Homebrewing Is Kind of Awesome

Kid Gloves Kölsch (front), Charlie (back)

After getting laid off from a lucrative but unfulfilling corporate gig in February 2016 I had a little extra time on my hands, so I decided to give homebrewing a try. I'd been thinking about it for a while, read some books, taken a class. Plus my wife was game, which helped.

If nothing else, we would at least gain a greater understanding of and appreciation for the ingredients and effort that went into making our favorite beers. Who knows, we might even like brewing. And if we got halfway decent at it, we might even like the beers we made.

The good news is, brewing turns out to be fairly simple if you approach it with the right attitude. First off, understand that you will make mistakes. Probably lots of them. But if you document your process (I'm a writer by trade, so this part comes naturally to me) and figure out where things went wrong, you'll improve. Get your reps in, keep working on making better beer.

That's just my opinion, as a guy who likes beer and who has found homebrewing to be an awesome hobby that I can share with my friends. Am I really in a position, after making eight whole five-gallon batches of extract beer in a plastic bucket, to offer advice? No, but I can relate my personal experience, which is that this is the coolest thing ever.

And that photo at the top is of the best beer we've made so far. It's a Kölsch recipe procured from our local homebrew shop (which happens to be Ballast Point), and it came out surprisingly well. The dog? Oh, that's our pug, Charlie. Don't worry, he didn't drink any of the beer. Someone has to drive...

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