2015: A Year in Homebrewing

Is it safe to come out?  Have all the “Year in Review” articles and mini-Facebook movies and all the resolutions and dieting ideas and all that final run their course?  Seems like all we see this time of year is nostalgia for the past (12 months) and unbridled optimism for the future (12ish months).

Well, I guess it’s time to do my part, but in an effort to keep it interesting, I’ll punctuate mine with beer.  Because everything’s better with homebrew.

I had really big plan about a year ago: brew a different and new and interesting beer every month for twelve months.  It seemed like a great excuse to put off writing any blog entries for a good long while, which worked out great!  It also turned out to be a distraction, sometimes welcome, often not, from a year that felt a little like a roller coaster: sometimes you were up, sometimes you were down, and you almost always had a bad feeling in your tummy.

January: I started the year with a pretty neat idea (I thought).  Knowing it was a) cold and b) coming up on my favorite night of inviting friends over to watch funny commercials and a short concert (which for some reason is called the “Super Bowl”), I decided to brew a lager, or two.  First, I brewed a big, strong dobbelbock (9% abv), and bottled 4 out of the 5 gallons.  Then, I took the last gallon, added water, and kegged it to make a 3% abv pale lager.  Eight gallons for the work of five!  And the commercial and concert party we threw went over great.  A perfect start to the year.

February: In February, the snows came.  You probably remember.  Since it was still cold, I stuck with beers that would benefit from a chilly basement, and made an altbier (which is not, as it turns out, a beer created by people on Usenet groups, much to my disappointment).  Soon after that, as we got even more snow, our dog, Joe, went out to pee in the front yard, as he had day after day for the 10 years we’d been part of our family, and never came back.  I looked for him until nearly midnight in the bitter cold.  I called his name, even though he was deaf.  I followed tiny sets of footprints all over the neighborhood.  Friends came and helped us.  Even neighbors we barely knew came out to help look.  We never found him.

To understand the devastation of that moment, you have to know how much Joe meant to us.  How the sound of him licking himself on my pillow was the lullaby I fell asleep to every night.  How we rushed him to the animal hospital when he needed his gallbladder out, despite not having any way to pay for such an operation, and waited up until after 1am to hear that the surgery had been successful.  How he greeted us at the door when we came home, day after day, for ten years.  How he jumped up on the couch and put his paws on the bassinet when Ella came home from the hospital, curious about this new member of our family.  He was terribly abused, abandoned, and starving before we adopted him.  He was a sweet, loving little old man when he left us.  I have no idea why he disappeared like that when he did, though he perhaps he knew (as we did) that wouldn't live much longer.  I don't know.  But finally, February was over.  Though somehow, the world didn't feel any less cold or gray for it.

March:  By this time, obviously, the year was off to a crappy start, and my heart wasn’t in homebrewing.  I made a beer, a honey ale, but it was contaminated and I ended up dumping most of it.

[Best if I skip a bit here…]

Summer:  Spring eventually thawed the snow, but mostly what I remember is spending an awful lot of time in doctor offices and hospitals for various reasons involving various family members.  By Summer, we’d found a new family hobby, which I highly recommend to anyone looking for spend a fun Saturday afternoon: house hunting.  Not serious, “We need to buy a house!” house hunting.  Instead, find some houses (I recommend Zillow) and set up some viewings.  You get to see some really nice places, and some total holes.  The ones with the collapsing ceilings and black mold are always fun, but my favorite was the one house with a brand-new beautifully decorate bathroom in the middle of a bare, unfinished, asbestos-filled basement.  Because that’s a selling point!

I did make a beer to honor Leo’s first birthday.  Since he was born on Bastille Day, it was a French-style saison, and I kept a few bottled with his picture on it.

We also considered a few fairly crazy new diets over the summer, all of which touted the benefit of going gluten free.  Ever game for a good experiment, I found an enzyme that could be added to beer that would more fully convert the gluten in beer into sugar that would then be consumed by the yeast.  The result was a pretty tasty pale “gluten-less” ale.  But after about a month of that, we decided that was crazy and went back to eating gluten.  FYI, fruit and vegetable smoothies aren’t that bad, if you make them right.

September: As the summer made way for Fall, and the school year started up again, my grandmother passed away at the age of 96.  I wish I could write more to sum up my feelings about this loss, but my feelings aren’t done yet, and can’t really be summed it.  Leave it at this: after her funeral, we picked up a six pack of ‘Gannsett and toasted her, and missed her.

At the end of the month, my wife and I managed to sneak away for a couple days to celebrate our 11^th wedding anniversary.  Hanging out with hippies and enjoying bike rides and, yes, good beer, it was the highlight of an otherwise somber month.

October: In October, one of our close friends got married.  My daughter was a flower girl, my wife was a bridesmaid, and I was charged with making 15 gallons of beer for the reception.  It seemed straightforward enough: 3 batches, 3 five-gallon kegs.  What could go wrong?  As soon as I filled the first keg and went to charge it, and heard the CO2 hissing out, I knew exactly what could go wrong.  Suddenly, I was all panic: Was it defective?  Would there be time to get more?  How much CO2 was I wasting?  Would there be enough to serve the beer?  What if I couldn’t fix it?  Would I have to tell our friend that I couldn‘t make the beer?  Would I be responsible for ruining their wedding?  Fortunately, I found that increasing the air pressure and adjusting the seal was enough to fix the leak, and the next two kegs were filled and sealed without problem.  The wedding was a lot of fun, and a couple people might have liked the beer.  Or not.  Didn’t matter to me; I still drank it!

In November, I turned 40.  Shut up, that’s not that old!  Just because I was born during the Ford administration doesn’t mean I’m not still spry and full of youthful—oh , who am I kidding?

In December, our family suffered another loss.  A man very close to our family, whose family had always felt like an extension of my own family, passed away.  To tease out the exact familial bonds from our extended Irish family would take some time, but cousin is the closest term, though that doesn’t do his closeness to us justice.  Uncle is somewhat closer, but Eddie was…well, he was Eddie to us, will always be Eddie to us, and that’s enough.  I brewed an Irish stout for him, because that seemed fitting.  I decided at that I point that I’d had enough funerals for one year.

The Universe, of course, doesn’t care what I think.  Just before Christmas, my father-in-law suffered a major stroke.  We made immediate plans to go to Texas, to see him, to let him see a couple of his grandkids.  We’d almost made it on the plane when the phone rang.  We missed the flight, and rebooked, not for a visit, but for a funeral.  This was the man who I called one day, 13 or so years ago, to ask for his permission to marry his daughter.  And he’d told me, “I’ll tell you what my father-in-law told me.  You can ask her, but she won’t say yes!”  This was the man who coaxed my daughter into taking her very first steps.  We flew to Texas the day after Christmas, to say our goodbyes properly.

So much for 2015. 

Do I have resolutions for 2016?  You’ve got to be kidding me.

Well, I guess that’s not entirely fair.  I’d decided near the end of last year to try my hand at fiction writing again.  I still think I’ve got a couple novels in me that need to come out.  But now, suddenly, I’ve come to think that where my writing really needs to be is sitting right in front of me, or rather, isn’t sitting right in front of me because neither of them ever seem to sit still for very long.

I have two wonderful kids, and they’d both probably get a kick out of some of the stories I could write for them.  So this year, and as many years as I can keep it up, my writing will be dedicated to them.  If you don’t see another blog entry for a while, that’s probably what I’m doing.  So if you see my kids, ask them if they like my stories.  I’m hoping they’ll say yes.