A hobby is born

Thought I would provide a little back ground information about how I have come to brew beer. This may seem a little disjointed, but stick with me I’ll try and tie it all together in the end.

I have always enjoyed drinking beer so that was probably one of the major contributing factors leading to my interest in brewing. However like most people when I was young I would drink any kind of beer it made no matter, the cheaper the better. Liquors never had much appeal to me sure I could drink an occasional mixed drink, but beer was where it was at for me don't know why just the way that it is.

Another thing I have always enjoyed as long as I can remember are the sciences, and figuring out how things work. I can remember when I was young my brothers and I fooling around in my fathers work shop in the basement, taking apart old radios or tools that no longer functioned properly. I guess this behavior got my folks to thinking or maybe the old man didn’t want us messing with his stuff anymore, but one Christmas we got a little electronics kit. The kit was cool you could hook up wires in the springs on the peg board that had pictures of what it was, like a resistor or capacitor. You hook up these wires to different connectors to make simple electronic devices, like a counter or even an AM radio.

As I got older on and in to high school I always took all the science and math classes I could. I was not a very good student, but I took the classes anyway because I had an interest in these things. Out of high school I entered a trade school for electronics thinking that this would feed my interest and provide a sound financial future. After trade school I had a job in electronics, while very interesting was not exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. So after about 4.5 years of that I decided to quit and go back to school.

I enrolled at a local state college to study electrical engineering thinking that I still liked the field I had been working in and this would be a way to further myself. Part of my required classes that I had to take was chemistry 101 and lab. I had not taken a chemistry course before I usually stuck with physics in high school, so I knew this would be tough for me. At first chemistry was difficult for me, but as time when on something must have clicked because I really started to get it and I was actually becoming rather fond of the class. While I was not a stellar student in chemistry I did do pretty good and I really liked it so I decided to take another semester of it even though it was not required. The second semester was twice as hard, but I found it rewarding when I finally got it. After the second semester I could not take any more unnecessary courses so I had to get back to my majors’ requirements, but the experience was fun. After a few years of school funds were running low so I had to find a full time job and do school as a part time thing to finish up my degree. So I decided to interview for a job I know I could do which is what I had done for my entire adult life, become an electronics tech.

Turns out the job I got was a really nice one, the pay was good and the atmosphere was great. Now that I have steady income and a place of my own I felt a little more relaxed about my future. However I was in a new location and only knew a couple of people so it turns out I had a lot of free time, I could use a good hobby.

Watching the science channel one day there was an episode of some show about micro breweries and how beer is made and things of this nature. Don’t remember exactly the name of the show, but it was entertaining and educational to learn about all the different things that go in to brewing beer. The people on the show were talking about brewing in the terms of it being a science. I understood what they were saying, but didn’t get the importance of it at the time. Like measuring ph levels and the density of the wort not to mention the biological part about the alcohol just being basically a waste product of the yeast. I thought to myself that this might be something I would like to try and it turns out that there is a little home brew store in the neighborhood. The owner of the store seems to think anyone can do it especially if they just start out with the basics and the beer that is being made would be better than any mainstream beer you can buy in a store not to mention cheaper in most cases. I’m sold on the idea now a hobby is born.