I haven’t fiddled with WordPress in about 2 years. Just needed to get up to date with theming and using it in general so I created this blog.

I’m going to be chronicling my home brewing. It seems like I have been doing it forever. My first foray was with an old roommate of mine back in college probably circa 1991. We were living in the heart of PB in San Diego and we used to, to put it mildly, drink a lot. The thought of making my own beer was intriguing and seemed to be a great way to save money because I was always broke.

He already had most of what back then was pretty much the only equipment you could get – 6 gallon(5 gallon cap) plastic buckets for a carboy and bottling bucket. We went to some hole in the wall in Linda Vista called Home Brew Mart. I had no clue back then it was Ballast Point. San Diego back then is not what it is now to the brewing scene. Ballast Point, PB Brewhouse, and RJs Riptide was probably the only breweries in town and frankly no one knew how to get their beer besides going to their premises and Ballast Point had no bar and being in Linda Vista well.. things have changed drastically in 20 years, but I digress.

So, we go to Home Brew Mart one Saturday to get the ingredients to make what I think was maybe a honey ale. I really didn’t do much besides watch Pat do everything but it was an eye opener. The beer came out great. The next batch was going to be a Stout but our sanitation procedures were poor at best and the beer got infected. Drinkable, just not so good. I didn’t brew again for 9 years.

I never really forgot about brewing – it was always in the back of my mind. In 2000 I dropped a couple hundred bucks on the “advanced” home brew starter kit. Moved on to partial mash and then all grain going up to 10 gallon batches.

I recently moved to Ventura and have scaled back my operations from 10 gallons  to 5 gallons. I’ll tell you what, the simplicity of doing 5 gallons versus my 10 gallon contraption has been a revelation. Unless you have automation on a rack or a brew tree, or a bunch of friends around, 5 gallons is the way to go for one person doing all grain because of the logistics – you can handle everything yourself no problem. I’ll be touching on this more in the equipment section where I think you can build a kick ass system for around 400 bucks.