Trend Setters in the Beer Universe

A new craze has been started in Corvallis. Home brewing.

It started out merely as way for Blair and me to use up our free time on a weekend and come out with a bit of beer for our efforts.

But it has become much more.

We shared our beer making adventures (and samples of our product) with others. Interest grew.

By the time our second batch had been bottled, our storytelling at work had piqued the interest of a handful of people at work. One coworker, Don, really emerged as a soon-to-be home brewing fanatic. In one whirlwind weekend, he obtained the knowledge, equipment, and ingredients to make his own batch of frothy goodness. His excitement was such that he seemed to no longer walk, but float across the ground. Don’s batch is in its secondary fermenting cycle as I type this, and he looks forward to bottling soon.

And so it came about that a group of us decided to hang out one Sunday and concoct a mutual bucket of brownish-red goodness.
The participants:
Me
Blair
Don (above left)
Jeff (our “supervisor” at work, second from left above)
Dave (co-worker, below left)
McKinzie (Dave’s significant other, below right)
Mike (local drunk, second from right, one step away from mandatory detox,..)
Tarika and her lovely dog Bogey even made a celebrity appearance halfway through the brewing process.
Everybody helped out in some small way or another, whether it was pouring ingredients into buckets, stirring, straining, shaking, drinking, eating, telling stories, or merely supervising.
At the end of a three or four hour adventure, we “pitched” the yeast in a grand ceremony and left the would-be-beer to “get its funk on”. It was religous moment, as the above photo accurately portrays.
As we looked around at the aftermath, we discovered that we had consumed more beer than we had created. Thus, balance in the beer universe was maintained.

A pleasant time was had by all, and it seems this may become somewhat of a tradition for our small, but growing group of local home brewers.

Beer making party.

That just sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it?