johnlittle.com

posting this left over from resipsaloquitur.auburnbrewclub.org… just posting this because I don’t want to lose it. I’ll update the links sometime and do a new About page.

**** Last update June 2008

I love homebrewing. It is my only hobby, and I find that piddling around in the brewery, sitting in the recliner flipping back and forth between homebrewing books, planning my next brews or equipment tweaks are some of the only things that really take me away from work at the end of the day.

First Craft Beers
I was first introduced to craft beer in 2003 by a friend who lives in Memphis. He and I were hooked on the MMORPG game, Star Wars Galaxies, and used to talk to each other with headsets and microphones while playing. He’d always tell me what beer he was drinking, and it was always a good gourmet beer. He introduced me to ratebeer.com, which lists thousands of beers and allows users to rate and comment on the beers. I decided to give good beer a try and went to the Whip Inn in Austin, which carries about 400 different brands of beer, and began to pull singles off the shelf. I didn’t know what I was buying, I just wanted to get a variety of things. Each night, I’d get a few out of the fridge and look them up on ratebeer.com to learn what exactly it was I was drinking. I don’t think I would’ve ever been able to discern choclate, plum, banana, raisen, biscuity, fruity, citrusy, nutty, toffee or any other flavors without the power of suggestion I found on that site. I was immediately hooked. Later my friend kept talking to me about his interest in homebrewing. I was ambivalent at first but kept the idea in the back of my head. We joked about creating Star Wars themed beers and cool labels… Lokian Wild Wheat Ale, for example. And just to clarify, I’m not a Star Wars nerd, but the game was fun for a while after it first came out.

First Homebrew
I attended my first homebrew club meeting in 2004, that of the Louisville Area Grain and Extract Research Society (LAGERS). It was incredible. I loved the homebrew, and it wasn’t long before I went to the local homebrew shop and bought my first brewing equipment. (I still use some of this equipment, but my brewery has come a long way since then.) One of the guys in the homebrew club invited me to come over to his house for a brewday on a weekend soon afterward, and I brewed my first batch, an extract batch with steeped specialty grains. After bottling that batch, I just stored it away for a while, and around this time we relocated to Alabama for work reasons.

Rocket City Brewers
Right away, I discovered the Rocket City Brewers in Huntsville, a very active club with over 40 active homebrewers. The club has won Mid-South Homebrew Club of the Year several times. I began to attend their monthly meetings and received an amazing education at each meeting. Their format of tasting one homebrew at a time, with extensive discussion of each, including a discussion of the BJCP style guidelines where appropriate was very valuable to me over the next 2 years. I immediately upgraded to all grain brewing and have brewed somewhere in the neighborhood of 83 different beer, mead and cider styles (as of June, 2008). My original goal was to not brew the same style twice and to make my way through the BJCP styles until I had brewed them all, but I fell off the wagon somewhere around batch #77. Each new style has been a real educational experience for me. Some of them have accidentally turned out quite good too!! I got involved in entering the Mid-South Homebrew Series competitions, together with the other RCB brewers, and have managed to get lucky and win a few ribbons. The competitions have been exciting and have encouraged me to brew more often and to brew different styles.

Auburn Brew Club
I moved to Auburn in May, 2007. There wasn’t a homebrew club here; and, after asking around, I wasn’t having any luck getting any names. I was beginning to get worried, because there’s nothing like getting together regularly with good hombrewing friends. So I put up a website, registered the club with the AHA, and posted messages about the club on the brewboard, beeradvocate, morebeer and northernbrewer. That helped tremedously. The club has 20 active brewers so far (as of June, 2008) and another 60 or so on our announcement list. We hope to have 30 active brewers by the end of the 2008. I commute to Montgomery for work, and I’ve been listening to podcasts from the Brewing Network and Basic Brewing on the way to and from, which has been very rewarding and makes the drive not only tolerable, but enjoyable.

Brewing and Work
Since 1992, I’ve worked exclusively on healthcare and public health issues. My online resume is here. I became licensed as an attorney in 1997 while pursuing a Master of Science in Public Health and have primarily worked for hospitals, physicians, residential care facilities, medical equipment companies and the like. Over the past few years, because of my involvement in the brewing community, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to answer questions from homebrewers and commercial brewers and retailers. I’ve always tried to maintain a focus on healthcare and public health issues, and I don’t think my forays into alcohol manufacture and serving issues takes me away from my focus. These are public health issues after all. So it has been a real pleasure to answer questions from beer brewers, consumers and sellers. There’s nothing like being able to combine work and the issues you get most excited about.

My Memphis friend never followed through with his interest in hombrewing, but I picked it up and ran with it. It has been a blast!! Thanks, Dany!