When good ideas (beer) go horribly wrong...

About 6 weeks ago while watching a few (YouTube) videos I came across a video discussing using other types of liquids to use in extract beers or in the grain bill for mashing and other purposes. Later on I watched a video using watermelon in the process instead of using water for the mash/boil process, at the time of the video I was very skeptical of using anything but water. But for fun and only risking 1 gallon on the process I decided to take a risk but with a twist. I thought of the videos on YouTube and watched people used pretty much anything they could extract juice (watermelon, oranges etc) so i decided to use cucumbers (why not?). The recipe is as follows (below)

Grains: 8.5 lbs Dingemans Belgian Pils 1.6L

.5 lbs Gambrinus Honey Malt 28L

Boiled Cucumber peeled and pressed for juice

Hops: 1 oz German Tradition 6.9% AA 60 min

Yeast: Nottingham

Tasting Notes: It's well interesting...well it's horrible and when i say horrible i mean it, i completely misjudged the taste of cucumber in beer, and well i am conceding that this was a first run of the idea, confidence is not high on this one!

Who was the first???

During my early thoughts of starting a brewery or even home brewing, I thought too myself how fun is this going to be? And initially I was skeptical just because of the entire bloody math that is involved into brewing (period). One fault of mine is that when I get involved in a hobby or for that matter anything that involves my hands or body, I tend to invest (research) time that should not be invested in a project. But nevertheless the wheels were in motion when I really began home brewing and the obsession with yeast, proteins, nutrients became to take over my daily thoughts. I would find myself at Wal-Mart looking at a plastic tote and asking “how could I use that for my brewery?” With that being said I was asked by a local brewer “why do I want to get into the beer business?” I replied why not, it seems to be the America dream, creating a product with your own two hands! To my surprise the response I received was less than impressive, but it did force me to ask a simple question.

Who can I look up too in the brewing industry as a mentor/trail blazer? Sure Garrett Oliver is with Brooklyn Brewery but who else is there? And who was the first? After about a month of library research and numerous phone calls to Oshkosh, Wisconsin I found the first. Joseph Nigl opened people’s Brewing of Oshkosh, WI on May 11, 1911 at the time his idea was too setup a brewery of 15,000. But that was not too be due to a lack of beer flowing in the state.

Theodore Mack, born in Alabama enlisted into the military after high school claimed that education was the foundation of all. He also attended The Ohio State University on a football scholarship and finally graduated from Marquette University. He also started postgraduate work at the University of Wisconsin in social work and worked for the Milwaukee county welfare department before moving to Pabst Brewing where he worked his way up the ladder in the industry.