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IslandDano

IslandDano

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I think it's kind of funny how I got to the point of brewing my own beer. I'm in Michigan while we have hundreds of breweries here I'd say I'm about tapped out on what's new and what else there is to try. There's really nothing at all my beer stops I haven't tried. As far as going to new breweries I've been to enough places to know there's not that much "elite beer" being put into the market place right now.

My wife and I honeymooned in Portland, Maine and the styles and mouth-feels were so different. I'm an IPA guy and I really like the way they do it out there. That being said I can't buy any NE style IPAs in Michigan. So I'm trying to brew them myself. Right now I have two batches going and while I'm not pleased I at least won't give up. I want to nail the style because I just can't get it by me.

I do have to laugh at how far the beer industry has come. There was a point where Summer Shandy was craft beer as it was one of my gateway beers into other styles and imports. This was 9 years ago...

So now I've got beer conditioning and fermenting. I've been using this site for about 6 months to prep myself for my own recipes and finally decided to get a log in today. So far so good.
 
I like your post^^^. To be sure, some of the beers I brew are not available where I live, with an example being 3 Floyds Gumball Head. With a bit of research on HBT, I found a clone recipe and started brewing my own immediately. Then I added a touch of this or reduced a bit that...now I can have it my own way.

The other factor is cost and that statement will draw fire I'm sure. After equipment is depreciated out like a business expense, I can make a keg of premium beer that will cost well over $100, plus tax and deposit from a beer store.....maybe I'll have $40 -/+ in it. Plus its a rewarding hobby and making your own beer has a wow factor. Darn right....its better than you can buy!
 
Initially I got into homebrewing because I wanted to be able to make seasonal beers whenever I damn well pleased. I love Oktoberfest/Marzens.

What keeps me interested is discovering great recipes. I love brewing with adjunts. Chocolate, Vanilla, Coffee, etc. So many different techniques.
 
The idea of being able to customize beer to my taste was VERY appealing. I also needed something to drink while my homemade wine matured...winemaking is now playing second fiddle.
 
When I started brewing, there were few craft breweries around. And when they did start up (Founders came along in about 1997) I had a weird dilemma. I live in Michigan most of the year, but our beer distributors come out of Wisconsin. They can't sell WI-only beers to our local stores, but they didn't carry beers available in lower Michigan and not Wisconsin- so I still couldn't get many of the craft beers I wanted.

So I started brewing my own, making clones of beers I wanted to try based on their descriptions. I also started doing lagers I loved in Germany, but couldn't get here.

I've brewed almost every style of beer, but no longer enter competitions and things. I just brew for my own enjoyment most of the time.

I am a certified BJCP judge, and have been known to take more than a few "beercations".

I was making wine many years before I started brewing, and found the jump to brewing was pretty easy overall.
 
I was gifted a Mr. Beer kit, then was gifted someone's homebrew set up because they were done with the hobby. I've been hooked ever since
 
I got into brewing when the Girls soccer team I coach bought me a gift card to go to a small store in Fredrick Maryland,where you brew a 5 gallon batch on premises.Its fermented there and you go back 3 weeks later to bottle and bring home your brew.Its called Flying Barrel and the volunteers there are awesome.
I live in a condo so have been doing 5 gallon extracts for 5 months.
Just bought the mash and boil to go all grain.

And i just love beer
 
My son gave me a brewer's starter kit for Christmas one year. It sat in a corner for a few years and in that time I became a cider drinker and pretty much gave up on beer. When I looked into making my own it was simple compared to beer so I started on the journey. Been doing it ever since. Never looked back.
 
A friend gave me a Mr Beer kit last January - I brewed it and was hooked. Not long after that I made a trip to our (now sadly closed) LHBS and dove in. Now I'm making great beer that I love and trying new ones that I can't find around here. Of course learning something new every time and getting great help and information from HBT!!
 
I used to live in the Netherlands, near the german border and not too far from belgium...beer was something you could get in all styles and great taste for little money...

Then I moved to Finland, where until very recently, you had a "choice" of 4 big breweries making the same pale euro lager for far too much money...

Homebrewing when I started a few years ago was just about to get going with 2 homebrew stores in the whole country.

Nowadays there's tons of small breweries and a lot of homebrewing, still no local stores, and still insane prices for any decent beer.
 
My wife gave me a Mr.Beer kit for x-mas as a gag gift. Proceed to laugh her ass off when I made my first batch and it turned out terrible so I told her "Challenge Accepted" and proceeded to learn/experiment more.

She regrets that gift more than anything else she has ever given anyone...like ever.
 
Mr beer got me started and almost made me quit. Just wasnt that fun. Now im doing 10 gallon all grain.
 
I was always interested in "craft beer" going back to Pete's Wicked Ale, Always said I would try home brewing later, when kids were older, had more time, space money etc.. Co worker is a avid brewer he talked me into trying it and he would help me with my first batch etc. Jumped in doing all grain from the first batch and have been hooked every since.
 
I found Charlie's Joy of Home Brewing in a used book store. After reading it I started looking around for the beer styles described in it. Bitters, IPA, marzen, cream ale, nobody at beer stores had any idea what I was talking about. I brewed my first beer just to see what an IPA tasted like. Soon after that I stopped working in order to take care of my son while my wife went to school. That meant no money for beer. I did the math and realized that I could brew beer at a low enough cost to fit it in the budget.

Now days we have money to buy beer, and there are more beer styles at the local stores than I care to try. Yet I'm brewing as much as ever.
 
I had a friend who brewed but I was more interested in watching football and shooting pool at his house while he did the brewing. I did help him bottle quite a few batches back before he started kegging but I was still content buying the beers I wanted. Fast forward a couple of years, I started talking about maybe giving it a try, just for fun. Stopped into the LHBS one friday afternoon, picked up a extract kit, fermenting bucket, and some bits to get started and brewed Saturday morning. The first batch struck me as way too easy. I had brewed 3 5gal batches before I popped the top on my 1st HB. I decided that I was all in and I wanted a BIG pipeline.
A year and a half later there are 6 beers on tap and at least 6 varieties in bottles. I wanted my own "beer store" so I could drink whatever flavor, whenever I want.
 
In my short time serving beer at a local brewery a friend of mine owns....I come across a lot of folks that have been overseas awhile and comment on how their styles compare to ours.
 
I actually grew up in a family that made wine, not professionally, but there was always 30 or 40 1 gallon bottles of home made wine in the cellar. So naturally when I moved out I started to make wine. Then one day in the early 80s I was looking in the back pages of Mother Earth News and there was an ad about homebrew beer.

SO I ordered a kit, it was easy to make except have you ever tried to drink a gallon bottle of beer?

Then I bought 22 oz bottles which made it simple

I found out that you could get corney kegs real fast and had a tapper keezer system in my house when it was a oddity to have a tapper in the house. People thought that meant I drank to much. By the 90s it seemed there were home brew stores in every town and things got easy.:mug:

So because it was so simple, I decided to move into the middle of the desert, 20 miles from the nearest store/gas station. I think I was one of the original customers of internet shopping, my LHBS is 120 miles away now instead of 3 like it used to be.:confused:

I have seen a lot of fads in this hobby, remember when if you were an all grain brewer it was using keggles that we welded ourselves, being able to buy some of the equipment we can today was a pipe dream. Currently think that the BIAB system will eventually out mode the 3 vessel system but a hybrid 2 vessel system will become the norm. I do not see why anyone wanting a 3 vessel system will not see the advantage of using the boil kettle as the mash tun, it just saves to much money.;)

Anyway, that is how I started, I still make wine and ciders, once a year I do 5 gallons of cider and about 15 gallons of wine. But beer is my main brewing concern these days. It is just to much fun.:tank:
 
Mr-Beer.jpg
 
I had always wanted to try home brewing. Back in early 2001 I went into a small LHBS to talk to the people but wanted to make lagers and it was just too complicated (temp control, etc). So I punted.

A few years ago my wife bought my daughter and I a groupon from a "brew on site" place but we were both traveling and the groupon expired.

Another daughter bought me a gift cert at the same place the next year for Christmas and I made sure to use it this time. I went down and brewed at their place on a Friday afternoon and went back Saturday morning to buy my own kit. And I'm not saving a damn dime brewing at home! :ban:
 
After how lame my first two batches are trending I have new found appreciation for the craft selections I have in my market!
 
A quest to understand more about beer styles and ingredients. It was the one subject I couldn't learn enough about.
 
very simple -

love beer (of course)
visited a friend that made beer - loved making beer that day (of course)

just had to give it a go. been hooked ever since
 
Back in the mid 90s I had friends that brewed and thought it sounded interesting, I wanted to but things got busy with work then family. Fast forward to a few years ago, I went to my cousin's wedding for which he and another cousin made all the beer for the reception - it was fantastic. I asked my cousin about it, and he said "if you can bake a cake, you can make beer." Not long after that I got a small bonus from work, used it to buy an extract kit, and have been brewing since. Now I'm doing BIAB batches every month or two and an occasional cider.

I don't really do it to make beer I can't buy, I just like making beer I like.
 
My favorite beer of all time was Potosi's Cave Ale. The old recipe.

In the summer of 2015 they changed the recipe, and it was not a good change. ABV went from 6.5 to 5.5, and there was a sort of a sour finish to it. Well. I called, I complained, the PR flack I spoke with insisted the recipe was the same, all they'd done is change the yeast. Yeah, right.

Meanwhile my son had been doing some 1-gallon brewing, and between the Potosi debacle and my son's experience, I was moved to try to recreate the old Cave Ale.

I've come very close--tweaked my recipe, it doesn't quite finish as dry as I remember, though I've had a couple people tell me I have nailed it.

In addition to brewing the Cave clone, I've done several other beers, a couple of which I find taste as good as the old Cave Ale--a Rye beer I just love, and a California Common that is just tasty.

I haven't bought a commercial beer to bring home since December 2015. I'm now 31 batches in, doing all-grain.
 
I started brewing for pretty much the same reason as OP. Since moving to Florida 18 months ago from Minnesota, I wasn't able to buy my favorite brown ale (Bitteschlapp) from my local craft Brewer. Hence, started brewing Caribou Slobber. Happy ending :mug:

If I still lived in MN I never would have started brewing.
 
My oldest son gifted me a Mister Beer kit in 2002. The first batch was so good I was immediately hooked. Within a few months I had four of their fermentors and had built an insulated cabinet to hold them plus drawers to hold over 100 bottles during conditioning.

The rest is ~14 years of escalation :)

Cheers!
 
In 2005 I saw the Alton Brown "Good Eats" episode on making beer. I said "I can do that", which shortly became "I've GOTTA do that".

Brewed my first batch in January 2006 or so, and been going strong ever since.
 
FloppyKnockers said:
I've always enjoyed homemade things over their commercial counterpart. Beer just became one of those.
Click to expand...

Me too.

A scrapper buddy came in to work with his dad's homebrewing crap in the back of his pickup. $50 and it was mine, and I was into it. Circa 2000. Lotsa superbad beer until I found HBT years later.
 
jschein said:
LOL, how has that been working out?

I started because of the history of brewing and have watched how the process evolved for homebrewers from simple to exotic. It is still a journey!
Click to expand...

Amazing! Would probably still be using my $20 tamale pot on the stove if we didn't get a new stove ( here in Colorado boil temp is lower so we can use stove). I buy everything in bulk and I've been making 55 beers for between 15 and $28 since day one. If I reused yeast that means I could maybe make a batch of beer under $10. I don't want or need a bunch of stuff laying around so I'm happy with what I got. You won't see me bring this topic up much as I can live with everyone having their own way of doing things.
 
Making a Federally Approved Poverty Wage in the early 90's, I couldn't afford that delicious Deschutes Black Butte Porter I had fallen in love with, so I learned to make it. :ban:

Amusingly enough, when Bert Grant's Perfect Porter hit our local shelves, I found out I was already making that too. :mug:
 
I was an avid woot.com disciple for a long time. This was before the days of all the off-shoots and before the Amazon buy-out. Hell, the damned thing was my homepage!

Anyways, one day they had a Mr. Beer kit up on Woot!. I liked beer and was instantly interested. Being the research-type that I am, I ran a search for Mr. Beer and found out about HBT. After reading a bit, I figured that I didn't want a Mr. Beer, and instead bought a starter kit at my local homebrew store. Thus started nearly 7 years of this wonderful hobby!
 
Back in 2009 I found a Hop plant while hiking out at Boyscout camp. Dug it up and replanted it at home. 2 years later I have hops, what do I do with them? After years of hints, my wife finally got me a starter kit for Christmas 2011. And the rest, as they say, is history... :mug:
 
I first found homebrewing in college...my frat brothers would extract brew late at night early morning in the house as to not get caught...I then met my wife and her brother got me Sam Calagione's book brewing up a business...I was hooked after the chapter on his first beer in his apartment with Ricki Lake trying it.

Bought my first starter kit in 2013 and have been brewing 8 batches year since with my kegging set up.
 

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