Over the past couple weeks I have been one of those times where I had bad luck if I had any luck at all.  Every simple task was made more difficult for no good reason.  A simple beer transfer that should take 20 minutes turned into a 3 day affair as I had to source replacements for equipment.  After a couple similar brewing issues in a week span I started to think about how I could avoid this problem in the future.  For me there are two areas that I am going to be working to improve.

The first is organization.  I have my space in the garage for my brew system and a space under the stairs for fermentation and storage.  Outside of these spaces I have equipment scattered in the basement and around a couple different sinks in the house.  This is a product of not having a true space in the garage to clean my equipment.  I need to have my brewing things in one place.  I also need to have bins for all of the small pieces like airlocks and stoppers.  Having better organization will not only help speed up my brewing tasks because I will not spend as much time looking for what I need, it will also help keep me aware of items that need attention.

The second area I am going to improve is eliminating single point failures in my homebrewery.  Basically, I need to stock spares.  I started doing this for beer dispensing earlier this year by getting a second CO2 tank.  It always seemed to happen that I would run out of CO2 on the day the homebrew shop was closed and I had friends coming over to enjoy some homebrew.  Now I always have spare CO2.  I need to extend this philosophy across the rest of my brewery.  I should have spare tubing for every size that I use in the brewery.  I should be swimming in air locks and stoppers.  Most of the items that I need spares for would only cost a few bucks to make it happen.  There is no reason to cause myself more pain by running out and not being able to transfer beer over $2 worth of tubing.

These changes are mostly about being prepared for when things go wrong.  Being prepared has become more important now that I have a son and another on the way.  My free time to do brewing tasks is now mostly at night.  I can no longer just stop what I am doing and head to the homebrew shop when I need something.  I need to be my own homebrew shop for common items.  By making these changes I should be able to remove some of the frustration when things go wrong.