Our Current Setup

Just so that everyone knows what Blake and I are working with, I thought I'd give you a quick overview of our current supplies (keep in mind that we just started).

So Blake and I originally started off with purchasing a home brewer's kit from Midwest Supplies, and have added some equipment to our arsenal over the past year.
Summary of equipment:

Home Brewing Equipment stored down in my Man Cave

• fermenting plastic bucket (that came with the kit and basically acts as a place to store equipment now)
• bottling bucket
• 2 glass carboys (with handles); 1-6.5 gallon, 1-5 gallon
• 5 gallon brew kettle
• bottle dryer
• steel spoon
• electric thermometer
• 12 and 22oz bottles
• bottle capper
• siphon equipment
• hydrometer (with a thief)
• air locks
• carboy brush
• cleaning stuff

The "heating contraption"

We recently purchased the 22oz bottles to help save time on bottling day and it has been awesome. Just have to clean/rinse about half the amount of bottles has definitely saved time. Right now we are looking and saving up money for a kegging system, but aren't quite there yet. During our last beer, Hoffman went out and purchased our latest gem....the fryer. Apparently this heating contraption speeds up the process by being able to raise the temperature of our wort faster than our electric stove tops....who knew?

During the last brew day where we used this "heating contraption", we did have a slight boil over, due to what sounds like a common brewing day problem....drinking too much beer while brewing. One of the joys of brewing day is getting together with friends and having some different kinds of beer while making beer, does it get any better?!

This equipment does get transported between Blake's house and mine. Each house seems to have it's advantages, and makes us both feel like we're a part of this brewing process. The house that gets decided upon is where we end up brewing, transferring between fermenters,  and bottle the beer, then we divide up all the bottles between each other.

One of the main problems with this, is that Blake lives in Volga, SD. Those of you that do not know where this is, it's roughly 3,405,345 miles from any other town.

Apparently Google Maps says Volga is only about 7 miles away from Brookings, this can't be...