Brewing

I have decided to start a blog. I am getting back into brewing my own beer in my apartment and will share the experience. I have brewed my own beer in the past, but had to get rid of my equipment when I moved here to North Carolina from the Chicago area just over nine years ago. There just was not enough room for it in the U-Haul trailer. I didn't jump right back into it because I prefer drinking with others and, not knowing anyone around my new home, the only way to do that was to find a nice neighborhood pub and become a regular there. I did that and I really enjoy the friends and bartenders at O'Malley's Pub and Restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina. I have found, however, that I now entertain at home as well and decided that it would be even more fun if I could share beer that I made myself with my friends when they are over. Towards this end, I found an online brewing supply company in Minnesota, Midwest Homebrewing and Winemaking Supplies (website: http://www.midwestsupplies.com/) that appear to have a decent line of products and quite good prices. I have ordered their intermediate brewing kit which includes a carboy for two-stage fermentation, 36 twenty-two ounce bottles (yeah -- they are rather big, wish I could keg it, but the costs are presently out of my price range) and two recipe kits for Liberty Cream Ale. While I would prefer to brew a lager or pilsner style beer, I do not have the ability to keep the brew keg at the required lower temperature to do this correctly and have settled for a beer that can be brewed at room temperature (at least room temperature when you have air conditioning). My entire order for equipment, bottles, caps and recipe kits with shipping came to $196.70. I guess I will have to brew quite a few batches before this will pay off economically. I am sure it will pay off emotionally for me. It would be hard to put into words the enjoyment you get from sharing something you have made with your friends. I won't only be sharing it with friends here at home though. I participate in the World Community Grid (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/), which is a way of sharing the computer resources you have at home with the world to help solve problems facing humanity worldwide. At present, the project we are running is called the Human Proteome Project, the function of which is to determine how protiens coded by human gene sequences are most likely to fold. I guess this will help researchers to understand how diseases attack our bodies and will help to understand what might prevent the disease from being able to do this. In any event, the software that runs on my computer is totally invisable to me. It takes over my system when I am doing nothing and it backs off any time I have something to do. In order to build spirit to run the projects, the WCG has enabled the members to form teams to compete for points, run time and results and I think I found the best team to join. I became the seventh member of a team that now has a membership 194. It started with a guy and his two daughters and the team is now fourth in points ranking on the WCG. The team is called MyOnlineTeam and you can join it by clicking the team name. We are outperforming several other teams with much larger membership bases and usually are second in daily statistics. Through this project, I am meeting people throughout the world and am enjoying their company online. I hope to share my brewing experiences with a few of them through this, my first attempt at blogging.