On the subject of children.

Today an amazing, life changing thing happened to me. With a burp and a blast of spit up, a baby came into this world. Now, before any more terror is placed in the trembling bodies of my close friends I should tell you, I refer neither to a human child of my own, nor do I refer to an ungodly abomination that I may have created via a pact with the devil and the spare parts from a 1978 Pontiac Lemans. No, the child of which I speak, is a bubbling, burping, bastard I like to call, Home Brewed Beer. Using nothing but grain, water, hops and yeast, my friends and I have turned the most rudimentary and inert ingredients and created life. Well, granted, the yeast was already alive but to be fair, I could have just killed it but I didn't, I fed it, so in a way, I played god and it all works out in the end. Today was the second day of fermentation and my beer is going strong, I must admit, I am a little giddy. I figure that this is what expectant fathers feel like. I am over joyed yet nervous. Beer is, after all, a lot like a child. You must keep it healthy as it grows, not allowing any contaminates to enter it. Otherwise you could end up with a retardation problem in the beer. Of course, you can pour bad beer down the drain, unlike what that woman in Kansas found out she could not do with her children. Beer can be harmed by sunlight and too much oxygen, children should be allowed to experience life out doors and should have plenty of oxygen. This is a good point for the great unwashed of our country, beer goes in the fridge, children go outside, not vice versa and if by any chance you are one of those people with an old fridge just sitting out near your child's swing set, at least have that common decency to shoot some air holes in it but and this is important, DO NOT SHOOT THE FRIDGE THAT HAS THE BEER IN IT! Unless it's a product of Budswieser, Coors or Miller, then what the hell, fire away. Hell, who am I kidding? If you are a fan of those beers, you probably don't read too much anyway and are even less likely to use the internet for anything more than finding NASCAR related pornography. Back too my point though. I am now worried about my beer as worried as I would be if I was to have a child, which I would also raise in a bucket in my basement. I am worried that I used too much of certain ingredients. Will I recognize it when it is ready or will I feel like the blond haired, blue eyed business man when he realizes that his green eyed, red headed wife just gave birth to their brown eyed, black haired, baby that bares a striking resemblance to the black guy in the office that always gets to work twenty five minutes after you even though he lives right next door and is usually heading to his car as you pull out of your drive way. What if I under cooked it, like some strange premature child? It was not in the oven ling enough and must struggle to make it. Could the struggle be too much? Will the beer never really mature but simply sit in my basement for the next fifty years playing X-Box and wondering what could have been? I simply can't answer these questions, i just don't know. Making beer takes so much preparation and planning, trial and error and trying again. It is a relatively exact science yet, still takes an amount of disregard for tradition and a lack of worry about failure to really make it work. So, I take it back, making beer is not like having a child, making beer is actually difficult, whereas any mook can miss spray his inferior genetics into another genetically inferior dolt and create a bumbling, drooling, poop machine that will probably grow up to be a senator and push for more mandates to hinder the art of brewing.