Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Brew Day with the Craft A Brew Beer Kit



I have really wanted to get into homebrewing. I even went and bought a kit from the local homebrew shop Brewstock about 2 or 3 years ago. For me homebrewing is the next step in my overall beer education. You can't really understand beer without actually making it right?

But like many people I come up with lame ass excuses for not following my passion. Work. Family. And more work. The family truly isn't an issue. Work on the other hand has been the issue. It tires and stresses me out. All I want to do on my day off is nothing. And that sucks. My wife told me I am letting my work ruin my personal life and I finally agree with her. I always let work do things like that to me. I'm sure my blood pressure is through the roof and I keep gaining more weight instead of focusing on getting healthier. I've decided to not allow a job ruin something I am passionate about and also potentially kill me. As I said on my Facebook page yesterday, "When your job gets in the way of your passion its time to figure out how to make your passion your job".

Step one: Brew a beer. As I said earlier this is something I have always wanted to do but came up with excuses not to. One of those excuses was I was afraid to brew a huge amount of beer only to ruin it and have to dump it out. I felt baby steps may be necessary. I needed a way to brew great beer but on a smaller scale.


(above) Mark Cowley's awesome homebrew set up.

My dad and I dabbled with that Mr. Beer Kit back in the day but it just didn't seem like something I wanted to invest in again. Recently I was thumbing through one of my Draft magazines and I saw an add for the Craft A Brew Homebrewing Kit. It says it makes one gallon of homebrew and they have great craft beer recipe kits for you to brew. I had to give it a try!

I acquired the Chocolate Milk Stout kit and today I enlisted the help of my 6 year old daughter and set to brewing! Here are some pics from today's brew:



Now we wait for fermentation to hopefully begin. After two weeks we are supposed to add the cocoa nibs and let ferment for another 2 weeks. Then the bottling begins. That'll be the next chapter in this post! Unless I totally screwed this whole thing up then I will have to order another kit and start all over. Either way the process was a fun way to spend with my kid and I look forward to more daddy and daughter brew days!

Thanks to Kyle Westfall and Craftabeer.com who supplied the kit and are also official partners with thebeerbuddha.com. If you are interested in this kit(and you should be) you can visit their website and use beerbuddha at checkout and get 10% off!

Cheers!

The Beer Buddha

2 comments:

Libellula Jewelry™ said...

I look forward to hearing how the beer tastes because I've had my eye on that same kit.

And, your daughter is beyond adorable!

Grant Capone said...

Yay! You'll love it and do great. Don't worry too much about messing up, the whole process is really forgiving. You could brew under the worst circumstances possible and still have something that is better than most store bought beers.

Mr. Beer recently got bought up by the extract company Cooper's and revamped all of their kits and recipes. So it should be A LOT better now.

You probably are already familiar with them but www.homebrewtalk.com and www.basicbrewing.com are excellent resources.