old hobbies die hard

The speed at which I get fully wrapped up in a hobby only to completely abandon it can sometimes be astonishing. One such hobby was home brewing, which fell victim to buying a house and the subsequent move. In the transit, things got separated or left in boxes and quickly stashed away in the far recesses of the basement and garage. Additionally work on the house, new jobs, and life got in the way of having time to brew. Just as easily as I stopped brewing, now I’m right back to bordering on obsessively thinking about getting back into it. All that laid in between was 5 years of my equipment and knowledge on how to brew gathering dust.

So in addition to watching some old YouTube videos that got me into the hobby, I’m starting to plan out my return to brewing this year. I thought it would be interesting to document this and my eventual plans, purchases and brew days in case they might help any other would-be or fellow lapsed home brewer.

I think overarching plan is the following:

• Take an inventory of what I have and what I need to re-buy
• Plan out a setup that will hopefully result in shorter brew days
• A simple test batch to ease back into things
• Regroup and decide what kind of brewing I might actually want to do

The first batch will probably be a 5 gallon extract kit, which is pretty much the same as what you would get in one of those kits they sell as Christmas gifts. From there I might go back and try some other brewing techniques including the brew-in-a-bag and all grain brewing. In all of this I’m hoping to find a better process than the one I fell off of before, which involved entire Saturdays cleaning, endlessly waiting for pots to boil and more cleaning.