The Midas Touch - Going Pro

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• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From United States of America
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• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From United States of America
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GuingesRock wrote: There must be a huge potential business opportunity for home brewers to expand. Home brewers have the Midas touch!

The other side of the coin !!

Once you go commercial it ceases to become homebrew and the "Midas touch" will evaporate. Doing something as a hobby is different than doing it for a living. When I decide to brew it is rarely planned more than 2 days in advance, sometimes I change my plans once I start, it all adds to the fun and I believe its this that makes my beer different. Now if I went all "micro" there would be recipes to follow/deadlines/bills/customers/supplies to organise / STAFF !! and then the F#@*ing TAX man !! . All the joy would go out of the process and it would stop being fun. I'm not saying it would be a bad career choice, there is a saying that to find the perfect job you just need to start doing your hobby for a living. But that's BS in my view as a job and a hobby need to be different or you are just taking your work home with you. I'm an electrical engineer and the back of my house has been waiting for a rewire for years, I know gardeners who's own back yards are a jungle. Sometimes a guy just has to do something completely different to the day job.

Anyway enough of my rambling, sorry if it seems that I'm trying to piss on ya chips, I'm really just sharing my thoughts on the subject.



Yeasty

• • SVA Brewer With Over 50 Brews From Great Britain
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Yeasty wrote:piss on ya chips.

Yeasty

Yeasty, I haven't heard that one. I've been away from England too long It might make a nice little retirement job though. You could actually drink at work (just to sample) and a few beers for your buddies and you'd have free labour. They paid the guys who built the pyramids with beer.

I came back on to add a real ale link: http://kenanddot.wordpress.com/2012/11/ ... en-option/

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• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From United States of America
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That's great Bob (I'll look at them after work), Aces High. Thanks

Major hoop jumping this one in Canada...licenses everywhere: License to brew, license to sell, license to take off site...

Must be an easier process in America if they are everywhere.

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• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From United States of America
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You guys need to get over to the UK;
We are able to buy 80% rum on Sundays from 10am until 4pm, and 24 hours a day at other times.

Off topic but you are also able to purchase Porn & fireworks (even at the same time), now that must make the Aussies jealous!

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Great Britain
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Porn, fireworks and rum...sounds great

Having a premises where people come in and brew their own under supervision, using your equipment, is a loophole that is used in some places I think.
Some of the wine making supply shops have been doing that here with wine, but I think the government is cracking down on them now.

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GuingesRock wrote:Porn, fireworks and rum...sounds great

Sounds like Mevagissy back in the 80's.

• • SVA Brewer With Over 50 Brews From Great Britain
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Today I took a day off. So did my wife. Life has been a bit stressful lately with legal wranglings with my x-wife (solved today) and my wife’s mother’s terminal illness (we all have our problems I know), so we badly needed a day off. Life has been has been emotionally exhausting and strategically virtually impossible lately.

We went to the Port Pub in Port Williams. It’s attached to a microbrewery. It is two separate businesses in the same building working in a symbiotic relationship.

So we had lunch there, and I had a glass of the brew masters Rojo Diablo Double IPA. I’d had a glass before, so this was my second glass, and I liked it even better than last time. Still not as good as my own beer, but it is rare that I like someone else’s. I was interested in what hops might be in there and asked the waitress, and she said “I don’t know but the brew master is right there sitting at the bar” and there he was eating his burger. I went up to him with my beer and said “I love this IPA. What are the hops? Are they Fuggles?” I was trying to sound intelligent and "in the know". Any way they were Amarillo I never tasted Amarillo before and I liked them.

We had our lunch and went around and asked the guy if we could have a tour of the microbrewery (Joshua’s idea, thanks Joshua). Kathleen, my wife smiled sweetly, chatted him up in her usual charming way, and impressed him with her knowledge and appreciation of his beer, and we ended up with a mega tour of his brewery and took about an hour of his time. That was a dream come true for me and a perfect event for a day off in a currently hectic life.

It was amazing! I told him about my SMaSH IPA with MO and Cascade and how I was thinking incorporating FWH into the recipe and he told me exactly what to do. He said to put half the cascade in the FWH and 25% for a 30 minute addition, and 25% for a 15 minute addition and That’s what I am going to do because he impressed me with his incredible knowledge. The IPA I was drinking was made with the same 50% FWH, 25% 30min and 25% 15 minute additions, but it also had dry hopping. If I remember correctly he said “double dry hopping" what-ever that means.

His brewing equipment was incredible too! He said “what you have to remember is brewing principals stay the same whether you are brewing at home or on a large scale”

That’s all I have to tell you because I am a bit tipsy on the guys IPA and it’s only mid afternoon.

Oh…and there is more. He does full volume mashing and doesn’t sparge!!! I said that’t what BIAB is all about, but he didn’t seem to know much about BIAB. He thought he was being revolutionary with his full volume mashing.

He had connections also to German breweries, which is where he got his FWH thing from. He described the brewery where he had connection in Germany and they put their beer in wooden casks and send them to the bar in a dumb waiter. Each cask was emptied in about 15 mins and then the next would be sent up. The casks were steam cleaned/sanitised.

Would anyone else describe their microbrewery tours?

And there’s more...He had three huge fermenting chambers each with its own cooling system and he could lager in them. One massive mash tun with a huge grain hopper with a built in mill above it. One huge kettle with a cluster of electric heating coils in it. Endless large “dispensing chambers” full of beer which seemed to be set at around 8 PSI CO2, but he said it varied. He carbonated the Beer with “carbonating stones” which were like hollow stainless steel rods with millions of fine perforations that screwed into the sides of the dispensing chambers.

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Nice write up of a nice day out there GR. I've got some Amarillo in the freezer ready for a summer APA. I hope you gave him the Biabrewer.info site address so he can join the real Biab community. You never know he might learn something..

Have the brewery got a web site ? email address ? I wouldn't mind seeing if they would part with there recipe..



Yeasty

• • SVA Brewer With Over 50 Brews From Great Britain
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