Aaaaaaand, we're back

We've officially made our first starter in North Carolina and Rowdy Reptile Brewing is back in business. We have a two-car garage, and next to the door going into the house is a cabinet/counter top that is a perfect spot for the stir plate. We set up our shelves to the left and can easily store all of our brew equipment on shelves. I dont think we will be brewing in the garage any more as we have a nice yard now so we'll be doing most of the brewing back there so the dogs can run around while we brew and we'll also have access to a hose. Our old place didnt have a hose, so we are very excited about how much easier it will be to brew with a hose instead of having to go up and down a flight of stairs for every drop of water we need.

On the other side of the door we set up the fermentation fridge and stacked our cases of empty bottles. The white board on top of the fridge was originally in our kitchen, but since we've gotten a bigger one, I am going to use this one as a "What's Fermenting" board. Now that we're in NC, we'll also have to start getting stickers from breweries here to add to the fridge and expand the collection.

Our first brew will be our Double Pale ale, but a little different from previous versions. The homebrew store here was out of Amarillo hops, so we will be dry hopping with a hop we havent used before called Citra. Shockingly, it has lots of citrus aspects, so it shouldn't be too different from Amarillo.

Since the homebrew store here is much smaller (and therefore the selection of grains is smaller) we've decided that we are going to plan more of our brews in advance and buy the ingredients online. The online place only does grain in 1 lb increments like the store, but it is a bit cheaper, and the hops are much much cheaper, so we will be able to make up the shipping costs there. We are looking into ways to store the small/random amounts of specialty grains that we will have left over, and I'm sure with the random assortment of grain/hops on hand, we'll inevitably do some "kitchen-sink style of beers."

So far we have planned for the Double Pale Ale later this week, then the Black IPA next week. After that we have ingredients for a schwarzbier, saison (with lemon zest, honey, and black pepper, yum!), dubbel (that we'll age on some figs from our fig tree), and a British-style porter for our Fall beer.