Category: A Method to the madness

OK finally time to get serious with this whole home brewing thing. Just the inital research is a bit intimidating. And when I say intimidating I mean there are a million and one ways to screw everything up and not know that you’ve done something wrong until it is far to late.

So I present to you now two resources that I have up to this point found exceedingly helpful in doing this whole home brew thing

— Home Brewing For Dummies. It’s a bit old but brewing isn’t exactly something that changes every other week. A good general resource and how to.

— Morebeer.com. Website a couple of quick how to video’s and a FAQ section that really helps in some spots. Other spots it’s a bit thin. The biggest thing with this is it lets you see what your working with so you can plan accordingly. Of course going to your local brewer supply store would achieve the same effect.

My other resource is Greg at work… and well he doesn’t have a website and I’m not going to post his email so you need to go find your own brew geek.

Whoa… Looks like someone kind of forgot they started a beer brewing blog.

I still want to chronicle my home brewing “experiences” but, I haven’t really had a chance to try it out and honestly I’ve been focused on other things.

I have been having a hankering to write about beer though. I don’t know why I just do. So while I’m waiting to bring myself out of my self induced beer brewing funk. I will share with you the reader the beers that I love here in the desert’s of Arizona.

Everything from large Macro brews (Coors, Bud, Miller) to local craft brews (Oak Creek, Four Peaks, Cavecreek).

Honestly this is just a excuse for me to go out and buy every beer I can and report back on it.

GI Joe would say knowing is half the battle…

My research for home brewing is proving that knowing isn’t even the start of the battle

I’m have a pretty good idea of what I want to do. In the overall scheme of things.

Kegging looks to be vastly more efficient over bottling in both ease and getting things carbonated. The biggest turn off to home brewing since I became interested has been cleaning all of those damned bottles.

The down side to kegging is it’s a much higher upfront cost and I truly look at home brewing as something of a capital investment. If I do three or four batches a year at five gallons a batch that is just a bit more then four 12 packs of beer. So three or 4 batches over the course of the year would be about right for me.

The other thing with beer brewing is that unless you flat break something you can pretty much use it for freaking ever. They may come out with some new fancy thing but it won’t help you do your job any better.

I guess the other question is how many kegs do I buy up front?