Game On!!
Ok, so the first brew of the new season is scheduled for May 28th, 2006. We’re brewing a Red Ale. We got a recipe from a magazine I had laying around, but of course, it’s a guideline (as usual). We’re following it more closely than usual, because we haven’t brewed in a while, so we wanna play it safe the first time out to avoid wasting the first 5 gallons of beer of the season. After that, of course, all bets are off, and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled program of sheer reckless abandon, which has, in the past, produced some really good beer.
The holdup in brewing has been a planned equipment upgrade. Our setup is slightly fancier now, all owing to our complete and total laziness. Matt and I are not fond of lugging 50 lb. vessels of boiling stuff around the back yard. We’ve purchased a pump, so that now instead of having to make sure this vessel is above that one, we can just pump the wort from one vessel to the other.
We’ve also replaced an old Coleman cooler chest with a stainless steel keg for our mash/lauter tun, and we’ve purchased an ABT false bottom for the keg. So now every vessel in our setup is a stainless steel keg, which is nice. It’ll be a little easier to clean, easier to move if we need to, and it can be repurposed to do just about anything, because you can apply heat directly to a steel keg. It’s not recommended that you do that with plastic Coleman cooler chest, for those who are wondering 
One thing that might also happen before we brew is a conversion of a pressure cooker into a simple steam injection system, which would allow us to do step mashing without fiddling with the water in the boil kettle. It could simplify stuff, or it could get us both injured. We’ll keep you posted…. I hope.
We’ve tossed around a bunch of other ideas, too, but most are kind of boring. We want to build a stand, we might want another burner, which means we won’t build the stand out of 2×4s, for example. By the way, it’s bad to install burners into wooden structures. This is why your typical gas stove is made of metal and not wood.
This reminds me that we should probably make the following disclaimer (which will appear on future articles on the site):
“We at Bamf Beer claim no responsibility for our dumbass ideas and moronic actions. Use at your own discretion”
That was Matt’s take, which is probably a lot more useful than mine, which was:
“We are momos. Don’t do any of this”.
If you have a good disclaimer idea, let us know.