In the beginning...

There was me. A 20-something young-ish professional who has started a ridiculous amount of blogs in the past, which are currently cluttering up some black hole of cyberspace forsaken by most of humanity.

But this one will be different, because I plan to use it to chronicle my journey from drinking beer to actually making the delicious stuff. But first, I'm going to talk about me, and how I got to this situation I am now in.

I would have to say I've been spoiled on my trip from beer-drinker to beer-nerd. You see, when I first started drinking beer, I lived in Palmerston North.

AKA "The Swamp" - seriously, the place was built on a swamp. Place be stuffed if Christchurch Earthquake 2.0 hit it.
Photo: Destination Manawatu

When I turned 18 - the legal purchase age for booze here in New Zealand - I was most likely to be buying a box/slab/crate of Tui, for the sole purpose of getting as sloshed as possible. Hey, I was 18 and a university student. While I know that is hardly a good excuse for both my drinking and social behaviors over my undergraduate days, it's a pretty easy one to fall back on.

After finishing up my degree and working for a year in a cafe - at time when I decided I could afford "good beer" like Stella Artois - I decided to take off to the big smoke of Wellington.

I once again worked in hospitality - working for Fuel Espresso on Warring Taylor St - and lived in what I swear was the coldest flat in all of Mt Victoria. While my rent instantly doubled and I had to walk to work at 6am for at least 30 minutes with the southerly blast off Antarctica at my back, there was one big bonus to life - the local bottle shop.

Photo: Regional Wines

Every day on my walk home from work - which I finished at noon every other day - I would stroll/trudge/drag myself past Regional, more often than not without going in. I was still in the frame of mind that a fizzy, over-marketed lager was the drink of choice. A shop without beer in its name will probably not be the place to go for a good tipple.

But one uncharacteristically hot Wellington day, as I dragged myself home after a stupidly busy shift, I knew I had to have something cold to drink. So, in I went to Regional...

To say I was overawed at the sheer range of product they had in there would be an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Plenty of beers I didn't know about, a range of beer taps on the wall to fill your own plastic riggers - not that I knew that at the time - and not a drop of Tui, Export Gold or any other mass-produced beer in sight. Which presented me with a big problem - what the hell was I going to buy? I had already walked in and I couldn't leave without buying something - after all, they may think I'm shoplifting.

So I perused through the labels and found one that instantly popped out - Epic Pale Ale. "Oh, just like Tui," I thought.

Well thank fuck it didn't taste like Tui. I remember that first whiff after opening the bottle. Fruit and spice and sweetness and that first sip opened up an absolute overabundance of scrumdiddlyumptiousness.

Photo: epicbeer.com

So, Regional opened up a whole new world for me. And - if I felt particularly flush on payday - I would pop into The Malthouse on my way home and spoil myself with a pint of something random.

After my year at Fuel, I went back to uni to - finally - finish training for my current vocation. Probably the most intense year of learning in my life was ahead of me, but I still needed to pay rent. So I decided bar work was the way to go. Lucky for me, I managed to land a job at The Malthouse where I managed to learn a shit-ton about beer from some of the coolest people I've had the pleasure to work with and serve.

I also got to drink beer - lots of beer. Plenty of limited releases or beers you would never find on tap anywhere else. I drank at plenty of different bars around Wellington.

But alas, all good things come to an end. And I was offered a job back in Palmerston North.

To but it bluntly, the beer scene here sucks. There is one good bottle store and one bar which stocks a decent range of bottles, but there's nothing on tap. No limited releases hit town, no fellow beer nerds to chat to, no big new release parties. It makes me one sad beer-nerd.

So what can a poor boy do? Well, I can make my own damn beer! Plenty of beer nerds make their own beer, why can't I?! This is despite the fact I've never brewed beer in my life. But I can bake, and Stu McKinlay from Yeastie Boys once called brewing "baking for men", so I should be sweet.

Since deciding to get into brewing, I've done a couple all-grain brews with a friend here in Palmerston North. But he has made most of his gear himself and is quite sick of having to constantly repair it. I'm not good with fixing stuff; I still have to sort out fixing my electric guitar and some drum gear. So screw it, I'm going to buy a brew kit.

After some advice from Jo Wood of Liberty Brewing Co, I got in touch with Chris Banks of Banks Brewing Hardware. He's currently making me a three-tier gravity system out of ex-brewery kegs. I'm looking forward to getting that call/email saying they're all ready to go so I can drop my first brew.

So, until then, I'll post about my beer drinking. There will be nice things, probably a few rants and maybe a lot of stuff you won't really care about. But I guess that's all part of the fun.