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Retriever Brewers had its start in my determination to make hard cider.
After researching the project, I decided that what I really wanted to make was apple mead.
Mead is honey wine; instead of using water in the recipe, I used organic apple juice.
I thought the resulting brew was pleasing; evidently so did the judge who gave it second place in the
2002 Wine Smith
competition.
As anyone who's made mead can tell you, it's a long process. Longer than "regular" wine, for sure.
The apple mead above took 9 months and would probably improve with age if there were any left!
At any rate, it is not unusual for meads to take 12 or even 18 months to get to the stage where you can bottle it.
And even then, depending on the mead, it may have to age in the bottle.
I hadn't started more than a couple of meads when I started wishing for something I could brew that took less time to finish than mead.
After looking around a bit, I settled on beer. While I know this will be rank blasphemy to those who are dedicated to the art, I use beer kits.
No, not the "Beer in a Box" type, the "open a can and add corn sugar and water" kind.
I love that I can start a brew in an hour and bottle it a week later.
Two weeks after that, I have eminently drinkable beer.
After I made 2 different kinds of beer, the question of labels came up.
That, in turn, led to the "what are we gonna call this" question. We have dogs, and most of them are sporting breeds: currently the roll includes two
Goldens, two antique Labs, and a Chessie
. So we became Retriever Brewers, in honor of those dogs and
those who have gone
before us.
Right now only the meads are for public consumption; my heretical beer is for my own satisfaction and drinking at home. If you're at a mead competition in the
Southeast, check out the entries...we might be there!
Please sign my guestbook
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