Fast Forward Half A Decade

It’s Been a While… My Bad.

Wow, well I have dropped the ball on this for a while. But to my defense, there have been a ton of changes that have taken place to keep me occupied. As the kids have gotten older, they have started more after school activities that keep us busy. Somewhere in there we moved houses, started dedicating more time to my homebrew competition system project Brewerwall. I even changed jobs that focuses my attention more into the world of beer as a software engineer at Precision Fermentation.

2018 through 2020

To be honest, I have never been much of a writer. I like the idea of it, but getting my thoughts down has always been tough. Originally when starting this blog I thought I would keep it factual and with the topic around brewing it would keep me motivated. Alas, life, work and other projects kept me from adding to it. Not that those reasons are bad things, it’s just the reality of it.

During these couple of years I did brew plenty of beers, participated in festivals and had a great time with the hobby! However, I ultimately failed at keeping any kind of blog alive. My hope is to change that by coming up with a new routine and schedule.

A New Location

In late 2020, during the peak of the pandemic, my wife and I found our forever home. An older home on a couple acres with a huge shop (aka man cave) and only about 10 minutes from civilization. After living in our previous home and starting a family we had accumulated a ton of stuff. There was quite a bit of purging of things along with moving. On top of it all, we were rolling a new house payment plus the old house we still owned. Needless to say, I was stressed. Thankfully, everything panned out. After getting the old house ready for market, it was under contract in 4 days.

A Lack of Motivation

2021 was a long year. Not only did we up-heave our family to a new place, we took on a lot of new projects to make the house a home. 2021 was a year spent mostly taking off my homebrewer hat and putting on my DIY home remodel hat. Which is good, but took a hit with time to dedicate to brewing on the weekends. However, by the end of 2021 a bulk of the work was done and I could focus back on homebrewing!

2022 NPT to Tri Clamp Conversion

2022 was me getting back in the groove. My general mentality with brew days is always asking myself: “What sucked the most” and fixing that problem. For 2022, it was dealing with NPT connections. Doing a deep clean, you had to unscrew everything, cut out all the thread tape and clean. Then the biggest problem going back was hoping everything screwed together in the appropriate position it needed to be. I hated it. I took this as an opportunity to switch everything over to tri-clamps. Super easy to clean and tear down. Financially, it was something I didn’t want to do all at once, so I rebuilt things in sections during the year.

Going into 2023

Marching ahead I plan to stay more consistent with posts, giving tips and sharing recipes. I also hope to brew more often and being able to tell those experiences. Cheers!