Ahh... Beer.

As some of you know, one of my favoritest things is beer. More than just drinking it, I am a connoisseur. I even brew my own.

For the last three years, while in PA, I didn't brew once. Just didn't have the desire. In the past two days, I've run two five-gallon batches, one a Frambiose, or raspberry lambic, and the other a honey wheat. It'll take a couple weeks for fermentation, and another few days for carbonation, but then I'll have ten gallons of fresh, homeade brew on tap in the garage.

Why the change in motivation?

Many, actually. In PA I was usually healing from one thing or another, and that generally precluded boiling gallons of water, or worse, lugging around big vessels of water. It gets heavy, and heat+heavy+injury=more injury. But I think the biggest reason was a lack of neighborhood. In PA we lived in a neighborhood, and knew exactly two couples, neither of which was the party and hang-out type. One couple was in their mid-hundreds, the other on;y in their 60's, but still, not the crowd to hang out on Fridays and BS till the wee hours.

Here, there are as many families our age as their are houses. We gather at whichever house has a pink flamingo on the lawn that friday, everyone brings a dish to share and a six-pack, and we watch our kids play, shoot the breeze, and hang out. I really, really missed that camaraderie and fellowship.

So the beer is fermenting, the fridge is repaired (I have an avocado green fridge made in 1972 that I got at a junk store near Fort Riley six years ago.) I drilled holes in the door and installed taps, cleaned it up, and got it running again. And all I have left to do is await the arrival of some parts to rebuild the CO2 system. Movers managed to nearly destroy that, too.

Life is good.

--Chuck