Ron piqued my curiosity for homebrewing a long time ago. For my thirtieth birthday I received a homebrew kit and brewed my first batch that week. It was a fairly simple affair, a plastic primary fermenter, a glass carboy for a secondary fermenter, necessary accoutrements and my first kit. I never got into enough to do my own all-grain brewing, but over the next few years I cooked up about a half-dozen batches. It was fun.
I brewed the last one in 2000.
A number of circumstances led to that lack. Children, moving, new jobs with longer hours and a longer commute, and, ultimately, a move out of state. Worse, my supplier disappeared.
I used to get my supplies at Hop & Vine in Morristown, New Jersey. This place was great. It was run by a couple of women who knew more about homebrewing and winemaking than I could ever hope to. They were always happy to take calls if you had a brewing emergency. The best part was you could go in there and say “I’d like to make…an ESB” or “…something like Sam Adams Boston Ale” and they’d put together a kit right in front of you with the flavoring grains, malt extract, hops, and yeast. They even put together a set of “never fail” brewing instructions that I still have and used for all of my brews. They eventually moved from Morristown to a strip mall in Lebanon, New Jersey, and while I visited them there several times, it wasn’t enough and they closed down. It’s a crying shame, really.
Fast forward to 2006. I’ve moved from New Jersey to Maryland. For the first time in ten years, everything I own is under one roof; no more storage units. I’m also never moving again. So it seemed like the right time to get back into homebrewing. I had a housewarming barbecue recently and used that as an opportunity to start collecting bottles.
My next task was to find all of my old homebrewing equipment. There have been several moves since the last time I brewed, and the stuff has been shoved into storage units and basements. Even though I have all my stuff here now, that doesn’t mean I know where everything is.
After digging through the storeroom, I found most of my stuff. Primary fermenter, transfer tubing, airlock, bottle capper and caps. No glass carboy, though. I have no idea where it is, nor does my wife. Oh well. (Might as well blame the movers. They broke or lost a bunch of other stuff.) Boy, is this stuff dirty. Three or four years in a basement which was little more than a glorified crawlspace has not been kind to it. I recruited my six-year-old to help me clean it up and lugged it up to the bathtub. It was work, but it was easy to keep the end result in sight.
After we’d cleaned the equipment and set it out to dry, I made my way over to Williams Brewing to order a kit of ingredients and a new carboy. It was more of a dent in my wallet than I wanted, but it should pay for itself in fewer visits to my beer retailer. I’m going to work on soaking labels off of my bottles now.
Look for Part II after my shipment arrives.
