Researching before the plunge
Before I decided to jump into the deep end of the brewing pool, I started researching homebrewing across the innertubes.
The beautiful thing about the Internet is the amount of information available… the ugly side of the Internet is the amount of information available. Homebrewing, while at its base is fairly simple, has many factions:
You have the keggers vs. the bottlers, all grain (AG) vs. the extracts, single fermenters vs. secondary… there are a million opinions on a billion stances. This can be quite formidable to wade through – but there is a silver lining – almost everyone I’ve met since starting this hobby/obsession has been extremely helpful. Snarkiness does exist, but it does seem to be a hobby of sharing ideas (as well as tasty recipes).
One of the best resources on the net is the Homebrew Talk forum:
This is a great place to figure out what you need to do to get started with brewing, and it also works well as a sounding board for noobs to ask questions.
For local info (local to me that is) – I found my local homebrew supplier (LHBS), Homebrew Headquarters located in North Dallas:
Great people, knowledgable, friendly… definitely not intimidating – which is extremely important. When I first started looking into home brewing, I was fairly intimidated. There’s a lot of math and physics involved with brewing – and I was a little unsure of how that could be enjoyable.
But once I got deeper into researching the art of homebrewing, I realized that while there is number crunching involved – brewing is actually a simple process:
You feed sugars and nutrients to yeast… and they reward you with carbon dioxide and alcohol.
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