I'm back!

Hey all,

I don't know who reads this, or who has been reading this in the nearly year since I last posted. I last wrote about fall 2014's brewings, started a post about online resources I use for my homebrewing, and then 2015 happened. As you may know, my wife and I moved to Berkeley, CA from Cleveland, OH summer 2014 for my first post-graduate research position. Within months my wife found a seminary program to attend and takes classes full time on top of part time work in the morning and teaching piano  lessons afternoons throughout the week. I still brewed, at an even more aggressive rate than before, but just didn't have the energy or made the time to write about it and other beer and brewing related items.


I'm trying to figure out my future. I ostensibly went into physics to become research faculty at a university somewhere. That might still happen. I'd love to teach physics at a collegiate level. I haven't written that off yet. But I love to work with my hands, and find great pleasure and meditative renewal in making things, particularly consumables. It's practical, and after a morning, afternoon, evening, days, weeks, or even months of effort, I have something to show for it. It's why I enjoyed design and construction so much in grad school. I could sit at a computer with data and spend days feeling like I'm spinning my wheels with occasional successes. But when I sat down at CAD software, or went into the machine shop, I always came away with a product to show for it and a feeling of time well spent, even if things didn't quite turn out right. So that has to be in my future, and I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate it into my career. My wife has noticed how much positivity I exude and joy I experience when I homebrew. It's a hand-working, practical output fun activity, and I'm brainstorming ways to bring it into greater presence in my life. Additionally, God has really been turning my heart toward helping people, and being His hands and feet here on earth for the downtrodden, oppressed, ignored. I have no idea how that will play out in my life, but with my wife taking her career into urban ministry, I have a feeling that what I do will have an aspect of that, as well.

And so I am reviving regular updates of this blog. For work I recently drove from the Black Hills to eastern Tennessee and back again, hitting up as many microbreweries and brewpubs as I could. As such, I coined the moniker "brewourist" (brewery tourist) for myself, and might change my twitter account or something to that affect. That will be one of my first new posts. I will also give an account of my previous year of brewing; I haven't been lax in photo documentation, so expect to see them. But I'm not sure about continuing to post the full recipes. If I want to go into brewing professionally these will be my income source, but I also know of an "open source" brewery in Minnesota that posts its recipes to some degree, so I might take a clue from them. I also joined the Bay Area Mashers homebrew club in the SF East Bay, and so will talk about that.

I've been reading brewing and brewery books, drinking as much homebrew and beer as I can, talking about it with friends, and dreaming. I have ideas to implement and people to talk to to help along the way. I aim to make this a chronicling of what I do and how I do it, and you're invited along for the ride.

I've tried to promise a schedule before, and was never able to stick to it, but I know that consistency is the key to gaining readers and success, so I have to do that somehow. I'll figure it out.

Any ideas, suggestions, questions?
Let me know. Leave a comment, to find me on twitter @AdamWadeBradley or untappd @PhysicistAB.
Until next time friends, happy brewing!