Monday Musings: Homebrewers Are a Hardy Bunch

The question is, what will
 this look like 10 days from now?

By Steve Siciliano

Yesterday I watched a pair of mallards happily paddling around on a pond in my backyard that wasn’t there just a week ago. In downtown Grand Rapids over the past few days the river has gotten dangerously close to the top of the flood walls, Riverside Park is now under water and swollen creeks in Kent County have washed roads and two-lane bridges away. We’ve certainly had a lot of rain lately.

I usually don’t take Michigan’s roller coaster weather personally. Normally I stoically cope with the breath-sapping humidity of summer, the grey gloom of late November and early December and the unrelenting, bone-chilling temperatures of winter. But I have been taking the incessant rain this spring personally because, you see, the Big Brew on the Calder is now less than two weeks away.

But so what if these ceaseless April monsoons continue into May? We west Michigan homebrewers are a hardy bunch. If it’s still raining two weeks from now we’ll don the appropriate gear and fire up the burners. We won’t let a little inclement weather deter us from gathering May 4 on the Calder Plaza to be part of the largest AHA Big Brew Day in history. And at one p.m. EST on that day, whether it’s raining or shining, we will join in a simultaneous, country-wide toast to the enriching hobby of homebrewing.