Brewing With A New Baby

[theheadonthedoor]

Calvin's approaching 4 months now and I've brewed a few times. I had a (mixed) blessing around the 2-3 month range when my wife took him to another city for three consecutive weekends for a professional development course that for her doubled as a parenting course (Montessori 0-3 assistant certification - she's already a certified Montessori 3-6 teacher), so I brewed all three of those weekends - twice personally and once as a collaboration with a local brewpub - and bottled two batches as well. I missed the hell out of my wife and child during those three weekends, but I also had a greater degree of freedom to use my time as I saw fit than I've had in a long time, and my wife learned a lot of good stuff for raising our boy (and things that will help her professionally when she goes back to work, including things that will allow her to make some money managing things for our school from home in the meantime).

Otherwise, my situation is similar to @jwalk4 - I don't get "one Saturday a month" exactly, but I get permission in advance of a brewday and try to be on hand to help with the baby as much as possible. Since I hand crank my Corona mill, I do that while they're asleep. I do single-infusion mashes with the knowledge that I may have to let the mash go long if I'm needed with the baby. With BIAB I do a bucket sparge and drain that doesn't take a lot of hands-on time. The boil doesn't require a lot of hands-on as long as I set a timer for the hop additions, and I accept that I may have to leave the immersion chiller running unattended for a while. Clean-up is usually pretty quickly done with the first bucket full of hot runoff from the chiller, and can be delayed until a convenient time if necessary. In the end, aside from milling the grain, a brewday requires probably about 30-40 minutes of hands-on time and most steps can be left alone as necessary if I'm needed to help with the baby.

Honestly bottling requires more of my time than brewing even though it's a lot less total time from start to finish, but as with milling I try to do most of that while they're asleep. I'll be doing my second bottling day with the baby at home this weekend - a gallon of cherry-oak quad and six gallons of passion fruit gose, and I'm hopeful that I can have the bottles capped and buckets soaking by the time they wake up. It's mostly a matter of timing and efficiency.

The question of permission is an interesting one as well: my wife hates brewdays - they take time, they make a mess (that I clean up as I go), they mostly lock up the kitchen - but she is proud of my beer and takes every opportunity to share it with friends as part of the Chinese culture of guanxi, or gift-giving/favor-trading as a semi-binding expression of friendship. In other words, she runs out the pipeline as fast as I do and reaps social and material benefits from it, so she puts up with brewdays to keep the gravy train rolling, as long as I know who's boss and schedule my brewing around her (and now also our baby's) convenience, which I do. In that way, having a baby actually makes it a bit easier: I used to get a bit resentful when she would nix a brewday for reasons I found less than compelling, but with a baby most reasons end up being rather compelling so it's helped my attitude about the whole thing.

That really is a big relief to hear as I'm hoping my wife will be lenient in the same regard. Additionally, cherry oak quad and passionfruit gose sound amazing!

 

[mrdauber64]

That is amazing! I've already got her interested in the names Atlas, Orion, and Apollo for a future boy, which are all hop names too.

We named our first Porter! .

 

[Sbe2]

I early morning brew now. I BIAB so I heat my strike water the night before while everyone is in bed (~180f). Let the kettle sit uncovered overnight. Wake up around 530, adjust temp., mash in, etc. Usually done with cleanup by 10.

I don't sit and watch every process. When the kid wakes up, I make her breakfast and watch her while checking in on my progress now and then. It's the only way I could get my wife to tolerate me brewing every six weeks or so.

I brewed at 4 AM once, it was peaceful and one of the best brew days I had. I was done by 8 before the kid woke up. The problem was by 6 pm I was exhausted.

Just talk with your baby momma and try to find a compromise. Like many have said before they are only young once, and don't miss out on that. You can always brew later.

 

[SanPancho]

Make em pay for half the ingredients, upfront, in cash.

 

[WarEagleBrewer]

.....The time passes quickly and you'll be back to normal but wishing you could enjoy those early baby years again.

Bull$h!t! My kids (twins) are 3 now and there's no way in hell I would EVER wish that on myself again. As a side note, if there's a rumor I have committed suicide by eating my .45, ya'll be sure to congratulate my widow on the new addition to the family.

 

[FatDragon]

That really is a big relief to hear as I'm hoping my wife will be lenient in the same regard. Additionally, cherry oak quad and passionfruit gose sound amazing!

I'm really excited about the gose - it's shaping up to be an excellent spring-summer brew.

The cherry oak quad is more of a leftover project: when I transferred the quad from primary to the carboy for some secondary time I discovered that I had an extra gallon or so, so I decided to secondary it in a sanitized juice jug with some steamed oak chips. Then when the baby was born a friend bought us some black cherries (super expensive in China but almost never very good because they get shipped in from Chile and usually sit on the shelf for a while because of the price) so I chopped out the pits and froze them. On bottling day for the quad, I first bottled the gallon on oak, then I left the oak in the jug and added the cherries and racked a gallon from the carboy into the jug, where it's been sitting for maybe forty days or so. The thing is, I tried an early bottle of the quad a couple weeks after bottling and it tasted like bubbly, alcoholic cherry juice, so it'll be interesting to see if adding cherries to that gallon will be an overload or if the flavors will mellow out by the time I'm regularly cracking bottles in several months.

Anyway, be the best baby daddy you can, and when you can get special dispensation from the pope, make the most of your brewdays by making awesome beer. If you have the will and the wife's permission, you'll find a way to make it work.