My introduction to home-brewing was a funny one. Without any prior knowledge of how beer is made, I find a picture, similar to the one above, on a site like werd.com or Uncrate and it catches my eye. It directs me to a KickStarter campaign that explains its a beer fermenter called The Catalylst made by Craft-A-Brew. Looks so easy right? My thought process is, I dump some stuff into this giant plastic bowl with a lid, let it ferment, and I have beer! I’m hooked by this modern looking contraption and suddenly I have my credit card in my hand.
So I scrounge up $230, probably using last little bit left on my credit card, and buy The Catalyst.
A few weeks later, it arrives in all its glory…but in those two weeks I decide it’s time to start prepping for my future as a home-brewer. To my astonishment and to further prove I have a problem with impulse buying, I find that brewing beer takes much more than my “add one egg and water” cake mix ideology of how this process should have gone.
I realize that the $230 I spent on the fermenter was only half of what I needed. The shopping list became long and the process daunting so once The Catalyst arrived, it quickly went to the basement and sat for 3 years…
Time to Mash
Fast forward to March of 2019, The Catalyst has been collecting dust in the basement with no plans on being used other than maybe a drink dispenser.
My cousin Justin (who you may have heard on the first Michigan Beer Pursuit Podcast) calls me up one day and asks if I still had The Catalyst still lying around. He tells me he just purchased all the stuff he needed to start brewing beer. Keep in mind, this is all amidst the COVID quarantine and luckily we just got our stimulus checks so I decided to put it some good use. Justin and I over a Discord call filled up a cart on homebrewing.org (one of the best home-brewing sites online right now) on things like:
Another $208 later, and I’m pretty much all set. Now all that’s left is figuring out how to complete this entire beer brewing process by myself while everyone is in a total lockdown!
In the next post:
All the trials and tribulations of brewing my very first beer single-handed while I’m taking direction from a Skype call
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