ENJOY BEER

As a first batch, my friend Nick and I took an embarrassing 12 hours (from setup to cleanup) to brew a Belgian blonde. Sticking with pure and unprocessed ingredients, we bottle conditioned it with honey and waited several weeks for the results. As the first two bottles hissed open we proudly patted ourselves on the back and exclaimed "holy $h!t, we made beer, it's actually beer!". It wasn't - at least not by today's standard. However, we were bitten by the craft beer bug and rapidly outgrow the rather unsafe BIAB rig that we started with. At the same time, we outgrew 5 gallon batches - and outgrew brewing outdoors in the cold Ontario winter. It was time to move the rig inside, increase capacity and add quality controls.