factory
Master Brewer
So - A few years ago, I decided I needed a hobby. I tried building model airplanes, building an HO scale model railroad, home improvement projects, etc. While those things were fun, they didn't excite me. I ran into a homebrewer while I was going through the Naval Postgraduate School and he got me hooked. That was 7 years ago and I've been dabbling with extract and partial mash brews ever since. A few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and go All-Grain for the first time. I've been assembling the upgrade equipment and I also decided it was time to put some precision and repeatability into my process (that's the engineer in me). So I reviewed and downloaded a couple of software suites for brewing and decided on BeerSmith. On Learn to Homebrew Day I plan on inviting a few friends over to brew up my first All-Grain batch. It will be the Imperial Pale Ale recipe out of "Extreme Brewing" (converted to AG with the help of my shiny new software). I currently have a honey brown ale and a pumpkin ale in bottles, both from partial mash recipes I developed myself with a paper an pencil and lots of erasing (again, geeky engineer) while using Palmer's "How to Brew". I'm looking forward to getting into the AG forums and learning about all of the things I've been doing wrong all these years. I plan on entering my honey brown ale into a competition in the Virginia Beer Blitz in Williamsburg, VA in Dec. Should be fun.