As I really started this blog to talk about my experiences in home brewing with the possible intention of becoming a proper brewer, I suppose I had better write something for Session 92.

Beer has been a interest of mine for many years. I started my drinking career in the mid-80s and have always enjoyed trying new brews from around the world. The recent beer revival came at a perfect time, providing an alternative to lagery stagnation, and as a nerd looking for something else to be nerdy about, it seemed a logical progression to understand how it worked. I had tried an extract kit as an 18 year old and found it was more complicated than it should have been, even though my Dad drank a far bit of the end product, so I took a trip to Abbey Homebrew one Saturday afternoon, put my card on the table and said 'I want to make beer please'.

I walked out £130 lighter with a collection of buckets, pipes, extract, hops and yeast and  the inspiration to at least have a go. It was still more complicated than it should have been and the mental shopping list started to grow as soon as I found that the boiled wort had to cool down before the yeast was pitched. Lacking the snowbank suggested by John Palmer's How to Brew I ended up leaving it to cool overnight, a risk by some accounts but not so bad really. The immersion cooler was the first next addition to the collection.

The first beer wasn't too bad and Palmer's book lifted the mist of the language of brewing but twitched a curtain into the science, and suitably inspired and somewhat to my wife's chagrin, I spent the next six months trying again and again, and problems were solved by searching and buying. Extract lead to grain and an Igloo mash tun. The Brupaks boiler became a 30L stovetop pot. There were many buckets. I tried as many styles as I could: pale ale, IPA, stout, even a very successful Belgian blonde (a house being kept warm for a new born baby is very good for the style, not to mention bottle conditioning it). Then the back of the garage got cleared and rewired and filled with stainless steel, again to my wife's chagrin. The learning curve got steeper and is still going up. There's more stuff to buy. Things do keep going wrong. When things go right it's mostly through serendipity. There are a lot of things to clean. But when it works it's a great feeling to be able to drink a beer that you made and know that as much as anything else it's been made because you want to make it and it's about understanding how brewing works.