From One Gallon Between My Legs to Five Gallons on Tap: My Homebrewing Journey

Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I knew what I was doing when I started brewing. Nobody does. And honestly? That’s the entire point.

The Spark (December 2016 – March 2017)

It all started the way a lot of hobbies do — as a Christmas gift someone probably thought I’d try once and forget about. Although it was all I talked about for a while so my mom finally said “do something about it” and got me a one gallon kit for Christmas. December 2016, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.

By March 2017, I was living in LA and decided to finally crack it open and give it a shot. And you know what? The beer turned out delicious. Like, genuinely good for a first attempt. There was just one small problem.

It was completely undrinkable.
Turns out, there’s a difference between sanitizers, and I used the wrong one for bottling. Lesson number one in homebrewing: sanitation is not optional, and not all sanitizers are created equal. I learned that the hard way — by pouring out a batch I was otherwise proud of.

But the real story from that first brew? The fermentation.

See, I brewed it in LA right before a cross-country road trip home. I wasn’t about to abandon my first batch, so I did what any reasonable person would do: I took it with me. Literally. That one-gallon jug sat between my legs in the passenger seat, actively fermenting, bubbling away as we drove across the entire country.

If you’ve never sat with a carboy of fermenting beer nestled between your knees for thousands of miles, I can’t say I recommend it for comfort — but I can say there’s something poetic about it. Life, happening right there in your lap. CO₂ quietly off-gassing while the desert rolls by outside the window.

That batch may not have been drinkable, but it was the one that got me hooked.

The Education (The Nano Brewery)

After that road trip, life happened. I took a break from brewing for a while. But the itch never really went away.

Then I got lucky. Someone invited me to help out on brew day at a local nano brewery. And let me tell you — if you ever get the chance to do this, say yes immediately.

That single day changed everything for me. Watching the process at scale, seeing how the mash, the sparge, the boil, the fermentation — all of it connects — it just clicked. They taught me everything I know that day. The theory I understood (okay, fine, I have a biochemistry degree, so the science side wasn’t exactly foreign to me), but the craft of it? The hands-on, feel-the-grain, watch-the-boil, trust-your-instincts part? That came from standing in that brewery and getting my hands dirty.
And here’s what I want to stress: you do not need a biochemistry degree to brew beer. Seriously. People have been making beer for thousands of years, long before anyone knew what a saccharomyces cell looked like. If you can follow a recipe, boil water, and keep things clean, you can make beer. Period. The science is there if you want to geek out on it (and I do), but it’s never a prerequisite.
Anyone can brew. Anyone should brew.

Scaling Up

After that nano brewery experience, I was ready. I bought a five-gallon starter kit and dove in headfirst.

I started with extract brewing — the training wheels of the hobby, though honestly, there’s no shame in extract brewing forever if that’s your thing. Plenty of people make phenomenal beer with extract, and the gap between extract and all-grain is smaller than the all-grain purists want to admit. But eventually, I wanted more control. I wanted to touch every part of the process. So I made the jump to all-grain, and I haven’t looked back.

Since then, it’s been a slow and steady accumulation of equipment. A mash tun. A lauter tun. Two corny kegs (because once you keg, you never want to bottle again — though I still do). And more bottles than I’d like to admit. Way more. If you’re a homebrewer, you know. That corner of the basement. Those boxes you swear you’ll deal with “this weekend” — and yet. They multiply. A friend drops off their empties after a party. You buy a mixed six-pack purely for the bottles. You tell yourself twelve bombers is a reasonable thing to own, and then somehow it becomes thirty, and you stop counting and just start stacking.

I am not proud of the bottle corner. I am also not getting rid of it.
Where This Is All Going

Here’s the part I don’t talk about much yet, because saying it out loud makes it feel real: I think I want to go further with this.

Not “tweak my process and brew more often” further. I mean nano brewery further.
And honestly? Looking back, maybe that was always where this was headed.
When I started my biochemistry degree I had no idea what I wanted to do professionally. I just knew the science was fascinating — cells, fermentation, the controlled chaos of living systems doing exactly what you need them to do if you treat them right. But somewhere in the first year, one of my textbooks had a four or five page list of every career you could build with a life science degree. I went through the whole thing. And I circled brewmaster.

I don’t know why exactly. I hadn’t brewed anything. I barely drank beer. But something about it stuck, got filed away, and apparently waited patiently for about a decade while I figured out the rest.

Probably because I lowkey have run pilot scale fermentations and cell cultures professionally. The science of keeping microorganisms happy, productive, and doing exactly what you want them to do — that's not a hobby for me, it was a career. It IS a career, and that's what I shouldn't need to keep reminding myself. That doing these homebrew fermentations at home is a continuation of that vocation — my knowledge, my ability hasn't changed. The only difference between me and a professional brewmaster is licensure. Which means the slide from "serious homebrewer" to "small commercial brewer" wouldn't be a leap into the unknown so much as a pivot toward something I circled in a textbook before I even knew what I was doing.

It’s still more sketch-on-a-napkin than business plan. But the idea has been getting louder. Every time I taste a batch, even if it isn't perfect, every time someone tries something I made and gets that look on their face, every time I stand at the kettle and feel completely in my element, It's in me, I could do this for real.

The gap between homebrewer and small commercial brewer feels less like a wall these days and more like a very long, very paperwork-heavy door. Now I'm asking different questions. Thinking about licensing, space, what a five-barrel system would actually require.

Maybe it comes to nothing. Maybe the dream stays a dream and I keep making five-gallon batches in my kitchen forever — which, honestly, would still be a good life. But I’d rather find out I tried and it was hard than wonder what would have happened if I’d taken the thing I circled seriously.
So: watch this space.

If You’re Just Getting Started

If you’re reading this from the beginning of your own brewing journey — or if you’ve been thinking about starting and just haven’t pulled the trigger yet — I want to leave you with something actually useful.

Buy Star San. Not whatever sanitizer you already have. Star San specifically. No-rinse, food-safe, genuinely idiot-proof. It would have saved my first batch and it will save yours.

Start smaller than you think you need to. A one-gallon kit or a basic one-vessel five-gallon setup is plenty to learn the fundamentals. You’ll want to upgrade eventually, but the equipment doesn’t make the beer — the process does. Learn the process first.

Make friends with your local homebrew shop. These people want you to succeed. They’ve seen every mistake you’re about to make. Ask questions. Take their advice. Buy your ingredients there when you can, even if it’s a few dollars more than ordering online. The knowledge exchange is worth it.
Join a homebrew club or community. Reddit’s r/homebrewing is genuinely one of the more helpful corners of the internet. Local clubs are even better — in-person feedback on your beer is irreplaceable, and the culture around this hobby is warm in a way that’s pretty rare.

And the most important thing: just start. The perfect moment isn’t coming. The equipment you have is enough. Your first batch might be undrinkable, might ride shotgun across the country in a jug between your knees, and might still be the best thing that ever happened to your free time.
It was for me.