Bye Bye Good Brewer

It was a sad day when I heard the news, yes that is correct my friend Daniel has closed up his lovely little shop here in Livermore and the Good Brewer is no more.   With our local shop gone what is a Livermore home brewer to do???


With this brewing life changing event I decided it was time to visit HopTech in Dublin and give them a chance.  I also reviewed the potential of online ordering, but after viewing the shipping costs I dropped that idea, I mean for a $45 extract beer recipe it was going to cost me $10 to ship it.  Given that HopTech is "on my way to work" I'd rather save that $10 and spend it where it's meant to be spent, on beer and brewing of course.

So life moves on and now we use HopTech, but how does that affect my brewing???  The main chang is all in the preparation.  I now have to do a pre-brew day inventory cross-check on all supplies as well as the recipe ingredients, since it would now be a 40min round trip if I forgot something, which would not work on brew, rack, or bottle days :)   Also, as I mentioned it's "on my way to work" so I'd rather stop off during a work day.

As to how I feel about HopTech, their great the couple that runs it really knows their stuff and they have a great inventory of grains, hops and extracts amongst all of the other equipment one might need to brew.  They are very knowledgeable and love to contribute to AHA to keep homebrewing alive - in fact when I was there they had a bunch of kegs all brewed and ready to server in AHA alley at Octoberfest.  It turns out that they they server kegs at two beer festivals a year as a way to promote home brewing.  As I continued talking with the owners, I found that they carry over 40 hops because he loves to have hop variety while brewing and they carry all sorts of varieties of extracts because she loves to brew with extracts - even a Rye extract.  From the outside the shop doesn't look like much, but as you walk around you'll find out it is bigger than it looks and most of the inventory is just "in the back".

I'll end with saying that while I'm sad to see the Good Brewer go, I'm happy to have found what I believe will be a solid replacement for my local home brew store!