I sit before you tonight enjoying a delicious IPA from my kegerator.

This is a proud moment.

Not because I’m truly enjoying a beer that I brewed (I do that often, otherwise I wouldn’t still be brewing, and hence, starting a brewery), but because I finally have gotten an IPA to come out how I envisioned it tasting. Sure, I’ve tried to brew a few IPAs in the past, but I’ve never been happy with them. They’re too harsh, or not bitter enough, or too malty, or just off.

So, as many of you know, I decided this summer that I was going to ‘figure out hops’. I made several hoppy beers with the intention of perfecting my technique and taste when it came to hops. An american brown ale, a hoppy american lager, and several pale ales were the main ones in the list. These included a series of 4 vertically hopped pale ales, which means that each used a single hop in their recipe, as well as a few mixed hop pale ales. I purposefully didn’t brew any IPAs because I wanted to get the flavors and aromas ingrained in my head before I moved on to a more bitter beer. Through this process I finally felt as though I knew how to really dial in the hoppiness of my beers, and I was ready to dive back in and do an IPA.

So as the first of the year rolled around, I set about putting my learnings into a beer. I was a bit disappointed when I first tasted it, as I thought it was too sweet (which, according to the recipe didn’t make much sense to me). It turns out, I just needed to let it carbonate a bit more, as the sweetness has died down to about the level that I thought it should be at with the addition of CO2 and the bit eit brings with it. It’s got a nice hop bite to it, but is balanced with an amazing hop aroma and a subtle sweetness to take a bit of the overbearing harshness that I find with so many IPAs. This was what I was going for, and I hit it. I won’t say that I totally nailed it, but I feel as though it was head and shoulders above anything else I’ve made in the IPA arena in the past.

But alas, perfection is a fickle mistress, and as I was cracking the first couple pints of the fully carbonated IPA into a glass, the burner was already fired up for the next iteration. The current one is still just a hair on the sweet side, even with full carbonation, and I want to try dry hopping this next one. Comparisons will be made, tweaks will ensue, and the pursuit of perfection will take another step forward.

Science.

I love experimenting, especially when it involves delicious fermented beverages.

On another note, some of you may have seen that I signed the lease for Wanderlust’s location this morning. It’s really exciting, as I now have an address which allows me to start getting paperwork for business and brewing licenses together. Both of those are a long process, so the sooner I can get them started, the better. That’s why, even though equipment is still several months out, I decided to pull the trigger on the lease.

Right now, I have 864 square feet of (essentially) empty room. It’s got a bathroom in it, and a laundry sink, and other than that, it’s pretty barren.

Which I guess is a good thing in terms of a ‘blank slate’ to work with. I’ve got to build a walk-in fridge, a grain room and a bar somewhere in that space. I need to have a floor drain dug and seal the floor. I’ve also probably got to do another 100 things that I haven’t even thought of yet, but that’s all part of the fun, right?

If you want to get a general idea of the ‘blank slate’ I’m working with, check out the album below.

Anywho, my lease starts on February 1st, so I guess that’s when the next phase of fun begins.

In the meantime, I will actually be doing a bit of traveling for my real job. I’m headed to a conference in Germany next week. The rumor is that this is one of the best conferences in the world for the type of products that I’m tasked with designing, so I’m pretty excited to be there. In terms of products, europe is usually several years ahead of us due to some slightly more forgiving (reasonable?) regulatory bodies, and so it’s really cool to see what they’re using over there (which we’ll probably be using in the US in 4-6 years). I’ll be there for 4 days, and then I’ll be visiting one of our plants just outside Munich the monday after the conference is over. (Which means I’ll be back just in time to cut my first rent check for Wanderlust….)

That means that I’ll have approximately 1.5 days to make it from Leipzig to Munich and see whatever I can see in that time. I’ve spent a very short amount of time in Munich, and none in Leipzig, so I’m sure I’ll find plenty to do. However, if anyone out there has any suggestions for places I should make sure to see in either place (or between the two), let me know.

And yes, I will be sampling the local beverages. Lets just chalk it up to research.

And no, I won’t be hauling skis over, despite the record snows that europe has been getting.

I’ve been homebrewing for about 7 years at this point, and about a year and a half ago I started asking myself what a lot of homebrewers ask: can I take this bigger? It was more an extension of the question: I’m brewing a lot of beer right now, and I want to brew more, but what the heck am I going to do with it? I was brewing a couple times a month, minimum, and I just don’t drink all that much.

So, I sat down and started writing up a business plan for a brewery. I basically said to myself that if I was going to be at all serious about it, I needed to do the work to see what that all meant from a money and time standpoint. It took me a few months, but in the end, I ended up with 30 pages of a plan that talked about opening a medium-sized production microbrewery (production=packaging and selling in stores, small taproom, no restaurant). I was happy with the plan, but was uncomfortable about the amount of startup money that it would take to get something that big going, and I also struggled with the fact that if I was going to do it, I would have to quit my job and jump in headfirst on the brewery.

I talked to a couple folks about it, and in particular, an advisor from the small business development association. He was incredibly helpful at getting the business plan in shape, but he said something that stuck with me during one of our meetings. He said “the more you can bootstrap your operation, the less risk you take on, and the more chance you have to be flexible as you scale it up”.

At the time, it seemed like a tough thing to do. Everything I read was saying that a brewery can’t be profitable, and will never be sustainable below a certain size system. For those of you who are familiar with breweries out there, this ‘magic number’ is usually quoted at a 10 or 15 Barrel (31 gallons=1 Beer Barrel, BBL) system, minimum, for any sort of production. (For reference, Mother Road has a 15 BBL system, and the new brewery at Lumberyard is a 20BBL system)

A system that size was just more money than I was willing to take on as a risk. It would mean a higher investment, which would mean more pressure to sell enough beer each month to make the loan payments. That was a little intimidating, and I also really enjoy my day job, so I struggled immensely with the fact that I would have to leave that behind to start this.

And so, it languished. I spent the summer poking and prodding at the business plan, but not making much progress beyond that. Sometime in the fall, I realized that I really needed to make a decision whether to just abandon this or do something real about it. I started talking again with Mother Road Brewing Company who had finally gotten operations up and running here in town about brewing on their system in their downtime. There were some capacity issues as well as issues with the packaging I wanted to use (22 oz bombers), and so I started looking elsewhere. I talked to several other breweries around the state about contract brewing, which is where you basically pay somebody to brew the beer for you, and then your name goes on it and you sell it. But, in the end, I really don’t want to just sell beer. The thing I enjoy about it is actually creating it. So, even though the startup costs for contract brewing was essentially zero, just selling beer and not actually making it was not what I wanted.

So, I was back around to where I started: back to the business plan for the 15BBL brewery.

Which I wasn’t comfortable with.

So I gutted it. I pulled all the sales figures, the capacities the monetary investments out of it, and I said “I love my job, but basically just want to brew more beer”. After running the numbers, and double and triple checking it, I was totally bought into the 10-15BBL minimum in order to make money off it.

But what if you didn’t want to make money off it?

What if I changed the goal from making this my main income to having some fun, selling some really really tasty beer, and it paying for itself?

So I did that. I scaled it back to a 3BBL system, I scaled it back to self-distributing, and having a taproom which was only open a couple days a week. The goal was to be flexible so I can brew a lot of different kinds of beer, and primarily get them into restaurants and the couple good beer stores around town.

All of a sudden my space requirements dropped, my initial investment amount plummeted, and the amount of times I needed to brew per month to break even looked more like a hobby on steroids than a full time job.

Now we were getting somewhere. All of a sudden things started coming together and I started feeling more comfortable. My SBDC advisor’s words came back to me about bootstrapping. Short of selling 10-gallons of beer at a time on my current homebrew system, this was the ultimate bootstrap.

By day, I still design and develop medical devices, by night I brew beer.

Which, quite frankly, isn’t all that different from what I do now.

Within a couple months, I had looked at a space, had gotten quotes on systems that seemed reasonably priced and was looking into loans. I even had a graphic designer from chicago who was on board for designing logos and labels for me. He had seen my post on one of the brewing forums about the contract brewing and contacted me about helping out. Over the last couple months we’ve settled on what is the final logo for the new venture of mine.

I’m incredibly happy with where it ended up. I think it pretty well sums up the feel of the whole endeavor. Simple, yet detailed. To the point, yet still a little funky.

The only thing I need is a name for the hobo.

My initial thought was to keep the brewery somewhat under wraps until I was further along, but the rumors had started floating around Flagstaff about it, mostly because moving forward with it necessitated bringing some other people into the loop. So, in order to keep everyone abreast of what’s going on, the cat is officially out of the bag.

I’ve been sitting on domain names, facebook pages, twitter accounts, and other manners of electronic real estate for about 18 months, and it finally got to the point that it’s time to get stuff rolling and start letting people know what’s going on.

The facebook page went up sunday night (and at the time of writing this, I’ve already got almost 100 people subscribing to it based of a single post which basically says “stay tuned”), and the website will be going up in the next couple weeks (at least something beyond a splash page). I locked up wanderlustbrewing.com, wanderlustbeer.com, wanderlustbeers.com, and wanderlustbrewery.com to try and head anyone off at the pass who stumbles upon the same name. The twitter account is twitter.com/wanderlust_beer.

Yes, I’m excited, and yes, you should be too.

But contain your excitement for a bit. I have to put a big fat disclaimer on this post: this is still very much in the setup phase. As Mother Road found out, these things take time, and a lot of aspects just can’t be rushed. The licensing alone takes 90 days from when I take possession of a building (which will hopefully be February 1st). The equipment I am trying to get on order isn’t due in to flagstaff until May or June, and that’s if I can get the loan wrapped up in the next few weeks.

So don’t go wandering around town looking for that logo on a door and expect to order a beer yet. In fact, if we’re all sitting around drinking a beer with that logo on it by the time the fall semester of 2012 at NAU starts up, I’ll be a happy camper.

But in the meantime, I’m still going to be homebrewing like crazy (along with some biking and skiing, and business planning), and I promise I’ll keep everyone in the loop on where everything is along the way. It’s going to be a fun journey, and I have no idea where it will end up. But, in the end, if I have a good time, make some other people happy with some good beer, and don’t lose my shirt on it, it’ll be a success.

And since the Wanderlust site isn’t up and running yet, just keep back here (or on the facebook or twitter pages) for any news for now. (Yes, I’m going to keep blogging, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen to the HBS right now, sounds like a post in the making…..)

Another holiday season, and with it another year, drawing to a close.

In some ways, it’s the same as it ever is.

Family, Friends, Travel, Presents, Food, Drink, Celebrating, Remembering.

These things happen each year like clockwork. They are what makes the holidays the holidays.

But in some ways, this year was a bit different as well.

No yearly trip to New Jersey, instead a quick family visit to the ‘rents in Indiana. Presents were exchanged with the extended family via UPS and thank yous were phone calls instead of hugs.

In some ways, different, in others, very much the same.

Claire and I ended up down in Sedona house and dog sitting for Mike and Lauren over the actual christmas weekend. It was a welcome departure, and other than trying to herd 3 dogs all weekend (and the following week), was a relaxing way to spend christmas. I hiked, I rode, I made slow-cooked ribs on the grill for christmas eve dinner, and I watched A Christmas Story.

It’s been nice to be back on the bike down in sedona fairly regularly. I’ve been down a minimum of once a week for the last few weeks, and some weeks have seen me down there upwards of 3-4 times. It’s a good thing, especially because the skiing around flag has been getting worse by the day.

As expected, though, winter’s grasp has once again taken hold of me. The allure of sliding downhill (and hiking uphill) on a bed of the fluffy white stuff has placed me, once again, behind the wheel of the subaru, skis in tow.

The winter has not been kind to the skiers of late. Even the places which are known for their consistancy (Wolf Creek, Silverton) are low for the year right now.

Then again, ‘low’ for these places is still very much skiable, as I have proven over the last couple days. A day at Silverton yielded some good turns and another broken binding. The binding was fixed that night in Durango (new years eve) and New Years day led to a half-day of skiing at wolf creek with FKR, my sister, claire, and a friend of ada’s.

The skiing was cruising groomers all day, but was a good way to work off a new years eve hangover. Feeling some unfinished business at Silverton, I bid my farewells to everyone and pushed onwards, solo, back to the small mining town with the epic skiing.

There isn’t any new snow since friday here, but I have some places in mind that may yield a stash of soft turns on the mountain. After 6 years of coming here every winter, hopefully it’ll start paying off with some secret stashes. We shall see.

The new years brings with it the deluge of resolutions from those around me. The workout schedules, the living simply, the diets. It’s all very respectable and I wish everyone luck in their new years resolutions. I only wonder why the the changing of a calendar year should cause you to start doing something you’ve been wanting to do for a while?

It would seem to me that a changing of the seasons may be a better time to start resolutions. When I pull my skis out, I resolve to start doing workouts that will get me better at skiing. When spring starts pushing the snow away, I resolve to start hitting the rollers on days I can’t ride, and going outside when I can. When the garden starts producing vegetables, I resolve to stop buying as many from the store.

And everytime I taste a homebrew out of the tap in my garage, I resolve to brew more beer.

Ok, so maybe the seasons don’t play a part in some of my resolutions.

My point though, is that New Years seems like a pretty arbitrary time to start making a change in your lifestyle. I would challenge everyone out there who has made a new years resolution to think of another resolution with a more meaningful start date, and put it on your calendar.

And with that thought, I’m resolving to have a great day on the slopes of Silverton today.

The seasons change, my sports change. The bike gets hung up a bit more in favor of something with two planks instead of two wheels. The repeated cycle of the pedals gets replaced with a different repetition.

Slide, stick. Slide, stick.

No matter whether the apocalyptic snowstorms show up, or the winter ends up fizzling out, the winter brings with it an excitement for new opportunities and new adventures.

Some are familiar, like fried turkey and hiking snowbowl in the mornings.

Others bring new adventures. The seasons begin to blur a bit more with the advent of 3.5″ tires sporting 5 psi.

The new opportunities presented by this modality excite me, but an additional expense is not in the cards for this winter, so alas, I will resolve myself to the occasional ride on the revolution demo bikes.

No matter, it becomes and excuse to enjoy companions who also travel by fat tires.

My solitary summer sports usually involve the pedals, the winter it involves a set of headphones, a 5am wakeup time, and a set of skins on my skis.

New adventures are the name of the game this winter for some. For me, it was a simple ride on a fat bike. For Brad and Sheena, it is the point in their life that they will remember as the start of an exciting journey that is sure to change their outlook on the world in one way or another.

In less than 2 weeks time, they will put the last of their possessions into storage, save what will fit in a heavily modified 1984 VW bus which they have named “Nacho”. They will then set off for the next 3 years. They will enter mexico at the beginning of the new year, and if all goes well will complete their journey at the end of 2014 after touring the americas, asia, and europe. Their adventures will be documented on the aptly named “Drive Nacho Drive”

All of a sudden, my adventures, in comparison, seem….. tame.

We celebrated the start of their adventure with a few beers and some laughs. Toasting not to the end of their current time in Flagstaff, but instead the beginning of the next phase in their lives.

Adventures, it’s the name of the game.

One word:
Wow.

Two words:
Damn Fast.

A few months ago, Keith and I hatched a plan while things were a bit slow in the office. A plan to travel to Seattle and learn how to drive a car incredibly fast on dirt (and gravel, and mud, and whatever else comes along).

With that in mind, we threw down the deposit for a 1-day course at DirtFish Rally School in Snoqualmie, Washington.

We also planned a nice long weekend in Seattle to check out what else the city had to offer.

But lets be honest, that was really just some filler around the day of the course (albeit, some cool filler). And, therefore, that’s another post for another time.

What we’re talking about right now is a 1-day course that revolved around these cars right here.

300+ horsepower Subaru WRX STis. The engine and drivetrain is pretty much stock, but they installed rally seats, 5-point harnesses, a hydraulic hand brake, new suspension, new tires and wheels, and a whole lot of underbody shielding to protect the plethora of rocks that get thrown up every day.

LOTS of zip ties and MDPE sheilding.

The course is set up so that there are 2 people and 1 instructor per car. The instructors basically stay in the car all day, and the drivers swap out, so you’re driving about 50% of the time, with the other 50% being spent watching and talking to another instructor who’s outside the cars all day.

Here’s Keith and our fearless instructor Don, sitting in our hatchback STi.

We started the day with a bit of classroom to talk about some basic driving techniques with an emphasis on what the ‘rally line’ is through the corners, and how you get as close as possible to that line using weight transfer in the car (and thus control which tires are gripping and which tires are slipping).

We then went out to the skid pad (basically a big circle of gravel) and the slalom course to try out the techniques. The morning seemed a bit slow, but it was pretty critical to start feeling comfortable with things like let foot braking and the fact that you have 300 horsepower of all wheel drive fury at your disposal.

After several runs through each of those two scenarios, we broke for lunch and then got into the meat of the driving after lunch. Another brief classroom overview, and we were strapped into the passenger seats of the cars so that the instructors could show us how to drive the actual rallycross course (called the boneyard) that we would spend the afternoon on.

I think my initial thought was something along the lines of ‘holy shit that was fast. There’s no way I’m ever going to be able to push this car that fast on this pit of gravel and mud’.

Fortunately, I was very wrong.

We spent the afternoon pretty much working up to what would culminate in pushing these cars to their limits. When I was on the gas, it was on the floor, and when I was on the brakes, it was at the very last second coming into a turn.

Interestingly enough, when I was mashing down on that brake, it was with my left foot as well. Again, very much what you’re taught NOT to do when learning to drive, but due to the control you have by being able to actually push the gas and brake at the same time, becomes incredibly essential in this kind of driving.

By the end of the day, I was doing 50+ MPH in second gear down a sweeping turn, with the gas on the floor, controlling the pitch of the car with the brake and hurtling towards 90+ degree turns composed entirely of mud and gravel…. and feeling great about it.

There were several runs near the end of the day that I got finished and just started laughing. I couldn’t believe how good it felt, and how freakin fast I was going.

I asked the Don at a couple points how I was doing during those last runs, and I just remember him saying

“I was just riding in a rally car. Not just a car that could be rallied, but a rally car. There’s not much more than a few seconds to be wrung out of that course, but lets try anyways”.

And try we did.

I think Keith and I were both doing pretty well by the end of the day, as both of us seemed to be catching the car in front of us, and had to keep starting further and further back from them.

There were a few guys there who had previous racing experience on tarmac, and they seemed to have a lot of trouble with some of the lines and with the timing and sequence of things. I think rally driving, and especially the lines they were teaching us, are pretty much directly in conflict with a lot of what those guys learned. Fortunately, never having been on a track or knowing what a ‘racing line’ was, I didn’t really have that problem.

Another paraphrased quote from Don “On a track, I can pretty much mark out where your car should be for the fastest line. Where to brake, where to turn, where to accelerate. When you’re driving a rally car, there’s where you want to be and where you actually end up, everything is part theory and part reaction, you need to know what to do, but also be able to save it when it all goes wrong.”

Fortunately, I think that ‘saving it when it all goes wrong’ is something that I do try to practice. Mostly in the winter and mostly in empty parking lots, but when my car starts getting a bit out of whack, I can usually save it.

It served me well on saturday, as I could tell when I was sliding the car in the correct way, and when I was ‘saving it’. I didn’t have too many incidents with cones because of this instinct, and I think it let me keep rolling when something did get a little off-kilter.

I think Keith had a similar experience, as he’s generally a good all-weather driver as well. Although, he did seem to have the more frequent situation of ending up the wrong way on the track.

(You can tell these pictures are Keith, because his car is pointed directly at a cone in both of them.)

All-in-all, it was one the funnest day I’ve had in a car. Yes, it cost a lot of money, but in the end, there is no other way to (legally) have that sort of experience without buying a car and going to a bunch of events, which is way more expensive.

It did make me think about what it would take to buy an old beater rally car, but the problem is not buying the car, it’s where I could use it. There’s one rallycross track that I’ve found in Arizona, and it’s not even complete yet (it’s in tucson), and there really aren’t any events down here that I could use it in. And really, where could I safely practice? In the end, it’s really not worth it to get one right now, but I’m really glad I took the Dirtfish course.

Maybe this will be my hobby when my legs (knees?) finally rebel in my old age and prevent me from being able to ski and bike any more. Until that point, I’ll put it in the back pocket. Then I’ll buy a car, a couple hundred acres of land, a tractor with a grader blade, and a nice big garage.

I can dream, can’t I?

Check that one off the bucket list, for sure.

I wholeheartedly believe that anyone who owns a subaru in a snowy environment, at some level, thinks they are a rally car driver in the winter.

Or on dirt roads.

Or maybe even on pavement when it’s a little damp.

There’s something in the rough edges of that car that just makes you want to get it dirty. Subaru’s aren’t particularly sexy cars, they aren’t particularly loaded with features, and with the exception of the WRX aren’t particularly powerful for their size.

They do, however, have a racing pedigree and that full-time all wheel drive really inspires confidence.

So about 2-3 months ago, Keith and I were sitting in the office at work talking about vacations and what we each had planned for this fall.

Neither of us really had anything.

He said something about “I’ve always wanted to take one of those courses where they teach you how to drive real fast on a racetrack, or maybe a motorcycle driving school.”

I turned to him and said something to the affect of “I’ve always wanted to take a rally driving class, who cares about the track.”

And thus, a plan was hatched which involved a long weekend to seattle at the beginning of november…..

Yes, it cost a bit of money, and yes, we didn’t really have any other reason to go to seattle. But then again, it’s kinda a once in a lifetime experience, and you can’t take the money with you when you die.

We registered for the 1-day rally fundamentals course, closed our eyes and handed over the credit cards. I just put it in perspective that I spent this much on a day of heli-skiing as well.

Well, almost this much.

Regardless, I got a frequent flyer ticket up to seattle, and I’ve never been there before so it’s a good excuse to check out a new place as well. Keith, Claire and I are headed up thursday night and have a place right by the Pike Street Market so friday and sunday will be spent exploring the city with saturday being our course.

I know I posted something a couple months back about Seattle, but none of us have been there before, so if you have any suggestions, please don’t hesitate to throw them out there. We’re pretty much just winging it for friday and sunday.

It only seems appropriate that I’m going to be driving a rally car the day after Nigel Tufnel Day

This is certainly going to be turned up to 11.