So this year I got into home brewing thanks to Meredith. She bought me a home-brewing kit for Valentine’s Day, and we brewed up our first batch in May. The beer turned out successfully, and two weeks ago we brewed up a new batch. We decided to get a little more complicated the second time around, based on some encouragement from our local homebrew supplier. We actually steeped some grains before adding the malt extract and we actually used real hops this time instead of hopped malt extract. I was a little impatient with cooling the wort and as a result pitched the yeast at 75F, which was the upper range of the yeast’s viability. Happily fermentation began, and when we sampled a little bit of the beer before bottling there were no off flavors, so we were lucky this time around. This beer is an ale version of an Oktoberfest lager. We are thinking of naming it something to do with baseball – short-list candidates are “Youktoberfest” after Kevin Youkilis and “Yawktoberfest” after Yawkey Way. Our next plans for brewing are perhaps a second round of the same recipe but this time using secondary fermentation, or a stout.