An intro

So I've had this blog for a while, but blogged mainly about things I don't like. I decided that I want to be more fun and keep a log of my homebrewing, and my quest to open my own microbrewery. I've been brewing for 4yrs now, both professionally and recreationally. I no longer work in a brewery, but now have a strong goal of owning a small production microbrewery.

I moved to Washington in 2007 to work on my brewing career, and I only ended up working for about 4 months doing it. I just couldn't afford to live on an entry level position wage. Previous to that, I worked part time for Orlando Brewing in Florida, and got a lot of awesome hands on experience with everything. Just yesterday actually I started volunteering to help out part time at Big AL Brewing in Seattle, an awesome startup microbrewery just to learn a new system, and get back in to running some big equipment.

I did my first homebrew batch in the fall of 2005, and brewed about once a week until I moved to Washington in 2007. I've entered one of my beers in a competition one time, and won a first place medal (I've had multiples of my recipes win medals, but they were brewed by someone else)... Which gave me a lot of confidence to keep at it and set some lofty goals for what to do with this. This has been the first thing I've ever been truly good at.

So my homebrewing has kind of been put on the backburner since moving here. Main reasons being that I couldn't afford to put together the elaborate homebrewing system I wanted to do, and because I don't have the space. In the apartment Amber and I now live in, I finally have space to store a few things, but not the space to do traditional 5gal homebrew batches. I solved my dilemma by piecing together a pretty crafty little 1gal system. It works perfect for doing stovetop brews, and it's nice to have the ability to experiment with new stuff and not risk wasting the costly 5gal batch.

Anyways, I'll be updating this with pictures and fun stuff as I do my brews, which will be every 1 to 2wks.