So, on an impulse, I decided a couple weeks ago to take up home brewing. I had been thinking about doing this for a few years, but have never taken the plunge
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I remember the first ZonieCon - the one held in 1998, at the Francisco Grande Hotel in Casa Grande. Our hosts, the Tucson Mob, had brewed some Root Beer for us, and had made commemorative labels for the bottles. Each attendee was to receive a free bottle as a souvenir, and something like 50 Cents or so for each root beer thereafter. And anticipating a large turnout, they had made a LOT of it, and brought many, many bottles.
...But they didn't put any preservative in the mix (I think someone forgot)...and they hadn't counted on it sitting in the back of someone's car for the better part of a hot, sunny day...or the fact that the Francisco Grande Hotel only had one weak, peripatetic old ice machine in the sun-baked cinderblock "Gulag" section which we were checked into, which grudgingly gave only half an ice-bucket of ice during 15 minutes of coaxing and waiting, and no other refrigeration was available to us.
So as the convention went on - and with fewer than 50 attendees in total during the whole convention, with a core of about perhaps 20 of us - we drank a lot of tepid root beer (for free), which progressively became less root and more beer. After about 3 or 4 bottles, one noticed a silight "buzz".
Despite the disaster which that one event was, we made something out of it - and in the end, I am glad to say that I was there to experience it, and the ZonieCons which followed. Good memories.
...But they didn't put any preservative in the mix (I think someone forgot)...and they hadn't counted on it sitting in the back of someone's car for the better part of a hot, sunny day...or the fact that the Francisco Grande Hotel only had one weak, peripatetic old ice machine in the sun-baked cinderblock "Gulag" section which we were checked into, which grudgingly gave only half an ice-bucket of ice during 15 minutes of coaxing and waiting, and no other refrigeration was available to us.
So as the convention went on - and with fewer than 50 attendees in total during the whole convention, with a core of about perhaps 20 of us - we drank a lot of tepid root beer (for free), which progressively became less root and more beer. After about 3 or 4 bottles, one noticed a silight "buzz".
Despite the disaster which that one event was, we made something out of it - and in the end, I am glad to say that I was there to experience it, and the ZonieCons which followed. Good memories.
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