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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