Saturday, September 27, 2008

First Post - a Little Background

To set this up, I thought I’d give a brief background on my brewing history. I started home brewing in college, “many moons ago” as the American Indians say. I started off with the no boil Coopers kits – basically a can of malt syrup to which you add a bunch of corn sugar, water and yeast. I somehow liked the results enough to keep going. I made probably two of these kits when I decided that I wanted to expand my brewing knowledge. I went to the Complete Gourmet, a gourmet cooking store in Richmond, VA that carried some homebrew supplies, and rented a basic video on home brewing. With my new found knowledge, I started off on the path of extract brewing. I eventually got into using specialty grains with the extract, but never made it all the way to all grain brewing – always wanted to, but just didn’t get there. I brewed for about 10 years, making everything from pale ales to brown ales to porters and stouts and also mead (wine made with honey instead of grapes – think Beowulf era). I stopped brewing about the time the stork showed up on my front door, for the first time. Fast forward several years, my oldest is now in 2nd grade, and I have recently resumed the hobby that I have missed for oh so long.

I will discuss the brews I have made and plan to make, but let’s face it, life happens. There may be extended periods of time where I am too busy to brew so I will hit many other topics during the down time.

Until next time…

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