I've conquered my fear!

Is that how you spell conquered? It doesn't look right...

Anyway, I have been trying to actually accomplish things in the past few days rather than mope about how I always want to do stuff and never do it, so the first step was to actually get out of the house, go to the homebrew store, buy ingredients for a batch of beer, take them home, and make the beer. Well, I shopped for the ingredients on Sunday (which meant getting out of the house and following through with buying them - big step!) and didn't have time to brew the beer. This is usually where the story would end. I would usually buy the ingredients and then leave them to sit for months and months and go stale, only because I usually do things on a whim and my whims never pan out fully.

However, I kept the ingredients closeby, and swore to myself that one of these nights, I would brew the damn batch. Tonight was that night, folks. Oh, sure, I didn't get home until around 7pm, but I was freakin' determined. (This batch of beer is specifically for Cuddy's going away party, so I actually needed to brew it at least 10 days before the party.) So I just dove into it. (Not literally - that would be very sticky.) I just started boiling some water in my brewpot, I put the necessary grains into the necessary muslin bag and steeped them while the water boiled, and by then I was committed. The house filled with the long-ago-familiar smell of brewing beer... and it was good.

I planned ahead and sanitized all the necessary equipment to complete the batch (floating thermometer, strainer, airlock, fermenting bucket), I prepared the dry yeast (let it soak in warm, not hot, water for 15 minutes, then stir right before pitching), I added the necessary ingredients into the batch of boiling wort (more hops, more extracts, some Irish moss and gypsum salt), I put 5 lbs of ice and 2 gallons of cold water into the previously sanitized fermenting bucket, and I completed the task.

I didn't even make that much of a mess, like I usually do. Perhaps many months of not brewing allowed my brain to comprehend and organize the various steps involved in brewing a batch of homebrew to meld together and form a cohesive idea of what I need to do in order to brew. Maybe not. But all that matters is that I now have a bucket of beer in the corner of the kitchen that will be ready to keg come Aug. 25th.

Preparing for this batch has made me excited about brewing more. Who knows? Maybe this will be the only batch I brew for a while... but I like to think that's not so. It's not so tough to do. But I guess when it comes time to actually make the contents of the bucket of beer consumable, I might have a different perspective. To bottle, to keg? Oh, the options...

Anyway, I hope everyone can make it to Cuddy's going away party so that they can try my (hopefully) tasty batch of pale ale that I've brewed up. Oh, and to say bye to Cuddy. There's always that motivation. (By the way, if you're coming to the party, bring a friend or eight. The more, the merrier!)