This weekend was a bit of fun, as I revived my long-dormant homebrew kit.  After a quiet night at home Friday, I headed over to my friend’s house Saturday to start the brewing project.  (Note that “friend’s” is singular-possessive, as in I have one friend and I was at that one friend’s house.  Maybe some day I’ll meet more people here but it’s not looking positive so far.)  Pathetic social life aside, we had a very productive day.  Our project started with a trip to the local brew shop in Folsom, where I purchased a California IPA, and he went with the El Dorado Hills Double IPA.  His was an infinitely more interesting recipe;  Apparently he did a little more research than I.  His kit isn’t listed on the site, but it came with a prodigious amount of hops grown right here in El Dorado Hills.  After listening to the guy carry on about how popular and limited it was, I wanted that one too;  Alas, I’d made my choice and I was sticking with it.  I had most of the hardware necessary to get us going so we didn’t have to purchase much else.  The rest of the afternoon was spent boiling, stirring, straining, pitching, cooling, cleaning…  Pretty darn fun actually.

In conjunction with this brewing project is the building of a dispensing unit to hold the homebrew.  The whole thing kind of kicked off when this guy mentioned he was looking into homebrewing, and also wanted to build a kegerator out of an old freezer.  Well, wouldn’t you know it, I just happened to have a semi-complete draft kit taking up valuable space in my overstuffed garage, as well as a small deep freeze that we no longer have a use for.  Bingo, project on.  Luckily he is far better at woodworking than I, and it’s coming along just swimmingly.  I’ll have to get some pictures taken.  (Actually I have some, I’m just too lazy to get them off my phone.)  The “collar,” which is the wood part between the freezer body and the lid, is red oak with four tap handles.  It’s stained and finished all purdy, and then the main body is finished in chalkboard paint so we can write our styles and other fascinating info on it.  (Or his kids can use it for doodling, more likely.)  Hopefully it’s all up and running by the time our two batches of the aforementioned homebrew get finished.