Donavan Hall

I brewed my first batch of beer in January 1998, but my interest in brewing dates back to when I was in graduate school. Actually, if you can believe it, I made it to graduate school without ever tasting a beer that I liked. The stuff they drank at my college was called Schaefer. I now know that the F&M Schaefer Brewing Company had a long and venerable history in American lager brewing, but at the time it was just the cheapest beer available. You could buy a case for something like six dollars. Even though I drank gallons of the stuff (not in one sitting obviously) I was never a fan. When the budget wasn't so tight (which wasn't often), I'd indulge myself with a bottle of wine.

I started drinking beer---good beer, or beer that I liked---in graduate school. My friend Steven (a medieval historian) came to me one day and said, "We need to find you a beer you like to drink," and he collared me all the way to the Chimes, the local pub and sat me down at the bar and ordered me a Guinness. My life changed that day.

Steven's roomate, Aaron, a modernist composer in the vein of John Cage and Philip Glass, was a brewer. Steven and I happily helped Aaron drink his homebrew and we kept saying that we needed to get into brewing too, but somehow we never scraped enough pennies together to buy our own kit. But looking back on it, that was just an excuse. Brewing looked like hard work and being naturally lazy I kept finding excuses to keep drinking Aaron's homebrew rather than getting off my ass and brewing my own.

All good things come to an end and so did my access to Aaron's homebrew. I graduated and moved 400 miles away from Aaron's homebrewery. The time had come for me to bite the bullet and start brewing. My wife and mother went in together on a deluxe homebrewing kit from the Homebrew Den in Tallahassee (our home at the time).

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Other Articles Written by Donavan Hall

The Best Beer to Start Brewing

Published on April 17, 2007 in Understanding Home Brewing

For Christmas or for your last birthday your wife/parents/kids bought you a homebrew kit. Maybe you treated yourself to that collection of the odd assortment of equipment: a bucket, a kettle, a thermometer, a hydrometer, maybe a couple of carboys. You want to brew a beer.