I began making beer in October of 2018, spurred on a former student at UCSF, Josh Emrick, who now has his own lab at the University of Michigan. After I had joined Josh for a couple of batches in the garage of his apartment out in the avenues, he surprised me by asking me to take a batch home and babysit it, explaining that he needed to go out of town for a few days. It was love at first sight. It was the amount of convection in the plastic carboy that really got my attention. I recall calculating how many joules of energy was being expended by the yeast, which had brought nearly 20 liters of liquid to a temperature about 2 degrees C above ambient.

My first few batches made at home were kits and used liquid or dry malt extract for the base grain plus small amounts of milled specialty malts, which I soaked in the hot wort on the way to the boil. I had a gas burner and man, that thing could really crank out the BTUs.

Over time I started to get a bit more ambitious, moving on to all-grain brewing after making about 15 batches using extracts. Then, I decided that I needed to make the jump from gas to electric, which woule allow me to move my operations indoors. Then, (slippery slope) I decided that I'd like to try making lagers, which generally calls for keeping the fermentation temperature well below room temperature. After I purchased an SS Brewtech glycol chiller, it was off to the races.

My neighbors played an important role in my beer making, since their thirst allowed me to make much more beer, and many more different kinds of beer, than would have been possible if I were just brewing for myself and friends. From 2018 to mid 2020, I was making a 5-gallon batch about once a month. In the summer of 2020, the first summer after the start of the pandemic, my neighbors started a Saturday afternoon BYOB social out on the sidewalk of our block. We were starved for company. We'd bring out our glass of wine or beer, sip by temporarily removing our mask, all the while keeping our distance from one another. After a few weeks of this, I started bring out extra bottles of my beer to share. Then folks started putting dollar bills "in the hat", and before long I was bringing out as much as a case of bottles eery Saturday. My production started to increase. For the first 20 months of brewing, up to June 2020, I made 30 batches of beer, or 1.5 a month. From July of 2020, I picked up the pace and made 37 batches in the following 12 months (3 batches a month).

At some point during the "breakout year" of 2020-21, I did some reading on the different beer styles and started to think about a project in which I would make them all (not really all all, as I will explain). There are a few organizations in North America that have codified beer styles, chief among them being the Beer Judge Competition Program (BJCP) and the Great American Beer Festival (GABF). I decided to focus on the BJCP classification scheme. BJCP publishes a fee Guide to their Beer Styles,

By combing through the BJCP Guide and by pooling some of the styles (esp. Specialty IPAs and Historical Beers), I came up with the number 108: 108 unique beer styles as of the BJCP's 2021 Guidelines. So, I set a goal for myself to make all 108 styles within 10 years of the date I started my first batch: a clone of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale made on 14 October 2018.

In the following sections you will find links to

• a list of all the beers I have made, the dates I "released" them, and their BJCP style

• an outline of the 108 BJCP styles, ordered by style family, with a listing of when I first made that style

• a graph of my progress towards the goal of making all 108 styles in 10 years, with the ordinate (y-axis) being the number of uniques style made the the abscissa (x-axis) being the date I "released" the beer

Freshly brewed joy