Home brewing.  What can I say, I love it.  I love making it, I love thinking through my recipes and learning new tidbits about it.  My current tradition has been to not really care about peeling labels or making my own.  This shouldn’t be mistaken as merely a utilitarian use of beer.  I just have been more concerned about only the actual beer’s flavor aesthetics.

I think that’s changing.

Recently, several people have taken upon themselves to help in the creation of my beer labels.  This unsolicited kindness got my mind thinking about design.  For this reason I’ve started the process of drawing up some preliminary designs for my beer and have, despite myself, found it to be a type of brewing catharsis that I formerly knew nothing about.

Isn’t it interesting that the world of brewing offers so many passions (and newly found passions) that you might have never know otherwise?  I think so.  For me, there is a wider statement that should be made.  My beer just keeps giving back to me.  In some sense it has created a neurological junkism that continues to open up my mind and my world.

Several times on the site, I’ve appealed to the fact that my commercial beer purchases have seen a drastic decline.  In fact, I’m not sure that the word drastic captures the change.  It seems, in short, that it’s certainly about beer…but it’s perhaps about more than beer itself.  A whole new world of passions have been awoken.  And that is something that I sorely need sometimes.

What about you?  Do you make your own labels?  Has beer opened up your world?  I’m dying to know just know a little more about beer through your passion.