BrewBrain Sports Investing

I’m sick and tired of two things - bottling beer and poker.

First, the poker.  I’m in a 20K+ hand stretch of running KK into AA and I’m sick of it.  Last night I decided to just move down and enjoy playing again.  Well, it was all going very well, chipping up over $100 on the $50 tables, when in the span of five hands on one table I ran KK into AA YET AGAIN - this KK vs. AA thing will now never even out for me; life just isn’t that long - and then ran a K-high flush into an A-high flush.  Bam!  Just like that I’m down to a $7 win for my efforts.  The frustration just isn’t worth it to me any more.  I have basically enough in my accounts to pay for everything I need, so that’s what I’m going to do.  I’ll keep enough in my account to make a go of running it up again, but I’m harvesting while I still have a crop.

The first step is to order a big shed for the back yard.  This is going to allow us to empty out the garage.  Half of the garage right now is piled high with “stuff” that is mostly in boxes and will stack nicely in the shed.  Lots of it can also probably be ditched in one way or another.

Once the shed is full, I can pick out a deep freeze and convert that into a keezer.  I’m thinking I’ll go with a 10 cubic foot model and go for five taps.  That is a lot of taps for me, but it will allow me to brew my standard offerings once and have them for a while as I’ll do them in 10-gallon batches.  That’s two kegs each, one on tap and one waiting and conditioning further.  I’ll probably need a second conditioning cabinet at some point as well.

Since I won’t have to brew my standard beers all that often, I’ll be able to brew smaller batches of specialty/experimental beers more often and just bottle those.  I’m finding I don’t like to take the time and bottles up with a recipe that may be a complete disaster when I have limited resources.  The kegs will eliminate that problem.

I’d love to get started very soon on this project as I have four beers to bottle over the next four weeks.  If I can get things together quickly enough, I can save some work.  I doubt I’ll be ready that quickly though.

The other thing I need to do is get some equipment together for very small test batches.  I want to brew a series of beers with one ingredient changed from one to the next.  This will teach me a ton about how the different grains/hops really change the flavor of beer in a vacuum.  I would love to brew one-gallon batches of each.  I don’t really want five gallons of each around.  I want to cycle through them much more quickly than that.  I expect many of them to be very good beer, actually, but this is for schooling purposes only.  If I like one enough, I can always brew a full batch.  I’ll stop by the home brew shop this weekend to see if I can get any ideas on what to use for a fermentor.  I’m not going to use a secondary for these test batches.

Oh, I picked up a 24 oz bottle of Sierra Nevada Southern Hemisphere yesterday.  I haven’t tried the beer yet, but that 24 oz. bottle is a real keeper!  It is fat and short and will fit on the refrigerator shelves just great.  The taller 22 oz. bottles don’t fit very well.  I may have to drink a ton of that stuff.  I hope it’s good!