Hello,
Just wanted to offer greetings to everyone. I've found this board to be quite useful over the past few months and also listen to the internet radio shows quite frequently.
I started brewing in May of 2007 and got seduced into the obsession very quickly. Since then, I've brewed 40 batches of beer and I feel I've come a very long way since that first all-extract kit that I purchased. (I still have a few beers from that batch actually, and it came out surprisingly good.)
I brewed 8 partial mash batches after that before moving to all-grain. I went from brewing in my kitchen to brewing outside to brewing in my garage. I'm currently very happy with my setup in the garage which has kind of become my "domain" where I can keep my brewing system intact and stored in a ready-to-use manner. Another thing I like about it is that I can control the environment much better than I can in the house or outside on the porch. We have a lot of dogs and I was battling a pretty frustrating wild yeast problem for a while. This was when I moved everything into the garage and I've had MUCH better results since then.
After 24 batches I finally moved to kegs, and I wish I hadn't waited so long. I couldn't believe how much quicker and easier it was. Plus, you could get a new batch of beer pretty much carbonated and ready to drink within 30 minutes of racking it to the keg. I've since bought a 15 cu. foot chest freezer and use this as my kegerator. It can hold 8 corny kegs at once, plus the co2 tank. I filled it up quick and I'm already wishing it was bigger! (...that's what she said...)
I'm living in Rio Rancho, NM which is basically Albuquerque. We don't get much rain and the brewing conditions here are pretty nice, although it does get quite hot in the summer. I don't really mind though, since I control all my fermentation temps pretty strictly.
This hobby really has sucked me in and I don't see any signs of slowing down yet. I brew pretty much every weekend and sometimes 2 batches per weekend. Even after 40 batches I still feel like I'm still just getting to the point of really tweaking my process and finally getting to the point of making very specific recipe adjustments. I brew a lot of Jamil's and Mike McDole's recipes and have had a lot of success with those. About 30% of the time I brew something that I came up with on my own, and about half of those have been really good. I've really grown to respect the brewers out there that have come up with all the great, proven recipes. It's not as easy as it looks.
Alright, that's probably enough. If anyone cares to see some of the weird shit I've brewed, I record everything on beertools.com and I use that site as somewhat of an online journal to keep track of all my brewing notes. Just search for herbaljoe.
Cheers everyone, here's to a fun new brewing year.
HJ
