Latest / Arizona Unscripted / Episode 17: 🌵 Arizona Unscripted - Arizona Hobbies: The Passions That Bring Us Together!
Transcript
- Arizona Unscripted: Welcome to Arizona Unscripted. I'm your host, Bart, alongside my wonderful co-hosts Diane, Jim, and Catherine. From time to time we'll be joined by special guests from communities all across the Grand Canyon state. So Arizona Unscripted is all about Arizona. I mean everywhere in Arizona. It's peoples, places, the events, and local issues that help shape our everyday lives. From time to time we'll be revisiting small towns and going to big cities from hidden gems and great and see great local food or talk about it at least. History, culture, and the challenges facing our communities. We're here to have a great time, real conversations with real Arizonans. So our goal is simple. Celebrate what makes Arizona unique while bringing together a voice from every corner of the state. So whether you're a lifelong resident, a newcomer, or just someone who loves Arizona, we hope you'll feel right at home. So grab a cup of coffee or something cool. Sit back and join us as we explore the people, places, and stories that make Arizona one of the best places in America. Welcome to Arizona Unscripted. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Diane, my co-host. Hey, Diane. Hey, Bart. It's so good to be here with you today. I'm really excited about today's topic. And ⁓ with that, you know, I just want to mention we've got Jim and Catherine here. ⁓ and Carol from Mojave, and we've got Connie here from Gila. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to them because I just cannot wait to hear. about hobbies today. Ooh hobbies. I love hobbies. Jim. I got a good hobby. That's what I heard. Yeah, we've heard that. I moved here about in 2005 and I did a little leather work before I retired at 2009. And then I started brewing beer with my son. Homebrew We bought a little starter kit and brewed a couple ⁓ brews ⁓ on a propane burner and stuff. Wow. And then then we started ⁓ the whole grain brewing and it just escalated on to I have all kinds of stuff now ⁓ to brew with. I've got an electric brewer that You can program on your phone and and ⁓ set all the parameters you need and wow that sounds fancy and let it brew itself. He even has some fancy etched beer glasses that he showed us last time. That was pretty impressive. So you got the whole thing. You got the whole setting brewing on it. Yeah. So I mean deal is like a kit do you buy or is it like a like a special equipment set or a kit where they give you all the ingredients and we bought a kit with the pot and the fermenter and all the stuff you need to do it with. But we we that ended up not making enough beer for us in and one time. We had to brew too many times. So now we we got a much bigger pot and and brewed more beer in that one. So I'd get I'd buy a fifty-five pound sack of grain. Wow. And ⁓ that's a lot we could get about fifteen twelve packs out of that. Wow. ⁓ when's the taste testing? Yeah, exactly. Is it a well I've been I've been busy, I haven't been brewing. I just got this new system and have And do you have your recipe? I I know it's like three ingredients, right? But do you like you do your own thing to make like a pills beer? And there's the water and the ⁓ hops and ⁓ and then the ⁓ yeast. ⁓ yeah. And then you like you figure out like you're gonna make an IPA or a piller or you get a recipe, you know, get an idea of what you gotta how much water you need to begin with. You heat the water up to about 168 degrees. Okay. You you put the You take that water and put it in a lotter ton, they call it, with a false bottom on it. You put the grain in there, you dump the water in there, you let it set for an hour, and then ⁓ drain that that wart off, and they call it wart, you put it in a boiling pot, and then you boil it for you boil it down till you get the right specific gravity with With the sugars that are in the beer in the grain. And then once you get it to the Pacific gravity, you ⁓ cool it down right away. And here in Arizona, that isn't always easy to do. But I figured out I I take a cooler and I put ice in it and put water in it. And then I got a little pump that I pumped that around. Yeah. ⁓ an immersion ⁓ cooler and cools it down to You get it down to sixty eight degrees or so. Wow. And then you ⁓ pour it in a fermenter and then you ⁓ put the yeast in it and let it set for about a week. Wow. Yeah. And then after a week you you can take it out of that fermenter and put it into a secondary fermenter, and you get a lot of the trub and and the dead yeast out of the bottom of it and put it in another one, let it set for ⁓ I usually put it in a glass one, let it set for two weeks, and then after two weeks you can bottle it or put it in a keg and and ⁓ drink it. So I have a question for you, Jim. And and perhaps this is something that you might try your small cooker for. Do you ever make non alcoholic beer? Yeah, you can. All you gotta do is not put the yeast in there. Is that the difference? I I I have no idea. Because all the yeast does is the yeast ⁓ eats the sugars up and it turns ⁓ it creates CO two and alcohol. And and then after if you the longer you let it set, the more alcohol you get out of it. Well, I know that a lot of breweries you can go to a ⁓ bar that has their own brewery and they have quite a few choices of NA beers and ⁓ that's what ⁓ I drink is non-alcoholic beer. So when we have the taste test, would you make some NA beer for me and make it extra small I can do that. I didn't realize it takes weeks. No. Well you know it's kind of like one of those things that you do just to ⁓ be doing what everybody else is doing. Well the beer industry has gone ⁓ away from home brewing and and breweries. Some a lot of these little micro breweries are going out of business now. Are they because ⁓ because MBEv is a distribution company for beer and they got forty seven forty six percent of the beer in the world they control. What and all these ⁓ All these little breweries, when they get big, MBEV goes in and buys them out, uses their their name and and produces that beer all over the world if they want to, you know. Well, but ⁓ that's what's put ⁓ home brewing is kinda going to the wayside because a lot of people aren't drinking those craft beers anymore. They're drinking the non alcoholic, they're drinking the seltzers and the They have ⁓ canned cocktails, cocktails ready to drink or something like that. Yeah. So that's taking a bite out of the home brewing system. Wow. Well and I'm also hearing the cost of supplies has really gone up as well, right? So it's making bought up a lot of the a lot of the supply houses, they've bought them and ⁓ they've raised the price of of the grains and stuff. So you can't compete with the with the Miller lights and the Budweisers and all the big brew brewing cookies. Yeah, 'cause they own all the all the split sply chains business. They raise it up. Yeah. We used to make it like a twelve pack used to cost twelve dollars and we could make that same p twelve pack for about three dollars. ⁓ wow. And and now the twelve packs around twenty dollars and it costs us almost seventeen to Brilliant beer, so it's still worth it, but I think you can change your you know you can have your different recipe and everything, but you also Yeah, we can make all different kinds of recipes. Well, you gotta keep that alive though, you know, keep that alive as a as a art form. That's what I'm doing. It's such a good hobby. You know, last week Carol and I had a rub beer and which we hadn't had in I don't know, very long time. But I was thinking when you were talking about home brewing, when I go to the breweries, they have brewed root beer, like their own What is that? What how is it the same process? Like what's root beer? It's beer with ⁓ the saffr sassafras roots in it. ⁓ really? ⁓ my gosh. It tastes just like root beer. But no, I'll just like nine percent alcohol in it. Wait, what? Rubbeer? Yeah, you'll get drunk off that root beer. ⁓ my god. well, I didn't know that. Okay. Well that's good to know. That's why on their board they'll they'll have the A B F, the alcohol by volume. And and ⁓ that'll tell you how much alcohol is in it. Usually like Budweiser and them are around five, five and a half percent alcohol. Have you been to Guinness? ⁓ yeah. That's a cool place. I mean, like the you know, the ⁓ he got the license or something happening of he's able to do the licensing or something back back in the day for a chicken a year. ⁓ wow. Well, you know, I was thinking when we were thinking about hobbies. We've talked about fast cars. We've talked about road trips. We've talked about barbecue. We've talked about brewering. And all of these are hobbies of yours, Jim. Yeah. All that's great. I did that when I was in high school. Hopefully not drinking the beer along with the car. Right. Separate both copies. Not a good idea. That's right. And on the other side of the spectrum is a little bit slower for those of us, ⁓ artists and writers. And I know we've got Connie here, and Connie is a writer. I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit, Connie. Right. I started in twenty eleven. My daughter was living with us at the time and she made a friend here in Payson who was ⁓ teaching herself to be a writer. And my daughter got all excited about it. And it was October, it was already almost halfway through October, and she came home from a visit with her friend and said Mom, I'm gonna try and write a book. You can you can write a book in a month at this at this online place called National Novel Writing Month, Nano. And so she was all excited about it and I said, Well, ⁓ how how do you do that? And she said, Well, you have to write sixteen hundred and sixty seven words a day, every day for the whole thirty days of November. ⁓ and then you can write You can write a fifty thousand word book. And I said, Well, how hard is it to write sixteen hundred and sixty-seven words a day? And she said, Well, if you think it's so easy, you do it. I said, Well, I don't know how to write a book. And she comes, goes into her bedroom, comes back out with a book on how to write a book. Wow. So I read through that really fast and I kind of followed the the game plan that ⁓ the author was Larry Brooks. And he was ⁓ actually a script writer for television in addition to writing novels. And so he divided it up into the four acts of what a TV show would do and said, Okay, this this is your opening. This is how you set everything up. This is the second part where things get really bad. This is the third part where it goes to hell in a handbasket. And of course the fourth part is where you tie everything all up. And I went, okay. And I used a little I used a pad, you know, stickies and and put put them on my closet door in four rows. And every sticky was its own scene. And then I just wrote on November first, I started I took the first sticky down and started writing to the topic. And I wrote a novel in thirty days. Wow. That's incredible. I built a storyboard. Yep. And then I knew I I had to write a a chapter at least for every sticky. And that that gave me that gave me 50,000 words. Now the the hard part came after I understood quite well that this was not a finished product. It now you have to edit. And that took me a year. So I wrote the book in 30 days. It took me a year to do the editing because I took a a class, an online class on how to edit, which was nice because really if you take a class on how to edit, you're learning how to write it right the first time around. Yeah. So so that was it. And so this is one of my books. This is not the first one but it's called First Encounter and it's the ⁓ a young adult ⁓ science fiction post apocalyptic ⁓ story and it's Not very thin. It's not very big because younger people don't have as much of an attention span. But I have four books in that series out and I have sixteen other books published. Self-published. I have twenty books. Twenty books on they're like on Amazon and places, the local bookstore, that kind of thing. And I write posy mysteries and sometimes a western and And ⁓ modern stories and I have a bunch of stories. I used to write a s a short story a week, a thousand words or less, and put it on my on my website. So there's there's ⁓ hundreds of stories on the website if anybody just wants to try something for free. Or you can go to Amazon and buy Buy the books. It's Connie's Random Thoughts dot com. Okay. Great. Connie's Random Thoughts.com. Let's check that out. That sounds really good. And you know, Katherine's asking the question because Catherine, I love reading. It's one of my hobbies that I have had to put aside the last few years, but I'm getting back to that in 27. But Catherine is one of the most prolific readers that I know. And she's actually volunteers with the library board, I think it is. And So I saw her face light up when you start talking about writing books. So Catherine, tell us a little bit about your hobby that ties in nicely with Connie's. It does. Well, ⁓ I I will talk about reading, but I just want to also mention that I used to be in a writing group and I wondered, Connie, it doesn't sound like you need a group. It sounds like you're doing fabulous on your own. But I joined a writing group a writer's group here in Havasu about four years ago, I think it was. And we met every other week and once a month we turned in a thousand words with a prompt and then once a month we had five thousand words that we turned in. So when you talk about writing sixteen hundred words a day, that's a fair amount. But to me, editing is the fun part. I really like editing. I I really like that part. But as far as reading goes, yeah, I'm absolutely a huge reader. I always have Several books going at the same time. I always have an audiobook in my car. I'm one of those old-fashioned people who still has a CD player in my car. And I listen to audiobooks on CD. Are any of your books, Connie, ⁓ out in audiobook? They are not because I'm self-published and producing an audiobook takes about thirty thousand dollars, which I don't have. Understand. Makes sense. Well I listen to audiobooks all the time. on the road trip that I just came home from, I had checked out about ten books from the library for my trip because it was thirty two hundred miles and that's a a lot of hours to be listening to audiobooks. So I finished I I only finished I think four ⁓ audiobooks on my trip because I ended up listening to music, which is I guess another hobby of mine is listening to music. But but reading is fabulous. I go to the library, I would say three times a week and I check out about eight books each time. I don't read all the books, but I like to keep track of them. I I indicate whether I wanna read ⁓ for a book group that I'm in, or if I just wanna read ⁓ for like I do write a book review every month. For ⁓ our newsletter, and I try to indicate is this a book that would be appropriate for that. ⁓ so I kind of have a system to my reading, and as I mentioned earlier, I've been keeping a book list of all the books that I read every year, and my book list goes back to 1982. So I've been doing it for an awfully long time, but I love it. what a way to get your head. out of your problems, read a book. What a way to ⁓ get yourself out of a depression, read a book and escape. It's such a wonderful escape. And you have access to different worlds, ⁓ worlds that are real and worlds that are ⁓ make believe. So reading is a lifelong hobby and anyone who is is a reader can understand why it's Such a wonderful pastime. Something you can do these days, you can do it on your phone when you're sitting away from the doctor's office or ⁓ or just you know sitting on the old couch. Better than better than TV. Read a book. Yes, read a book. Stay in school, read a book. Absolutely. Well, I don't know. I'm kind of thinking, Jim, are you gonna write a book on ⁓ your hobbies? No, but I read a book about. How to brew beer, that's how I got started. There you go. But you get a few chapters of that now, Jim. Yeah, you should be able to you should be able to write that book now, Jim. I love that. That's another one that's another really great thing about books is if you I mean nowadays we have YouTube that people go to to learn how to do things, but you can find a how to book about just about anything in your library. And I guess that's another little plug for libraries because libraries are the original common ground in this country. It is one of the places ⁓ Ben Franklin made a comment back in the day about how the library was the one place in the country where anyone could go in and access anything they wanted. And I think that that's really saying a lot for our country. And it really is. Pretty much still that way, other than ⁓ a few attempts and successes unfortunately at banning and censoring some books. In general, our libraries have what a wide variety of books for a wide variety, the the wide variety that we have in our country. Well, thank you for that. All of you I hope that we can have you back on a future episode and talk some more about our hobbies and what we have in common across Arizona regarding these. And I know that we wanted to have Carol talk about her hobby. So we'll have to have her back on a future episode. So Bart, we're gonna hand it back to you. Yeah. Well thank those hobbies. ⁓ my gosh, I'm already thirsty. ⁓ And I tell you a good And and Jim, I heard one thing about going back to beer. I heard you have to be really clean. Everything has to be clean. ⁓ yeah. Sanitizing is the biggest thing in brewing beer. You have to sanitize everything. That's what Eric is. If you don't do that, if you don't sanitize, then there's can be issues. Yeah. Very true. Yeah. Yeah. May not come out the way you hope. Flavor may not be as good. Yeah, I ⁓ I love gardening and canning is the same thing. So we'll have to come back for another episode on that. So thank you all. And then for you know for our audience members out there, ⁓ you know, you can you can ⁓ you can write us at arizonainscripted at gmail.com and let us know what your hobbies are, what you'd like to hear more about in those areas, because we have I mean, everybody has hobbies, it seems like most people. ⁓ I I love the fact that Kanye did the the the book reading, I mean the b the the writing, being able to write, you know, write and everything is amazing because that's such a creative process and fun too. I'm sure. And with AI now it's kind of funny. Some people are stamping, you know, human made. Yeah. Well, I'm very inspired. So thank you all. And we'll have you back on a future episode. Yep. Thanks, Lar. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, guys. Have a good day.