... I used to brew beer. I started on cheap Boots kits, brewed in a laundry bucket I found in the loft of my shared house, when I was a student, when my sole interest was getting hammered as cheaply as possible! I graduated to mashing when I realised that you could actually do that at home, although it wasn't quite so easy back then ... my brewery consisted of two plastic buckets, one with a kettle element fitted, and a mashing bag in the kettle bucket with an old yoga mat for insulation. Hops came as sorry brown things, loose in clear plastic bags, and malt was largely the reject stuff from the commercial trade, fobbed off on us home brewers. Anyway, I made some good beer and some shocking undrinkable ****, before passing my kit onto a friend (who still uses some of it) and moving on to other things.
Fast forward twenty years ... suddenly I have more time at weekends and am looking for a hobby. Hey, why not start brewing again? So I look into what's available, and it's amazing. The quality of the ingredients has improved beyond all recognition, there are any numer of specialist homebrew shops online, the quality of the kit is not far short of what you might expect from the commercial trade and I'm dazzled by it all. This is a very long winded way of saying that I've recently spent probably slightly more than I intended to in setting up a home brewery and have just made my first brew in nearly twenty years. Looing forward to making many more and I'll let you know how the first one turns out!
Fast forward twenty years ... suddenly I have more time at weekends and am looking for a hobby. Hey, why not start brewing again? So I look into what's available, and it's amazing. The quality of the ingredients has improved beyond all recognition, there are any numer of specialist homebrew shops online, the quality of the kit is not far short of what you might expect from the commercial trade and I'm dazzled by it all. This is a very long winded way of saying that I've recently spent probably slightly more than I intended to in setting up a home brewery and have just made my first brew in nearly twenty years. Looing forward to making many more and I'll let you know how the first one turns out!
