Like I said in the begining: brewing beer is the coolest thing I've ever done.

It's so damned cool that I went out an bought a second fermentation system. It takes a week or two to ferment a beer (if it's an ale--twice that if it's a lager) so having only one fermenting system means fairly low rate of production. I can't get enough. I want to have two beers fermenting all the time. One batch is five gallons, which sounds like a lot--53 12oz. bottles--but you can't not share, so fifty bottles is going to go fast. Besides, once I get lagers going, I've got to ocupy a single fermenter for awhile, which means... Look, I love this and I'm not going to let in adequate facilities slow me down.

I've already mentioned that I've got two fermenters working right now. That might not be right... you'll have to get into some forthcomming posts to hear about those.

Now is for history. How did Next Week come to be?

I cut my beer drinking teeth on total crap. That's the way it starts beccause we start drinking beer when we're not yet legal and we do it to get drunk. There was Molson Ice, which I choked the fuck down. There was Henry's (a.k.a. Henry Weinhard's)--Private Reserve and Blue Boar--which are better than Molson Ice. They both suck. And there were other beers too, whatever we got our underage hands on. Corona occasionally, and this seemed like good beer, even though it isn't.

In college I learned that beer is good. Not good because it gets you drunk. Good intrinsically. Good because damn what flavor, what taste. That all started with you're standard British imports--Newcastle Brown Ale and Bass. I drank lots of Newcastle. It's a fine beer for introducing friends to beer. This is a beer that tastes like a beer. Tastes like quality. Tastes like you should care about it. Newcastle is a seven.

I had my first taste of creat beer in college. A Delerium Nocturnum as I recall. You couldn't get that where I was at the time cause it had too much alcohol. (Riciculous law! A nine dollar beer that less alcohol is illegal while a four dollar wine 150% as strong and shitty as can be is legal beause it's wine, not beer. Whatever.) That opened my eyes. Some beers are a ten.

I first identified style in beer with wheat beer, namely Franziskaner. It's not like I'd never noticed difference between beers before. But Franz opened my eyes to the idea that beer had style as well as goodness. Here's something I knew before Franz: all beer-rightly-done is good. Here's what I learned from Franz: the beery good has structure. Call the structure of the beery good its style. Now you know what I mean by identifying style in beer? It's like this: John Lennon and Miles Davis are both cool. But they have different style. Now, you have to have style to be cool, but not evey cool has the same style. Hell, it's antithetical to cool that there's only one style that can have it. Mutatis mutandis with the beery good and style.

I spent a summer in Ireland somewhere in the middle of college. The first beer I had there was a Guiness at the brewery in Dublin. Hotness. I found Smithwick's, an Irish Ale, easily drank, a seven like Newcastle.

That's a bit of the evolution of this beer lover. What's driven me to brew my own is harder to say. The confluence of factors is too great to summarize. Needless to say, I'm brewing.