Why the Nautilus shell?

It has been a few years since we began this homebrewing blog. I thought now would be an appropriate time to look back at one of our original posts that still encapsulates our passion for and connection to brewing. Let's take a look down memory lane...

~ Tuesday, August 19 2014 ~

Inspiration is a strange thing. We commonly find ourselves settling into habits and rituals that make the more difficult things in life like time management, expenses, and responsibilities just a little easier. That’s just good planning. However, once in a while something strikes us in such a way that we question everything we do, think, and say. Something that reaches us on a deep level and forces us to examine exactly why it is we act the way we do. 

So how was I inspired by a creature straight out of ancient history? Commonly referred to as a “living fossil,” the Nautilus has changed very little over the last several million years. Its simple life under the ocean is nothing particularly amazing; it’s not the most deadly predator under the sea, it’s not the most pleasing creature to the human eye, it’s not even at the top of the food chain in its ecosystem. However, its shell is a work of art that nature crafted hundreds of millions of years ago that has persevered and allowed this interesting organism to thrive through countless generations.

The shell of the nautilus is arranged in a type of mathematical spiral. Without getting too nerdy, I’ll explain what this means to the organism that lives within this geometric enclosure. As a hatchling, a nautilus occupies three to four small chambers arranged in a tightly wound spiral of a sort of mother-of-pearl material. As the nautilus grows, it creates new, larger chambers in a prescribed pattern around its older chambers, sealing off the previous one except for a small duct. In this fashion, the nautilus continues its growth around its center creating proportionally similar but larger enclosures until the end of its life.

It is this constant prescribed growth in a clear and direct pattern that caught my eye and that continues to inspire my own personal growth. Even as a young creature, it knows that it must create a new space that it will grow into and subsequently, eventually outgrow. The constant drive of time is ever present in the mind of the nautilus, and it embraces this drive as it embraces its own former chambers. Constantly improving by creating new pieces of itself, yet tied to its origin by building upon itself, it never loses its tie to the beginning of its life. It even uses the small duct left connecting each previous chamber to control its buoyancy, allowing it to navigate its environment by using its abandoned past as a tool.

In many ways, the nature of this ancient creature defines the way we brew beer. Though we are constantly moving into newer and bigger environments, we realize the need to end the previous chapters while never forgetting the structure and utility of these past experiences. We as brewers constantly use what we learn and where we came from to guide us on a known path outward from our origin to the end of our journeys. Though we hopefully have many years and many new experiences ahead of us, the nature of our progress should always be defined by what we have learned and assimilated throughout our experiences.

It’s no coincidence that this shape has inspired us. After all, spirals are all around us (no pun intended). Though circles and spheres may be the most perfect omni-directional object, spirals are nature’s reaction to this omnipresence, in response to gradients of influence. Just look at the shape of galaxies, whirlpools and maelstroms, even weather phenomena like tornadoes and hurricanes.

So when people ask me why I chose the nautilus shell to be the symbol of New Main Brewing, that is the long answer. The short answer is I’m a huge nerd, and geometry is kind of my thing. However, nothing in life is worth doing unless you are passionate about it, and I believe that this symbol perfectly describes the nature of this brewing endeavor. Though we must constantly grow into the new, we must also build upon our main core of traditions.

~

We want to thank Melissa Brimer once again for helping us with our logo design. 

We get by with a little help from our friends!

Make sure to get your very own New Main Brewing Company 
"Coming Soon" shirt!
booster.com/new-main-brewing-company

Thanks again for reading. Stay tuned for more!

The rumors are true!

After months and months of research, after countless brewdays and hours spent talking with friends, after days, weeks, months of "what if," we have finally decided...

New Main Brewing is going pro.

Amanda and I are pleased to announce that we are planning to open New Main Brewing Company in the Mid-Cities region of DFW. We have not arrived at this decision lightly, and we are not messing around. We have been working with some local brewers for background information, local business owners for legal info, and our network of friends in the brewing industry and community for general planning advice. We are committed to opening and running an exceptional brewing business that produces great beer and provides our community with an outstanding place to share a pint with each other.

While we were investigating if this was going to work or not, a lot of things fell into place to convince us that the time is now. We were very fortunate to stumble upon Empire Commercial Real Estate while scoping out potential locations. They are just as excited as we are at the prospect of our community having its own brewery and taproom, and they are helping us find our brewery's location. We can't wait to start planning our site and building!

We were also lucky to have such a great network of friends both through the blog and through other homebrewing competitions. We will be bringing on our friend and award-winning homebrewer Kyle Nelson of Steel Rain Beer as our Head Brewer as well as his wife Erin to help us on the financial and marketing side of the business. Take a moment to go read through Steel Rain Beer's blog to learn about these amazing people. We are excited to bring them along with us on this crazy journey, and we can't wait for all of you to meet them!

We call ourselves New Main Brewing for a few reasons. First, it is a callback to a family story of mine wherein a couple of brothers (my grandfather and great uncle) spent some quality time planting trees on New Main Drive at Texas A&M College. Those trees shaded my sister, my brothers, and me on our way to our classes serving as a reminder of the value of hard work and the importance of focus. Secondly, we wanted to describe the type of craft beer experience we wanted to share with all of you.

Our beer will follow a simple layout of 6 "Main" beers with a few specific "New" treatments for each style. Over the next few months we will have several tasting parties to get your feedback on each beer and its variants, so you will have the opportunity to have a hand in determining our tap lineup! We are planning on some favorite styles like Stout and Porter, but we will also offer some exciting Belgian styles like Saison and Witbier.

We will also feature a VIP club for the taproom. For a monthly membership fee, you will have first access to new beer releases, discounts on pint and growler purchases, swag, and exclusive raffle drawings. We will also hold a VIP-only party before our grand opening to thank all of you with your very own celebration. More on that later.

We are still at the very beginning of this journey, and we thank all of you for your continued support of our homebrew team as well as our blog. Thus far, interacting with you all has been a tremendously helpful and rewarding part of our homebrewing hobby, and I can't overstate how grateful we are for that. We can't wait to meet even more of you at our several upcoming tasting parties and fundraising events over the next few months.

Now here's the part where y'all come in.

Starting a brewery is going to take a lot of time, a lot of effort, and A LOT of capital. We are going to have several opportunities for y'all to help us make this dream a reality. First, we are accepting donations through our new company Facebook page for a variety of levels. Your generous donation will go directly into funding our brewery, but there are several perks of donating at this stage available as well. For example, a donation of $5-$25 will earn you a New Main Brewing Company sticker and a thank you card. A $100 donation will  not only earn you a snazzy sticker, but you'll also be immortalized by a plaque on our wall of supporters, which will be prominently displayed in the brewery taproom. A $150 donation will secure your very own personalized bar stool in the taproom, as well as the aforementioned sticker. Seriously, we like the stickers.

We also have opportunities for y'all to spend some quality time with us at the brewery. A donation of $500 will earn you a party at the brewery for you and up to 100 of your friends. If you have a larger group of friends, coworkers, or colleagues, a donation of $1,000 will secure a party for up to 200 at the brewery. Think rehearsal dinners, retirement gifts, company party, or just pool some funds together with your friends! For those of you more interested in the brewing process, a donation of $2,500 will give you the chance to brew a recipe with New Main Brewing Company as a brewer-for-the-day on our commercial system and a party to share your beer with all your friends and family. 

If none of that is really your style, we'll have several opportunities for you to come volunteer at the brewery as well, once it's built of course. We will have several beers that will require ingredient preparation, and we'd be happy to exchange your help for some beer. We'll also have volunteer opportunities for kegging, cleaning, special event staff, and taproom activities. Make sure to keep an eye on our social media for these opportunities as they will be first come, first serve.

We will kick it all off with a t-shirt sale through booster.com featuring our logo on the front and "Coming Soon, Thanks to Me!" on the back so you can brag to your friends about the brewery you're helping to build. In the mean time, make sure to like and follow us on all of our social media so you can keep up with our ongoing process. We plan to share all the ups, downs, and sidewayses we encounter, and we welcome your feedback every step of the way. This is our dream, but we want this to be our community's brewery. 

We believe beer is about people, and we're excited to share this experience with all of you. Please follow us on our journey!

Facebook - New Main Brewing Co.

Twitter - @TheNewMainBrew

Instagram - newmainbrewing

Snapchat - TheNewMainBrew

Martin House Riverside Shootout 2016

It's homebrew competition season!

We decided to run our newly assembled brew stand through a brew day Saturday before competition Sunday so that we wouldn't have a mess on our hands in front of the DFW homebrewing community. We brewed a slightly varied version of our Pale Ale that we originally fleshed out last summer for our friend's bachelor party (still haven't settled on a name for it!). I mainly wanted to make sure our new pump and hoses operated correctly, but the addition of a separate vessel for mashing was also on trial that day. 

So we went ahead and set up our folding blue awning in the driveway to invite any neighbors passing by to come try some beer and talk about brewing. Unbeknownst to our own damn selves, everyone thought we were participating in the neighborhood garage sale event that was happening on nearly every street in our neighborhood. People kept slowing down and stopping to come check out what we had, and here we thought, "Wow, look at all these people that want to see what we're brewing!"

While we weren't really prepared for an all out garage sale, we did have a few things we wanted to get rid of, so we slapped a few hasty signs on some bulky items we no longer had space for. We did still get a few people to come over and ask about brewing, so I still consider it a success: we managed to have a successful brew day. All systems go for Sunday! We celebrated like any good southerner should, with a massive crawfish boil at our friend Jeff's house. (Happy birthday Jeff!)

Sunday came soon enough, and we packed our car and Jeff's truck with all of our equipment needed to brew on site at Martin House. We arrived, got set up, and began mashing in with mercifully pre-heated strike water provided by the brewery. This cut a good hour or so off brew day and made cleanup a snap. The brewery also provided a good amount of the ingredients needed for brew day, including 2-row malt, several varieties of hops, and a nice fresh pitch of yeast to take home with us. The idea there is that whichever beer wins the competition should be as close as possible to the beer that will be brewed in the Pro-Am session at Martin House.

We had a relatively uneventful and efficient mash thanks to our new system, and began transferring wort over to the boil kettle to heat up to 212F. Now here is where we got a little wonky (technical term). We planned to use  Chinook hops (13% A.A.) provided by Martin House for First Wort Hopping to allow a smoother bitterness to come through in the tropical stout we were brewing. We collected our first running of wort in the brew kettle and threw our hops in at about 175F. The problem was that the wind blowing across the parking lot was playing hell with our burner flame. 

We didn't reach a boil until just over an hour later, which is an abysmally long time to have to wait for the familiar churn of 212F. Because our hops spent such a long time in the hot wort, we probably got 10-20 more IBUs than we intended, which was not ideal for the sweet stout base we needed. I adjusted the hopping schedule by pushing all of the aroma/flavor hops into the whirlpool phase, which occurs after the boil is complete.

With our nice fresh pitch of Martin House's house ale yeast, we brought our wort home to ferment. Apparently, the yeastie boys fought for their right to party, and we had ourselves a good ol' fashioned airlock blowout the next day. This is by far the most vigorous fermentation I've ever seen. The beer was LITERALLY churning with activity, pushing more and more krausen out through the clogged airlock every second. We evaded disaster by transferring some of the over-active beer into the smaller carboy (which had plenty of room) and replaced the airlock with a blowoff hose. Problem solved.

Fast forwarding to today, we've finished 2.5 weeks of primary fermentation and have split the batch into a 4-5 gallon batch for cold conditioning prior to pineappling, and the remainder is sitting in our wonderfully flavored and conditioned whiskey barrel. Once those condition for a few weeks, we'll bottle them and let them sit for a few months for competition and/or consumption in the cold weather months.

Our pre-competition pale ale turned out well, if not slightly more bitter than we'd like. We decided to dry hop this batch with Simcoe and Centennial for a nice floral and spicy aroma. We have a few ideas to up the mouthfeel and balance out the bitterness with a little more malt presence to make this one a staple beer once again. No diacetyl this time though, so I'll take it!

This weekend we'll be submitting 24 bottles of our rosemary, sage, and basil wit to Backcountry Brewing's Homebrewer Competition. We bottled a couple extras to make sure what we were submitting was the best possible version of our beer, and it definitely stands up to the fresh-out-the-keg offering! Hopefully we'll hear back on that one soon, and we just might have another Pro-Am on our hands!

As always, thanks for reading. If you or someone you know is getting into homebrewing, make sure to share us on Facebook and Instagram. Cheers!

Martin House Riverside Shootout Preview

This Sunday, Amanda and I will be traveling to Fort Worth to compete in Martin House's on-site homebrew competition, Riverside Shootout. Think of it like Chopped but for beer. We will be given some of the main ingredients that Martin House uses every day for their own beer and we are allowed to bring any extra ingredients we need to fashion an outstanding homebrew batch. The winner gets a cash prize of $500, and they get to brew their recipe with Martin House on their big boy system.

Our epic Division bottle share, and
Derek from Dirty Job Brewing, Arlington's
next craft brewery! Check out our interview
with Dirty Job on Atypical DFW Podcast here.

As we mentioned last week, we are going to explore the Tropical Stout category new to the 2015 BJCP guidelines. While this competition is not strictly judged according to guidelines, we think this category is just weird enough to produce a gem. We finished the stout with pineapple for a nice dose of tropical flavor to balance against the roast. We received some good feedback from some other folks when we brought the beer to a bottle share at Division Brewing last week. Hopefully the batch we brew this weekend will live up to the pilot!

Meanwhile the New Main brewing setup has really been coming together lately. Thanks to our gift card from our Operation Bravo win at Shannon and a few well-timed homebrew supply store sales, we have been able to acquire a few pieces of equipment that should make brew day run smoother and more predictably. We have added a whole second vessel and burner, a high temp pump, all of the fittings and hoses the pump needs, as well as a nice heavy duty cart/stand on which the whole shebang is mounted. 

We're going to pump - *clap* - YOU up!

Sure, we could have just dished out an assload of money for a standard single-tier, 2-pump, 3-vessel system and just brew like the majority of people do at this stage, but the idea of doing what everyone else does just for the sake of simplicity isn't really our thing. We are going to brew a test batch Saturday so that we are fully acquainted with the system come Sunday, but I have faith that our ducks will be in a row for competition.

I don't have a whole lot else to say this week, sadly. However, I think it's high time we share a homebrew recipe with you fine people. This beer lends well to spicing and/or dry hopping, so get crazy with it!

Palo Alto Wit

Brew Method: BIAB
Style Name: Spice, Herb, or Vegetable Beer (Belgian Witbier base)
Boil Time: 60 min
Batch Size: 10 gallons (fermentor volume)
Boil Size: 11 gallons
Boil Gravity: 1.048
Efficiency: 60% (brew house)

STATS:
Original Gravity: 1.052
Final Gravity: 1.014
ABV (standard): 5%
IBU (tinseth): 15.91
SRM (morey): 6.1

FERMENTABLES:
10 lb - American - Pale 2-Row (42.6%)
10 lb - American - Wheat (42.6%)
2 lb - Flaked Oats (8.5%)
1.5 lb - Canadian - Honey Malt (6.4%)

HOPS:
2 oz - Mandarina Bavaria, Type: Pellet, AA: 4, Use: Boil for 15 min, IBU: 7.71
2 oz - Saphir, Type: Pellet, AA: 4.25, Use: Boil for 15 min, IBU: 8.19

MASH GUIDELINES:
1) Sparge, Temp: 155 F, Time: 60 min, Amount: 33 qt, Ladle Rinse, mash out

OTHER INGREDIENTS:
2 each - Orange Zest, Time: 5 min, Type: Flavor, Use: Boil
2 each - Lemon Zest, Time: 5 min, Type: Flavor, Use: Boil
1 sprig - Rosemary, Type: Spice, Use: Boil
1 oz - Sage, Type: Herb, Use: Boil

YEAST:
Wyeast - Belgian Witbier 3944
Starter: No
Form: Liquid
Attenuation (avg): 74%
Flocculation: Med-Low
Optimum Temp: 62 - 75 F
Fermentation Temp: 65 F for 4-5 days, then ramp to 70 F for 1-2 and cold crash prior to kegging
3 volumes CO2 (plenty of protein in this beer for a nice fluffy head)

Mixing up some rosemary, sage, and basil tea

We've brewed this recipe a couple different ways before, and we think the best method for adding the spices is to just brew the base witbier and let it ferment through primary. Then once you've cold crashed the beer, rack to secondary with a tea made from your spices. The reason for doing it this way is that you can pull a sample of the fermented, uncarbonated beer and measure it out equally into 3-5 sample glasses so you can dose varying amounts of the tea into the beer. Taste each one and compare them to each other and to the base beer in order to decide the appropriate amount of spice tea to add to your fermenter. Then all you do is scale it up to your batch size, pitch the tea, then let it sit in secondary for a few days before kegging or packaging.

Make sure to accurately measure out your
tasting samples so your dosage rates are right

That may seem like a lot of work, but it gives you steady, standard, and easily repeatable results every time. You never know how potent your herbs will be, and if you're using things like fresh rosemary, it's easy to overdo it. Likewise, if you prefer to dry hop the beer rather than spice it, you can simply pitch your desired aroma hops when you rack to secondary. 

If any of y'all brew this or any of our other recipes, please drop us a line and let us know how they turned out! If you're in the Arlington area, we'd love to meet up and swap some homebrew, too. You can reach us at:

 newmainbrewing@gmail.com 

or you can leave us a comment below. Also, don't forget to like and share our posts on Facebook, and follow us on Instagram at newmainbrewing. 

Cheers!

Semi-lazy Update

I feel I need to explain why the quality and quantity of my posts have dropped off lately. I may or may not have mentioned before, but I am a Civil Engineer by trade. I mainly design residential and commercial developments (think neighborhoods and businesses) and I also work with floodplain remapping. I know you're all riveted and can't wait to hear more about storm drainage and sewer lines, but unfortunately that's not really what this blog is about.

I said all that to say that while I can legally refer to myself as an engineer, I am only certified by the state of Texas as an Engineer-In-Training, or EIT. There is one more certification that is much more legitimate and much harder for an engineer to obtain: Professional Engineer, or PE. There are all kinds of documentation and hoops to jump through in order to become licensed as a PE, but the final determination comes in the form of an 8-hour long, comprehensive, big, hairy, ugly, and quite frankly rude-ass exam.

I will be taking this test in a couple weeks, so in between home and work I have been devoting "every" unoccupied moment to preparing for the exam. I put "every" in quotes because, let's face it, I'm no machine. I require study breaks filled with internet memes, podcasting with my friends, the occasional novel or two, and other such respites from equations and proofs. Hell, I didn't even have enough time to mow the back yard, allowing it to resemble a dark, mysterious rainforest-like setting that threatened to swallow our poor, unsuspecting dogs whole!

"Don't go into the long grass!" (Lost World, Jurassic Park)

This all means that the time I would normally spend typing away about how great beer is and how good we are at doing beer is now spent buried under a small traveling library of reference manuals, an arsenal of number two pencils in various stages of sharpness, a previously-small-and-charming-forest-worth of graph paper etched with the frantic scribblings of a mad man, all covered in a fresh dusting of eraser rubbings, pencil shavings, and coffee stains. (can you tell I need a creative outlet?)

All embellishment aside, I have managed to keep my brewing pipeline stocked with the third incarnation of our rosemary and sage belgian wheat ale, Palo Alto Wit. This time around we brewed a little more than 8 gallons with a smaller amount of spices so that we could "dry-hop" the beer with the spices after fermentation and get a much more dialed-in flavor profile. After primary, the samples tasted pleasant and showed that we were at about 5.5% ABV. We will make a tea with some sage and perhaps even some basil to dose into the beer for just the right aroma to complement the flavor.

We have also accidentally created an excellent stout recipe while preparing for Martin House's Riverside Shootout Homebrew Competition happening the weekend after my PE exam. I teased last post about a new style category that was recently added to the BJCP Style Guidelines. I now realize I have no control over other people's recipes or fermentation, so secrecy is kind of a moot point. The best brewer will execute the best beer he or she can, and that's really what competition is about. We are attempting to create a Tropical Stout, category 16C, to be named Parrot Metal after my pathetic effort to imitate a metal singer's growl on our podcast at Dr. Jeckyll's several months ago (check the 30:00 mark).

Various weird tropical fruits soaked in vodka to bring out
the "essence" of tropicality

The base recipe (before adding anything to make it "tropical") is actually everything we love about stout. It has excellent roast flavor, bitterness is balanced but present, alcohol is a manageable 7%, and it looks great in the glass. The style guideline actually calls for a much sweeter stout with low bitterness, but I think once we add some tropical fruit tinctures to the beer, the bitterness will balance out against the sugary juices. Regardless of how this performs at the competition, you can count on us brewing this one again.

We have also found a new homebrewing competition while out cruising the breweries in DFW. Backcountry Brewing from Colorado recently bought the recently-out-of-business Firewheel brewery as a satellite to brew and distribute to Texas, so we thought we'd go check them out. I was in a Belgian beer mood, so I sampled their Belgian Pale and a Red Saison, which were both pleasant and enjoyable. While tossing back these fine ales, I noticed a sign on the wall that urged homebrewers to inquire about a homebrewing competition.

Upon investigation, not only do the winners get to brew their beer Pro-Am style with Backcountry, but a portion of the pint sales come back to the hombrewer as a cash prize! I think our Palo Alto Wit will have the opportunity to shine bright in this type of competition that is not so heavily dependent on guideline interpretations. We shall see! (Sign up at the brewery, and deadline for submission of 24 bottles of your 1 entry is May 14)

So there. I've put off studying long enough, and I must return to the world of conversion factors and interpolation. If I don't survive, tell my wife and dogs I love them, and drink our homebrew at my funeral.

Bluebonnet & Shannon

Two weeks ago was yet another huge week for New Main Brewing. We planned on attending the Bluebonnet Brew-off in Irving, but we were too sick to make it to the event. The competition representatives sent out the score sheets a few days later, and while neither of our entries won, we got some good feedback on how to tweak our recipes. Naturally we drowned our "sorrows" at Division Thursday night with some green beer (Forty-eighter Berlinerweisse with woodruff syrup).

Green beer at Division Brewing in Arlington

The next weekend, we went to Shannon Brewing Co. for their St. Patrick's Day festivities and enjoyed bagpipe & drum, great rare Shannon beers, and good company. Our Pro-Am beer was also on tap for thirsty patrons, billed as the Irish Breakfast Stout. It seemed to be a hit! We thoroughly enjoyed a few pints of it before trying some of the heftier offerings like the Chocolate Rumble Stout (their usual Chocolate Stout aged in a rum & whiskey barrel) and their Double IPA. We were able to meet up with our friend and fellow homebrew blogger Kyle of Steel Rain Beer Blog to share some beer as well as strategize for the next homebrew competition coming up in April.

A pint of Irish Breakfast Stout at Shannon for St. Paddy's Day

On that note, fast forward to this past weekend. Since I am currently glued to review books and study guides in preparation for my Professional Engineer exam, I decided I would take a study break and brew up about 10 gallons of our favorite spring/summer recipe, Palo Alto Wit. We also threw the garage doors open and invited our neighbors to our cluttered brewhouse to share our hobby and a little bit of our home brew. We had a great time brewing and getting to know some of our neighbors from around the block. We are also thinking about hosting a block party soon to invite everyone on the street over to taste some fine beer and enjoy the (for now) pleasant evening weather.

Slowly but surely rebuilding my brewstand and sharing with
the neighborhood!

The good thing about brewing a ton of beer is the motivation it provides for getting all your other beer packaged. Finally after nearly a year in their 1-gallon fermenters, we checked on our 9*8*7 Russian Imperial Stout aged on chipotle and vanilla, respectively. Apparently, leaving a beer that long in a jug with a rubber stopper helps bring out the character of the... rubber stopper. Both beers have a distinct balloon flavor, and on top of that the chipotle version turned nasty sour. Determined to not have wasted 2 whole gallons of precious precious beer, I bottled the vanilla version in hopes that the balloon flavor isn't that noticeable after a few weeks of conditioning. Likely it will still be not great. Lesson learned, no rubber stoppers!

Lastly, I mentioned earlier our next homebrew competition coming up next month. We will be participating in a competition hosted by Martin House Brewing in Fort Worth called Riverside Shootout. This is a very unique and interesting type of competition because you have to brew your beer ON LOCATION at Martin House. They will provide base grain and hops as well as their house yeast and you get to bring whichever specialty grains and/or flavorings you want to make a truly unique and interesting beer. The best-in-show winner gets to brew the winning recipe with Martin House, in much the same way that we brewed our recipe with Shannon. It would be pretty dang nifty to get to do another Pro-Am! Without giving too much away, we will be exploring a newly added style in the 2015 BJCP style guidelines...

Now on tap at New Main: Not Out of the Woods Black IPA and
Shannon/New Main Pro-Am Rio Bravo Breakfast Stout

Until next time, make sure to like us on Facebook, subscribe to the blog, and don't forget to like and share all of our posts so all of your friends can learn about homebrewing and craft beer! Thanks for reading!

Why I Blog

I thoroughly enjoy reading literature about beer and brewing (duh), and I've found a group of folks that churn out supremely satisfying content: Brulosophy.

Marshall Schott founded the site several years ago aiming to improve the hobby of homebrewing one exBeeriment at a time. Schott takes common claims and, to paraphrase Andy Weir's The Martian, he "sciences the shit out of it." Through blind triangle testing, statistical analysis, and the good ol' fashioned Scientific Method, Brulosophy and its contributors tackle misconceptions and internet arguments about various brewing techniques like alcohol-infused Mythbusters.

The level of professionalism coupled with everyone's favorite beverage makes this website a treasure trove of edutainment. In addition to these xBmts, Brulosophy has a segment called Bru's Views wherein the regular contributors as well as guest contributors from the craft beer industry will weigh in on opinion-driven brewing topics. In their latest installment, Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing Company joined the fray to discuss what every homebrewer eventually spends a slightly inebriated evening contemplating: Should I go pro?

Y'all have been extremely supportive of New Main in the past, and as I've mentioned not quite often enough, I am sincerely grateful. However, the notion of diving head-first into the brewing industry, halting my degree-based career and comfortable lifestyle is at best risky and at worst irresponsible.

Many of the Bru's Views contributors believe the biggest factor against going pro is that homebrewing is nothing like commercial brewing. It has been my experience through talking with our local industry folk that this is 100% accurate. The largest part of owning/operating a brewery has nothing to do with boiling wort. It has to do with unabashedly hard work in difficult environments on expensive equipment with ever-looming deadlines. The brewing industry is not to be entered into lightly and takes a solid constitution in order to stay above water, let alone succeed.

Another aspect has to do with market saturation and increased competition with other brands in your marketplace. The Brewers Association reports nearly two new breweries open every day. While this is great for consumers and craft beer fans, this will eventually mean slimmer margins and tighter belts on each brewery's budget. Don't get me wrong, competition is a cornerstone of the capitalist free market, and I would never choose to live in a society where things like what I drink and where I can shop were decided for me.

That being said, sustainable growth is a tricky thing to master in a fledgling industry. The typical American brewing entrepreneur usually enters the market thinking they will be the next Jim Koch or Sam Calagione. Everyone remembers what happened in 2008 when the housing bubble burst. Some of you may still be recovering from that colossal crash, and my sympathies are with you. It's with this in mind that I am slowly realizing the attitude of "I'm just one more brewery/business/loan" just might be the beginning of the end for markets that grow too quickly.

By all means, you should chase your dream and pursue your happiness, but you better be damn sure what your happiness looks like. My biggest epiphany came in the form of the cliche interview question, "Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?" This can be an immensely helpful question for people to ask themselves about their personal life and goals. Unfortunately most interviewees are concerned with what the interviewer wants to hear rather than what they honestly want their life to look like 5-10 years down the road.

Sure, everyone wants to be successful and happy, but that's entirely too broad to begin acting on today. Avalanches are often precipitated by a series of small but no less important events. You really need to focus on what a specific day in 5-10 years would look like. For example, here's my idea of Wednesday, March 10, 2021:

6:30AM - Wake up
7:00AM - Make coffee and breakfast.
7:30AM - Kiss my wife goodbye as she goes to her immensely successful and rewarding job as Director of Bands at the school of her choosing.
8:00AM - Read latest articles and message boards for tips on improving something about my brewing setup and/or writing.
10:00AM - Whoa, I passed practically all this morning without checking my own website hits and comments section. Hmm. only 6,000 views today, but 1,000 comments?! I guess my article on subterranean brewing with moon-grown hops and fair trade water was a little too edgy. Better take it down a notch next time.
11:30AM - Make lunch and take it to Amanda's band hall. Reminisce about how cool it was for her to be honored at TMEA last month as the youngest female Honor Band winner. Help her organize her clinician appearance schedule for fall 2021.
1:30PM - Back to the home office to research facts and figures for my second book, Take That, Big Beer: A Complete Guide to the 21st Century North Texas Craft Beer Boom. (First book was a New York Bestseller about time-traveling baby geniuses, of course)
3:30PM - Rack my split batch of Imperial Red Ale (one clean, one with Brett) to secondary and check the gravities on last week's batch of my award-winning Palo Alto wit. I may keg that one this weekend so it will be ready for next week's 34th Annual Bluebonnet Brew-off "Meet the Homebrewers" pouring session.
4:00PM - Reach out to Bluebonnet Brew-off Director Kyle Nelson for a 3D video interview, record for tonight's live podcast from Atypical DFW Studios.

4:30PM - More writing for the book, specifically the chapter on the impact of to-go sales legislation change on distributors and bottle shops. Contact Deep Ellum, and Grapevine Brewing to set up interviews based on their successful legal alliance formed back in 2015 to sue TABC.

5:30PM - Make dinner before guests arrive. Fajitas with my famous guacamole. Eat entirely too much guacamole before I decide it's ready to serve.

6:15PM - Dinner with wife and podcast crew, go over last minute topic changes for the show, discuss new sponsor Texas Craft Brewers Guild. 

7:00PM - Start live broadcast, show topic: Upcoming Bluebonnet Brew-off, Martin House's upcoming 8 year anniversary party, The Expendables 7 - This Time It's Geriatric, vertical tasting of Collective's American Sour Red 2016 through 2021. 

9:30PM - Kick everyone out of the house, watch latest episode of Better Call Saul spin-off, Tio Salamanca Knows Best

11:00PM - Lay down and reflect on an awesome day spent doing what I love with the people I love, thank God for the invention of the Dog Fart Eliminator which is prominently affixed to the wall near the head of the bed.

Okay, so maybe some of these things are a little far-fetched, but hey, you gotta swing for the fences. My point is it's just as important to be able to put your dream into real, measurable terms as it is to have a dream in the first place. How else are you going to make them come true? And as much as I'd like to say my dream is owning and operating an award-winning brewery, I fear that my lack of relevant experience in both the brewing and business arenas means I am more likely to become a statistic than a success story if I were to jump into it right at this moment.

All caution and forethought aside, brewing is one of my deepest passions. If I could maintain the lifestyle I currently enjoy while brewing beer that I would be proud to serve, you bet your ass I'd be doing it. Come to think of it, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm enjoying the comfort of a somewhat typical middle class American lifestyle while brewing tasty beer for my friends and family, and thanks to the internet I've been granted the opportunity to share this experience with all of you. Here's to the next 5-10 years! Cheers!