this is me testing this page
I’ve been brewing beer for over a decade now.
I started on my mom’s stovetop with a $60 single-gallon, all-grain kit from Amazon (I would later learn that this was throwing myself.. not necessarily into the deep end, but definitely like the middle of the pool, as most beginners tend to learn the basics of brewing with extracts). My first brew was named Scottangry’s Everyday IPA and it was amazingly good for a first go. Beginner’s luck like that can have the effect of boosting your ego a little, so I charged on.
Before I knew it, I was part of a wider community of homebrewers. I met a dude named Steve across the counter at my job at Starbucks- turns out he was an avid homebrewer and even in a club. Luck of the Irish for me again, as Steve had just upgraded to a bigger rig and was looking to offload some of his old kit- which just happened to be a size (5 gallons) that I was in the process of upgrading to, after a dozen or so decent-to-good 1-gallon brews (and one atrocious infected coconut disaster)- on the cheap (a la free ninety-free, baby!).
Before long, I was knocking out big (for a one man operation) 5-gallon batches of beers of varying quality right and left. If you brew, you already know what the next upgrade had to be. Because bottling is such a massive pain in the dick, that’s right, we graduated to kegs. Stories abound from the weeks I gathered all this kit. Maybe I’ll use this WordPress site as an actual OG WordPress blog someday down the line and get into those stories. Don’t hold your breath though- free time is at a premium these days. I bought this domain like 6 months before wrtiting this, now, the first thing I’m actually writing on here no matter where you end up seeing it. So in the end, I’ve got six 5-gallon homebrew style kegs (soda kegs, different connectors than commercial beer kegs)- 2 new and shiny and 4 gently used- and I’ve got a mile of tubing and I’ve got a fridge that really will need its own separate place for its story (Craigslist and deserts and hill people, oh my!) and I’ve got a bunch of other miscellaneous pieces of this and that. Also my awesome tap handles (pictured above). We’re rocking and rolling, man.
Around this time a few of us start going to this newly opened brewery for weekly trivia nights. I really enjoyed the beer and the vibe of the owners and- here’s that luck again- on only my third or fourth time there, they put applications out front on the bar. First time they’d hired anyone outside family and friends. Long story short, I got the job. It was just beertending at first, but quickly came to include assisting in the brewhouse as well. Then- “Brewer.” (chef’s kiss) Few years later, our head brewer moved out of state. And that, ladies & gentlemen & whatever other formal pronouns you vibe with, is how I became the Head Brewer of Alosta Brewing Company.
Then the world grinded to a halt, I had a kid, immunocompromised friends and family in my circle, and I didn’t feel safe working with the public at the time. The plan is to get back in the brewhouse after these gremlins of mine get a little more grown. Either back at Alosta again, if they’ll have me; or maybe I’ll begin a new journey somewhere else. But the brewing calls to me- I’ll get back to it.
In the meantime, sniff around the site. I’m not looking to spin this up into a thing. It’s just a hobby site and as such will be filled with all kinds of shit related to my myriad.. well, hobbies. It’ll also probably change as I tire of certain aesthetics and hopefully it grows as well. You might learn something new, you might hate the way I make coffee, you might find a new recipe you enjoy, you might read an opinion of mine that turns us into lifelong nemeses ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ who knows!
Be good to each other. It’s really not that hard.
Peace,
-The Barefoot Brewer