Howdy from Miami

Hello everyone. After months of lurking, I finally decided to sign up and give this community a go. My name's Luis and I started brewing in July of this year. I have been wanting to do home brew for the last probably 10 years, but never found anyone who was willing to get into it with me. I finally met someone who had been doing it and he basically showed me how. I fell in love with it and have brewed around 8 beers since then. I have been doing mostly kit stuff with partial mash, but eventually I would like to get into full mash.

I have a 7cf Keezer setup sans collar for now. I am currently building a nine home bar which will house the freezer and a 4 tap setup. Right now, I've only got it running with 2 kegs.

Other than homebrewing, I have a bunch of other expensive hobbies. One of them is costuming. I have been a member of the 501st legion for 3 years and an avid costumer for longer. My girlfriend is also a member. We both have Stormtrooper costumes, and she has a Boushh costume as well. I've since slowed down with that stuff since brewing and getting into other hobbies, though.

Homebrewing got me into beer tasting, which has become another expensive hobby. I've got a spreadsheet setup and my girlfriend and I try to go out and taste as many beers as we can to add to the list. I generally stick with just a few types since I don't really like spending money on a style of beer I'm not really a fan of. Right now my favorite beers are Imperial and Russian Imperial Stouts. I love Imperial IPAs and really like regular IPAs. Black IPAs I'm also a big fan of. While I used to love them, I haven't really had much interest in Beglians as of late. My least favorite beers are lager types and light ales. I guess I just like really big flavors. In the last 2 months my list has grown by about 150 beers. I'm currently at just over 250.

Anyway, I'll cut it short before this gets TL;DR. Cheers.

Hello from up the road in Jax, FL.

There's a few great apps for android and ipood for logging your beer tasting. I like using untappd, which lets you organize and rate your beers. Both beeradvocate and ratebeer also have decent beer rating systems. Just an FYI.

Congrats on the brewing. Wow, eight brews in and you're already working on the bar build. Kudos on that. One of my desires for 2013 is working on a 20 gallon brewtus-style garage build. I'm looking to achieve complete beer industry emancipation but money and time are a little tight at the moment. Maybe by summer 2013.

Enjoy the forum.

Hey there. Yeah, I know about all of those apps. I tried a bunch of them before just switching to a spreadsheet. I keep it on my Google drive which I can share with my girlfriend so she can check it when she needs to as well. I just wanted something really simple to keep track of the beers I was tasting with a simple rating system, 1-5. I do use ratebeer and beeradvocate to get the details like Brewery, Location, Type of beer if I'm unsure, etc..

Yeah, I pretty much went all into this thing after my first beer. I brewed a strong scotch ale and a week later I drove up to BX Beer Depot and bought everything I needed to brew. A week later I decided I didn't feel like bottling so I bought the Keezer and keg setup. I'm glad that the old lady is really accommodating and lets me do whatever makes me happy. It probably helps that she likes beer almost as much as I do. She also has helped me brew for most of the beers.