Beer Brewing

I didn't drink beer until after I was 18 years old, not even a taste. When I started drinking beer the only beer my friends and I knew about were American lagers, Budweiser, Millers, Coors, etc. I wasn't particularly impressed with the taste. At that time it was more of a social thing. We were in college. We would go out, usually drink too much, and do and say stupid things.

When I was on the bidding committee for MidAmericon we used to buy cases of Coors and take them to the east coast and lots of people would come to our parties. I wasn't particularly impressed with Coors either but I didn't know of anything better.

I don't think I started paying more attention to other beers until after I moved to California. I still was drinking primarily lagers but I'd moved up to Dos Equus and Pilsner Urquell. Then I started finding out there were other types of beers like ales, stouts and porters. I had known about Guinness before but the realization that it was a different type of beer never occurred.

Last year Jay Kinnney expressed an interest in brewing his own beer. This sounded interesting to me too. From this arose Bob's Bathtub Brewery, named after Bob, our dog, and the bathtub where we give him baths. We've made quite a few different types of beer so far. This first was an english style bitter, the second was an ale but leaned toward a stout, and the third was a wheat beer. The brewing process is interesting. Patty is not too fond of the part where we cook up the ingredients though. The smell of hops, barley, etc. tend to spread all over the house. We do a two stage fermentation for those familiar with the process. All of the equipment that we have so far has cost less than $100 (my memory may not be quite right on this point) and the ingredients total less than $50 for each batch. There are a few other pieces of equipment I want to buy but I don't want to spend too much and then find out I'm not really that interested in the whole process. We still have a ways to go toward perfection. Some of the labels Jay madeup are interspersed throughout this issue.

JAY'S BEER LABELS

To SKUG Index