early in January 2008, we made our first batch.  It was a California Common.  I remember how delicious it made the whole kitchen smell while it was gently bubbling away on the stove.  It was such a lovely golden brown soup in the brew kettle.  It almost looked like very liquidy caramel.  And the wort tasted so very good before the wee yeasties even went to work on it!  When it was done cooking, we pulled it off the heat and dunked it in an ice bath in the kitchen sink.  We made a bit of a mess pouring it from the brew kettle into the primary fermenter, and I remember thinking, "This better be some damn good beer for all this mess I'm going to have to clean!"  We pitched the yeast, closed it up, and tucked it out of the way.

The next afternoon, when I was getting my lunch together, I heard a strange soft clicking noise.  It was a steady, constant sound, and it took me a couple minutes to track it down.  The fermentation had kicked off, and at that moment, when I could see the yeast farts escaping through the airlock, I was hooked.  Before me sat a 6 gallon plastic bucket full of life.  Those bubbles coming through the airlock told me that millions of little yeasties were alive and thriving, busy converting the sugars in the wort into alcohol.  You could smell the breadiness, that yeast smell, when you leaned in closer to the fermenter.  I sat enthralled, watching the airlock tick-tick-tick for some time.  Before I went to bed that night, I checked up on my little friends again, and they were madly at it.  I went to bed with happy thoughts.

In the morning, the bubbling was slower again, and by night, it seemed to have stopped all together.  I was a kind of disappointed and sad.  I knew it couldn't have kept bubbling away forever, and I knew that no more bubbling meant the beer was just about ready to bottle, but my voracious little friends were now starving.  They had destroyed their own environment, filled it up with their delicious waste.

We let the newly produced beer sit for about another week, just to make sure that the fermentation was completely finished, since we would be bottling our brew.  There were several more strong warnings about making sure that the final gravity really had bottomed out, lest one's beer bottles turn into glass grenades.

So, mid-January, we primed and bottled our first batch.  We numbered the caps, too.  We wanted to drink a few immediately and tuck a few away for longer and longer periods of time, so we used the numbers on the caps to determine when we would let ourselves try it.  We wanted to see how the flavors changed as the beer aged more.

The problem was that it was such a damn good beer, especially for our first time out of the gate, that we couldn't help but ignore our numbered cap/aging system.  Before we knew it, we only had a couple bottles left.  Sadly, we didn't get much of a chance to brew again until a couple years later (our second batch was an Irish Stout).

The more batches I brew, the stronger my love for brewing becomes.  My only regret is that I didn't discover my love for brewing beer until well after I had chosen my profession and spent many thousands of dollars getting my degrees.  I think the last decade or so of my life could have played out very differently if I had been allowed to experience the brewing world, and my passion for it, earlier in life.

Finding your passion in life is important.  Get out there and figure out what makes you happy, and go after it. Cheers!