Man Plans, God Laughs

The title to this Public Enemy album, which subsequently became a Yiddish proverb, adequately encapsulates what happens with my firm intention to blog every time I put it in writing here. Hoping to avoid this curse, I am not going to make any promises this time around. I will, though, do a quick recap of the beer related stuff I have done in the past three and a half years.

1.- I started a beer company

Yup. Even though when I closed the bar, I promised myself beer would only be a hobby from now on, I turned around and started a beer company with two friends from my homebrew club. What’s more, I started it right in time for COVID-19. Of course, there was no way to foresee there would be trouble brewing at the time, but it does in part explain why TRESHUMANTES CRAFT BEER lasted about two years. We did release a fantastic amber ale called Arrebol, which is an old Spanish word to describe the reddish tones in the sky at sunset. As you probably gathered, this is why I spent so much time in 2019 brewing amber ales, they were trial batches. I still have a few bottles lying around, as well as the recipe stored in my Beersmith, so even though the ride was a bit short, I will continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor for years to come.

2.- I grew a beard

Okay fine, so this is not really beer related news, but it does make me look more like a beer geek and homebrewer, so I felt it needed to be mentioned here. For visual proof, see below.

3.- I spent three months brewing on a weekly basis

As luck would have it, confinement caught me sharing my apartment with another friend from my homebrew club, Andu, who had moved in shortly before that and brought his two tap kegerator and his Grainfather. Having nowhere to go, we set out to brew enough to compensate the effects of all the home work-outs I did to keep me from going absolutely bonkers. Needless to say, I succeeded tenfold. At least my IPAs are now pretty darn delicious.

4.- I drank a lot of beer

There were several reasons for that, aside from the obvious and most important one (that beer is delicious). First there was confinement. I can’t go anywhere, so I might as well just sit in my terrace and have a beer. Or I can read and have a beer. Or I can watch TV and have a beer. Beer. Then, when confinement was over, we’re no longer confined. Let’s celebrate with a beer. Let’s hang out responsibly with a couple friends and have a beer. Let’s not hang out with friends and just try some new beers by the pool. My new post-confinement girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend) was and still is a big craft beer fan, so we went about trying almost everything we could find (mostly IPAs), until we spent all our money and had to resort to cans of plain ol’ mass-produced lager. We settled into a rhythm and decided that a beer a day will keep the COVID away. Of course, better to have two or three, just to be sure. Beer helped cope with stress and beer helped to relax. Beer is fun and a good substitute for all those hobbies that involve being around lots of people and are therefore a risk.

5.- I bought a Mangrove Jack kegerator

After confinement, Andu got a sweet deal at this job that allowed him to work from home virtually indefinitely, so he decided to move to the small town his family is from and build himself a nanobrewery and bar for his own personal enjoyment. I was heartbroken… because he took his kegerator with him. I quickly bounced back, however, and decided that it was no use crying over spilled milk (had it been beer that spilled, that would’ve been different) and that I just had to get back out there and find myself a new kegerator. I therefore got myself a three tap kegerator from Mangrove Jack.

6.- I bought a bigger fermenter

The homebrew club, Try 11 Brewers Club, used to meet once a month at a beer store/bar called La Buena Cerveza. We stored the Club’s brewing equipment in their basement. After confinement, the owners of La Buena Cerveza decided to move to another location and increase the bar area and downplay the beer store side of it, which meant they couldn’t keep our stuff. The Club then decided that we were better off selling the equipment, because we hardly brewed during club meetings anymore anyway. One complicated system of list of preferences and raffles later, I ended up with a new 27 liter (7 gal.) Chronical from SS Brewtech. I named him Arturito, because it looks like R2D2 and that’s how R2D2 sounds to a Spaniard.

7.- I got into brewing with Kveik

Sure enough, Arturito doesn’t fit into my mini fridge. This left me with two options, buy a bigger fridge to ferment in, or forego temperature control for the batches that I fermented in Artu. Having broken the bank on a new kegerator and a new fermenter, I decided to park the idea of buying a new fridge, out of fear that I wouldn’t have enough cash left over to buy grain or pay the electricity bill. Against my anal-retentive nature, I decided to try my luck at fermenting without temperature control. Now, this was the month of July. If you’ve ever been to Madrid in the month of July, you’ll probably know that if you don’t have air-conditioning on you can spontaneously combust at any given moment. Most yeasts don’t like spontaneously combusting, but I don’t like spending all my money on air-conditioning so that my yeast can be more comfortable than me. That left me with Kveik, that marvelous Norwegian yeast which (like many Norwegians) loves the Spanish summer.

8.- I did a bunch of beer related tourism

Well maybe not all of it was purely for beer reasons, but I did manage to find awesome beer everywhere I went (go figure). Out of the places I went, I was especially pleasantly surprised at the selection of craft beer in Hungarian supermarkets.

9.- Try 11 Brewers Club started a podcast

It seems that Andu got bored in his nanobrewery and bar all by himself, because he suddenly decided that it would be a good idea for the Club to start a podcast. So, he convinced another club member, and they are now up to the fifth episode. The podcast is in Spanish, and it’s called Tirando Cerveza. In case you’re curious, I was on the second episode, saying a bunch of wildly heretical things about brewing, which I thought would get me stoned by my peers at the next homebrew convention, but that didn’t happen because…

10.- I missed this year’s homebrew convention

After planning for an entire year, booking the hotel and paying the fees and making the trip up to León a few days in advance, I went and caught gastroenteritis the day before the convention and spent the whole weekend in bed, while others drank my beer. The bright side is I finally lost all that confinement weight.