I've been brewing my own beer and mead since 1997 and while it sounds like it'd be very difficult to do, as long as you can boil water and keep your kitchen clean, you can do it too.

No matter what style of beer, wine, or mead you're making you follow the same steps. First you prepare the sugar solution that the yeast will convert to alcohol, then you put it in a closed container to ferment for a while, and when it's done you transfer it to bottles or kegs.

Now, I'm concentrating on a few styles of beer that I really like, including a dark wheat beer and stouts.

I also make meads, a type of honey wine, which take a lot more time to ferment, but the end results are quite delicious.

The next step in my evolving madness I've built a chiller based on the plans found on the Internet. I had to make a few modifications because two inch thick foam board is not readily available in the metroplex. Other than that its pretty much built according to plans and functions perfectly. I've managed to keep a fermentation at 67 degrees for three weeks, having to replace the pair of one gallon ice jugs every other day with the ambient temperature between 78 and 85 degrees.

I've also built a kegerator out of a used fridge and now have two taps available for kegs of brew. Kegging is definitely the way to go, it beats bottling hands down and means that any time I want I've got beer on tap. You can check out my how-to on kegging homebrew if you’d like.

Check out the What's Fermenting page to see what I've currently got bubbling away.