by Ann Johnson

Created on: October 01, 2008   Last Updated: November 07, 2008

Home brewing is so much fun and so easy to do, that soon you are looking for something more challenging to brew besides beer.

You will spend hours in brew shops, looking around for which brew you will make, kegs, buckets, bottle brushes, bottles and all the other little goodies which go with brewing.

Depending on which type of brewing you do, you can get rid of the family on the weekend by boiling up the hops etc in an old saucepan on the stove. That stuff smells like rotten hay and will clear the house in no time, so you can be left alone to wash out approximately 50 bottles in the bathtub, then sterilize them in the laundry tubs, then up end them to dry on every available piece of cupboard space in the laundry and kitchen.

When your brew is ready to bottle, you go downstairs to your shed alone to do the most important job all. Occasionally you swear as you break a bottle whilst capping it, but basically the task is done easily and soon you have crates and crates of bottles, complete with date and brew type hand written on little stickers on every bottle. You stack them and note the date you can finally sample the fruits of your labour.

Weeks later, as you sit in the lounge room relaxing watching football, you hear what sounds like breaking glass. You listen, but hear nothing so forget about it. Through the night, you hear it again, and this time decide to visit your brew to make sure all is well. Despair! There on the ground is a menacingly jagged broken bottle neck, still with the cap on. You carefully look around to see several of your precious bottles have become so gassy they have blown out the top of the bottle. This looks dangerous, but you are so excited that something is finally happening in your carefully washed and sterilized bottles! Luckily they are in a downstairs room by themselves, and can't hurt anything else if they explode.

You quietly clean up, purposely forgetting to tell everyone else in the family what you found down there, and go about life waiting for the day you can sample.

Finally it comes, and you have invited your best mate over to sample and slap your back and drink way too much, then tell you how great the beer is and what a wonderful job you did.

The fact that hangovers are rare after drinking home brew means you woke up the next morning feeling great. Because of this, you are now planning another brew, and another, and another, until you have been doing it for years, and are now bored.

You are sick of washing bottles and sterilizing

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