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Here’s a pic of one of the Auburn Brew Club member’s refrigerator. Brandon Herrick is an AU grad student (of age for sure) and has his priorities in order. Notice the content of his fridge. There’s a decent supply of condiments, about a pint and a half of lemonade, a carboy of fermenting wort, and a keg of German Pilsner.

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I’m clearing off my 2 year old piece of junk Palm Treo getting ready to get my hands on a Droid (so many features, and I’m loving the freedom of the cloud and freedom from Microsoft).

Here’s some pics from late September (I think?) when fellow RCB’rs Todd and Tonya (together affectionately known as Todya) were here. These are at Kiesel Park’s dog park. I heard Kiesel Park was donated to the City of Auburn by someone who thought there’s already too much focus on sports in Auburn. So one of the rules at Kiesel is no sports. The dog park is cool and can get very active. If you’re making a special trip to Kiesel with your dog, always bring a gallon of water to dump in the dog bowls while you’re there. Makes it easier for everyone since the closest spigot is a couple hundred yards away.

Beware. There’s alot of chasing, slobbering, panting and humping that goes on at the Kiesel Dog Park.

More homebrewers going commercial. Chris and Christina Collier and some partners have been working hard to start up the Nantahala Brewing Company in Bryson City, North Carolina. I can’t wait to visit.

Chris and Christina have been active in the Mid-South homebrewing scene for many years. They’re members of the Covert Hops Society in Atlanta and managed the Peach State Brewoff for a couple years. They write the homebrewing column for the Southern Brew News, and they’re regulars at the Auburn Brew Club tailgates.

Best of luck Chris and Christina!

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!

I didn’t have the opportunity to flub up this video because a real professional was filming, Chad Parrish. This is an excellent discussion with Mises Institute Economist, Mark Thornton. Mark has been a real friend of the homebrewing and craft brewing community. He authored the only book of its kind, The Economics of Prohibition. Mark is a genuinely great person… extremely intellegent, and I thank Mark and Chad very much for facilitating this video.

A pic of him in front of a small portion of awards won over the years, and a pic of him expressing his opinion about Free the Hops (aka Fuck the Homebrewers).

I was just discussing Stephen’s background with some friends and thought I’d post some pics I have of him to point them to.

visiting austin on business this week.. Met up with my good friends edward anf johnny to watch the nfl playoffs..

I won my first Texas Hold ‘em game. It was at our department Christmas party. We had a very nice lasagna lunch and bottle exchange… The we got down to business with a poker game.

Rachael would have been a formidable opponent… she had me worried from the beginning… but the cards just didn’t favor her.

Jennifer was vicious.. too vicious.. and it cost her.

Chuck was tenacious.. a wolf in sheep’s clothing… but the wolf got flushed (I think it was a flush that took him out).

Out of all of us, Kevin has apparently watched more Texas Hold ‘em on ESPN and The Travel Channel, so he was our commentator.

I was very patient.. folding around 8 or 10 hands in the middle game… then with my outstanding natural skill and lack of any visible tells.. lured Kevin into going all in against my Full House.. 3 Jacks and 2 threes…

We celebrated with Fuller’s Extra Special Bitter. The picture is of Kevin, some Dead Guy Ale and Paulner (sp?) Hefeweizen (sp?) … taken with my phone cam… so that’s why its a little fuzzy.

Edward and Johnny dragged me down to Nuevo Laredo against my will on Saturday night for a kind of going away celebration. We were supposed to leave at 3, but didn’t leave until 7, which in Edward’s world meant we were right on time. But that’s OK because it gave me a chance to sleep off the depression experienced as a result of Texas’ loss to Oklahoma.

We made it to the border around 10:30. We would’ve made it sooner except that Johnny needed to stop about 18 times.. rather than take care of everything he needed at one store.. we had to stop once to get him pork rinds, once to get him Rolaids, once so he could go to the restroom, etc… etc… But it was worth it because Johnny takes abuse well, and you always have to have one person in the car you can abuse.

For any of my readers that have never been to a Mexico/Texas border town, I didn’t take my camera, but I found a few taken in Nuevo Laredo on the internet that work. The first is of El Centro, which is the center block of the 9 square block area just across the border. There are gazebos and lots of park benches and the big monument you see in the picture which is surrounded by steps all around. People sit, relax, and chat in the square all day and most of the night on the weekends. The square is surrounded by clubs, restaurants, and shops. Our safety (and the safety of our American dollars) was sufficiently secured by the presence of Federalis with AK-47s.

And so we started our Cerveza Tour of Nuevo Laredo. We started in the club referred to as the “open-air one where all the Americans hang out and dance because it is the closest to the border.” Then we went to “the one where Johnny’s band played this year.” I liked this one because the weather was perfect and the club is on the top floor of a building and is one of the few with a large balcony overlooking the main strip.

Ten clubs later (at around 5am), after sampling mucho cerveza, enchiladas, and other mexican delectables, Johnny and I found two big recliners and tried to take a short nap, but couldn’t because Edward kept yelling at us (something about what was wrong with us and he was just getting started). We insisted on leaving… and he yielded under much protest…

Then we found the perfect taco… I swear I have never had better tacos. The tortillas were home made, the fajita meat was sliced very thin and chopped, marinated and grilled to perfection, and the pico de gallo was so hot it gave me hiccups on the first bite. (I tried to recreate them last night, but didn’t come close. The ones we had last night were the best we’ve ever made at home though, so it was a partial success.)

The second pic is one I stumbled across in my search for Nuevo Laredo images and thought I should add it as a note to self. Don’t stay at the hotel at 718 Guerreros in the summer time. Edward had convinced us on the way down that we should get a hotel on the Mexican side. I didn’t want to be accused of being a pansy, so I didn’t object, but I did want to know 3 things before I agreed: (1) are the beds clean, (2) is there air conditioning, and (3) do the doors lock. I received what I thought were satisfactory assurances from Edward that he knew of a hotel (the one with the coke machine outside) that was no different from an American Day’s Inn or Motel 6. So I agreed.

But for some reason, we didn’t make it to the one with the coke machine outside, and instead stayed at the one called simply “Hotel” at 718 Guerreros. I don’t know why I remember the address. I guess I have selective memory. The last thing I recall is Edward standing on the dresser with his arm raised over his head and his hand in front of the vent yelling, “Johnny, the air conditioner’s not working….. Johnny, it’s been 10 minutes and they’re not up here yet…. Johnny, call them again… Johnny… Johnny..” and then I recall Edward on the phone arguing with the front desk (in what Johnny said later was very broken and unintelligible Spanish) that we wanted our money back and we were going to another hotel. But it was 6am, Johnny and I had already claimed the 2 beds and our last words for the night were “Edward, there’s no way in hell you’re getting us out of these beds…. we’ll each give you one of our pillows and a blanket… you’ve got the floor.”

The 3rd picture is also one I found on the internet and is of Bridge Number 1 that crosses the Rio Grande between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. It’s the one that most people use to cross over the border. Or maybe this one is of Bridge Number 2. I’ve never seen that many cars on Bridge Number 1.