Rick Couch

I guess it was around 2006 or so, I was at a LAN party (if you know, you know) and one of our crew had brought in some homebrew that he had made. I got to asking Nick about it, and he told me I should check out one of these homebrewing kits if I was interested in learning how to brew my own beer. I bought a simple Brewer’s Best two-bucket kit, a recipe kit for a hefeweizen, and the rest is history.

Probably my Vanilla Bourbon Milk Stout.

Without a doubt, my strawberry blonde ale. Trying to be clever (my wife is a ginger), I decided I would make a strawberry blonde ale in her honor. Great idea, right? Unless you use a terrible strawberry extract AND manage to get your wort infected during bottling. Not so much a strawberry blonde ale as a Robitussin and Band-Aids ale.

Yuengling Black and Tan, whenever I can get my hands on it. On the regular? Wild Acre Billy Jenkins.

Nothing at the moment, as I’m currently renovating my office. Just kegged a Maibock, but nothing in the fermenter right now.

To brew and drink, honestly it’s anything German. Hefeweizen and doppelbock at the top of the list, though.

I’m still working with my original all-grain setup – an Igloo mash tun, 8-gallon Megapot 2.0 brew kettle, standard wort chiller that I run through a cooler of ice. I have two 7-gallon Fermonsters, a chest freezer fermentation chamber, and a new 3-tap keezer I completed about 2 months back. Thinking about moving to either a Foundry or a Grainfather in the not-too-distant future.

I love the mad science of it all. Not only am I making delicious beer that I can share with friends and family, but I get to be the “Doc Brown” behind the scenes. I get to develop my own recipes, tinkering all the time, and really customize the beers to my own tastes. While experimenting with recipes is a blast, and brewing even more fun…honestly, it’s also gratifying to get inebriated on beer that I made from water, barley, and hops in my own garage.