Somebody bet on the bay

This is the only website on the internet featuring a picture of a horse that does not contain a discussion of Transylvanian horsemeat.    You’re welcome.

Once again, I have gone for an extended time without blogging.  However, this time I have also gone for a long time without brewing, a sorry state of affairs, to be sure.  Things have gone so far that I have nothing planned or near readiness for the National Homebrew Competition, which starts accepting entries today.  Bummer.

I do have some halfway-decent excuses for my lack of attention to things brewing.  We bought a wonderful house in Maplewood, NJ, which comes complete with detached brewery (the previous owners just used it to store their car!).  The process of bidding, buying, closing, packing, moving, unpacking, and settling in has made spare time a rare commodity, and an hours-long block of spare time needed to brew a batch nonexistent.  Plus we had the whole Hurricane Sandy thing happen in the middle of all of this.  And then, once we were moved in and mostly unpacked, I had to leave town for over a week to go work on the Superbowl (about this I am absolutely not bitching).    Followed up by Stupidstorm Nemo, which again required me to be away from home for a few days.

Happily, I was able to get back on the metaphorical horse this past weekend, in the form of an extract brew (my first in almost two years),  a clone of Dogfish Head’s 60 Minute IPA taken from Extreme Brewing.   “Extract Brewing?!” you might say, to which I would respond, “My all-grain rig is still in boxes in the frozen garage.”  So there.

Stay tuned, lots of good stuff in the coming weeks, including

• A blow-by-blow diary of the transformation of my garage into a badass home brewery
• An account of my beer adventures in New Orleans (limited by the need to work 12-hours night shifts for the duration of my stay in town)
• A recap of all that I have learned about brewing water chemistry (nerd!)

Thanks for sticking around through my down time.  Cheers!