Brewing beer is something that my dear friend Daren and I have been experimenting with for the past year. We have made I.P.A., double I.P.A., pale ale, lemon ale, and most recently a Hoppy Red Ale.
Interestingly enough, brewing beer has been in my family for many generations. My great great grandfather was a brew master for Steam beer, which I believe is what we know now as Anchor Steam. My father has told me stories about tasting beer right from the vats at the brewery.
More recently, summer of 2003, driving West on highway 80, hills rolled on forever like waves that roll onto the coast. We were riding through Iowa, into Nebraska to visit Steve, my Dad's brother. My two Australian friends and I blasting the Chili Peppers, eating jerky, drinking red bull, smoking cigs...the reason for the road trip across this vast nation was to deliver a car from New York to Colorado for my old Boss.
We drove out of the rolling hills of Iowa into the flatlands of Nebraska. My uncle was extremely hospitable and my aunt and cousins welcomed us and it felt like we had just said goodbye last week, when it was really the previous year. We pulled the car into the drive way and walked up to the door, leaving the baggage in the boot. Stretching as we walked to the door, all the kinks of the road rolled out of our shoulders as we stepped into their home. After we settled in and had dinner, my uncle invited us downstairs. We went down into the basement and he offered us a beer that he had recently brewed. I do not remember much about the beer, but that it was a pale ale and it had a unique taste, a home grown, home brewed tatste. Maybe because he told me he brewed it, or maybe it is, as Greg Brown says about canned goods, "Ah, she's got magic in her - you know what I mean, she puts the sun and rain in with her canned green beans....'Cause these canned goods I buy at the store, ain't got the summer in them any more." Home Brew has a taste, a home made taste and this taste is not like anything your local grocery store sells, and trying this for the first time was a memorable experience.
Dave, my mothers brother, has brewed his fair share of beer, I believe since he was my age. He gave me a 5+gallon carboy to help me get started with my brewing. Two years ago he brewed a seasonal holiday beer to go with his annual Christmas party. It had hints of spices, nutmeg and cloves and a rich ale in the front. This year I am going to brew a winter beer for those cold California nights.
I know, I am brewing on a much smaller scale than my great great grandfather ever did, but I am carrying on the tradition and that is whats important to me.
Relax, have a homebrew.
Townes Van Zandt fills the room,..
Late January. Buried deep in work, buckets and pales and cans filled with print, type, hard cover books, soft cover books, and click click click of keyboard text typing. All of this and long nights spent going through material, extracting information from resources once unheard of and now understood. From seven a.m. through nine p.m. Monday through Thursday is beating me up like a street boxer beating a frozen raw meat carcass hanging on a hook at the local butcher downtown sometown. Only to sleep and wake to begin it again. 
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