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02-02-2018, 10:16
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https://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/hydrometer_illustration_640.pngThis is our contribution to the monthly exercise in collective beer blogging which this time is hosted by Jon Abernathy at*The Brew Site*who asks us to reflect on home brewing (http://www.thebrewsite.com/announcing-session-132-homebrewing-conversations/).We winced a bit at this one. Over the years we’ve written about why we love home brewing, why we stopped home brewing, and why we started again. But we haven’t brewed in ages, or felt the urgent drive to do so. Jon has prompted us to interrogate ourselves.
Question One: Why is the home brewing kit still in the attic six months after we moved to Bristol?There are positive reasons. We’re in a new part of the world with limited time off work which we want to spend exploring, not watching a pot that never boils. We’ve been busy ticking pubs (https://boakandbailey.com/2017/12/every-pub-bristol-first-100/) and getting to know the local breweries. And (this may or may not be positive depending on whether you believe it is the job of beer bloggers to sacrifice their health in the War on Prohibition) we don’t drink as much as we used to — we only need so much beer!
But there’s at least one poor excuse: we’re still sulking because the last few beers we made were duds. We read the books, we bought the apps, we procured the fanciest ingredients from the Malt Miller, and we sanitised everything within half a mile of our house. Twice. After all that, the beer was still basically crap — a bit rough, a bit acidic, a waste of time and money.
https://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/homebrewing_gubbins_500.jpg
Question Two: So why bring the brewing kit at all?We had limited space in the removals van and got rid of lots of stuff, including about 150 books, but for some reason we kept the boiler, the mash tun, and the thousand bits of easily lost copper and plastic. Clearly there is unfinished business. The itch lingers.
It might never get used again — there’s hardly a house in Britain that doesn’t have a load of dusty home-brew kit in the back of a cupboard — but it’s good to know it’s there.
If we find a particularly interesting recipe in the archives we can at least make a stab at brewing some version of it. (Our last really successful beer was a 19th century Whitbread pale ale from Ron Pattinson’s marvellous*book (http://boakandbailey.com/2014/02/homebrewers-guide-vintage-beer/) which turned out funky and fascinating.) If we wake up one Saturday morning with the urge to brew we could be filling a fermenting vessel by teatime. (Bristol has actual bricks-and-mortar home-brewing shops.) And we sometimes daydream about using it to make some mad, strong, beastie-riddled keeping beer for mixing with stuff from the supermarket as we’ve done with Orval in the past (https://boakandbailey.com/2015/01/proporval/).
Or maybe it’s just sentiment. You’d be surprised how many memories a plastic bucket can hold.
Session #132: Home Brewing Conversations (https://boakandbailey.com/2018/02/session-132-home-brewing-conversations/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (https://boakandbailey.com)


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