My name is John and I am a pack rat. Or, how do you know when to stop a hobby?

Hello. My name is John and I am a pack rat. I keep everything. Everything. Receipts. Old letters. Old emails. Pictures. Things I've written. Things I've read. Things I want to read.

So when I have a hobby, I jump in. All the way. And I tend to keep it around for a long time.

Take homebrewing for instance. We were at a Waccamaw Pottery that was going out of business a few years ago and they had what looked to be some sort of can that one could use to make more beer. I had recently discovered that beer was not evil and that it tasted pretty good too. So I bought it.

There were three cans of dark syrup. I read the cans. I then read the intructions online. Mr. Beer. Mr. Beer Home Brewery to be more precise. That was the name of the company that had produced the three cans that I now owned. But I only had the malted syrup and I needed something for the beer to ferment in and so I found a bucket. I brewed my first batch and it was not so great. Then one of our neighbors had a yardsale and they had the real Mr. Beer kit, with the fermenter and bottles. Sweet!!

I proceeded to dive further and further into the world of homebrewing. I bought more buckets, "recycled" from trash piles, read books, shopped ebay, went to scrap metal yards, went to stores going out of business. I purchased cornelius (pepsi) kegs. I purchased 8 gallon tamale pots. I made a lauter tun to sparge my grains. I bought a small refrigerator for the kegs. Pretty soon, all this equipment took up a lot of room.

It also took up a lot of time. Whenever my wife was occupied on a Saturday, I would take advantage of the situation by having a brew day. If I made a 5 gallon batch from scratch (all-grain), it would take 8-9 hours. The beer was good. But it wasn't GREAT. I wanted it to taste like Bells', like Goose Island, like New Glarus. It didn't.

And I had other hobbies. I started doing more backpacking. I got into that. But I also kept brewing. One only has so much space in one's basement. One only has so much time.

I liked brewing. It made me feel like I was producing a product that I could enjoy. Others liked it more than I did. It was fun. But I wasn't great. And it took up entire days to brew, and then more time to transfer, and hours to bottle. And then more days of waiting -- usually two weeks after bottling.

I made an IPA following the best recipe for extract brewing. I used the best yeast. I followed the direction meticulously. In the end, it was good. Maybe even pretty good. But not great.

So . . . . . finally, after many years and many batches and many bottles, it is now time for the pack rat to clear out space in the basement. I need the room down there and I can buy a GREAT beer for $9 a six pack. I can buy awesome beer for $12 a bottle.

I have other hobbies and maybe someday, I'll return to brewing, but for now it is time to stop a hobby. Farewell.



(As I write this, I am corresponding with a gentleman from Milwaukee who is going to purchase all my brewing supplies.)