|
|||||
|
Things were proceeding along fine when the wort in the brew pot boiled over onto the hotplate. The sweet wort foamed over the top of the pot and burned on the electric stove below. This caused smoke and the smell of burned sugar was unmistakable. I turned on the ceiling fan and opened the remaining windows in hopes of getting the smoke outside quickly. After about 10 minutes I had the whole mess contained and resumed the boil. Unfortunately the smoke was harder to control and somehow managed to work its way to other parts of the house. Suddenly I heard my mother’s voice at the bottom of the stairs asking me if I smelled smoke. Like Han Solo in middle of the attempt to rescue Princess Leia from a Death Star jail cell, I cautiously replied, “No, I’m okay here. How are you?” She didn’t seem convinced. Minutes later, my father appeared and he didn’t stop at the bottom of the stairs. He climbed the stairs and entered my room. With a pot boiling, steam rising into the air, the unusual smells of hops and grain, and equipment strewn across my room and bathroom, there was no way I could hide the operation. I told him I was brewing beer and waited for the worst. I don’t remember the exact conversation that followed, but the result was that he said he had brewed beer when he was younger and I could brew as long as I didn’t sell it. From my reading of homebrewing history, I knew right away that his early attempts at brewing must have resulted in some awful beer and I also knew that he suspected that I wouldn’t hold any long-term interest in creating such bad tasting stuff. He knew it would be a short-lived venture. I was relieved to be off the hook and envigorated by the license to press onward. After I went to college, I made one attempt at brewing there in my dorm room. The resulting beer was mediocre. After that I brewed at my apartment in College Station and at one point I brewed a peach beer in my parents' kitchen at home one summer. The peach beer clearly had technical problems and was foamy, had a bad taste and was totally undrinkable. It was the only bad beer I have ever brewed. I distinctly remember pouring out many bottles of that bad beer at the back fence behind my parents’ house. My homebrewing attempts had gone from medicore to bad. After that, my brewing equipment sat idle in my closet upstairs at my parents’ house. Ultimately it would sit there for another 15 years. In college after I turned 21, I realized that buying beer was far easier than brewing it, and buying commercially brewed beer was perfect because I could get a great variety a bottle or a 6-pack at a time. It was just on the eve of the great American micro brewing revolution of the mid 1990’s when brewpubs and microbreweries started to appear across the country. As the months went by, it became easier and easier to get new and interesting beer from a variety of places. Home brewing was becoming a distant memory, but my interest in beer still remained. I wrote a monthly column for the Southwest Brewing News about the Houston beer scene. I continued to seek out new beers and vigorously continued to collect beer bottles, cans, and labels. In 1994 two friends and I toured the west coast and northwest states on a 3 week road trip to seek out brewpubs and microbreweries. |
|||||
| Thursday, November 20, 2008 |
|
||||
