Boll Weevil Brewery

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About the Boll Weevil Brewery

The Boll Weevil Brewery, my home brewery, was founded in early 2003, and gets it's name from my hometown's one and only claim to fame: the Boll Weevil Monument.  The lady holding the black bug in my brewery logo is the infamous monument, which stands proudly in the center of main street.

I became interested in the subject of homebrewing after seeing a few homebrewing supplies in a neighboring town's local hardware store and I began to research home beer making on the internet. Of course my first question was: Is this legal? And the answer was: YES! I can legally make 200 gallons of beer a year if there are two adults in the household?!?!? Now, my wife doesn't really like beer, but heck the law is the law, so I guess that's just another 100 gallons for me!

To start my adventure, I plonked down approximately $50 dollars for an equipment kit from Listermann.com which came with a 6.5 gallon primary fermenting bucket with lid, racking cane and tubing, a bottle capper, a hydrometer, and a bottling bucket with spigot.

I am a former Miller Lite drinker (I know, I know...shut up!), and not knowing anything much about beer styles, I ordered a Pilsner kit from Listermann's with my equipment kit. Well, I found out that a Pilsner beer is a Lager beer, that is it needs to be fermented at a lower temperature than Ale beers. Not being able to get my front bedroom/fermentation chamber down below 68 degrees (my wife and kid were turning blue from the house being so cold, heh heh), I had to ferment it at quite a bit out of it's temperature range, which makes the beer have certain off flavors (fruity, butterscotch or buttery flavors.) This sounds nasty, and it definitely isn't as smooth and pleasant as the beer is intended to be, but it was some of the best beer that I have ever had! I'm sure that making the stuff myself added to my enjoyment of the brew, but from that first taste I was hooked.

I had purchased 36 22oz beer bottles, and saved up another case or so of used pop top commercial 12oz bottles, and my first two batches went into these. Bottling beer is a pain in the arse! The results are great and convenient if you need to carry a six pack to a friends house or want to give some away, but the labor involved in cleaning, sanitizing, storing the bottles and bottling the beer was definitely something that I wanted to avoid if possible, so my next big purchase was a used refrigerator, a 5 pound CO₂ tank and some corney kegs. Corney kegs are 5 gallon soft drink premix containers made of stainless steel, and are absolutely perfect to put 5 gallons of homebrew into. I also "won" 5 faucets mounted into a stainless steel backsplash from E-Bay, and mounted this onto the side of the used "kegerator". The brew gods were happy, because 5 corneys fit perfectly into the unit, so now I can have 5 different brews on tap and ready to go!

Up to this point, I had been brewing my extract kits on my lovely wife's stove. Any of you that have cooked any amount of time are familiar with boilovers...and 2 gallons of syrupy beer wort is just waiting for a chance to overflow the pot! And there's nothing like a sticky mess on the stove to make a wife come unglued either, let me tell you. With this in mind, I found a Morone Turkey fryer at the local Lowe's hardware, complete with a 7.5 gallon pot and 170,000 BTU propane burner! With this newly added equipment, I can now perform full boil brewing, and can do it outside, where any spillage or boilovers are easily cleaned away using the water hose.

Now that my brewing has moved to 5 gallons of cooking wort, there is a need for a better way to cool down the hot liquid. I fashioned a homemade Immersion Chiller out of 50' of refrigeration line from Lowes, and a couple of water hose connectors. This sexy beast will take 5 gallons of 211 degree wort down to about 78 degrees in just over 10 minutes (when the input water temp is low, and with ample stirring of the wort)! This gives the brew a better cold break which lets undesirable proteins in the wort separate out from the sweet beer nectar, making a cleaner looking beer when finished.

A friend donated a small chest freezer, and I purchased a temperature controller, so now I can brew lager beers, but admittedly I need a bit more practice with this kind of beer! And, a bit more patience also, heh heh. Waiting 3 weeks or so to drink an ale is bad enough, but lagering is just torture!

I'm currently accumulating the equipment necessary to go to 10 gallon batches and all grain brews, but I'm still very happy with the quality of Listermann's beer kits after using them for 3 or 4 years, and haven't motivated myself to increase the brewing time on brewday just to save a few bucks or "have more control" over my beers. Maybe one day when I'm retired and have nothing better to do with my time...I'll give it a whirl then.