Local resident steps down after 20 years as NEPA Eye Bank president

Christopher Sweeney of Stroudsburg recently stepped down as board president of Northeast Pennsylvania Lions Eye Bank, which serves 37 counties. He has held that position for the last 20 years. “I have been associated with the Eye Bank since I was District Governor in 1985, having served as a board member, vice president and then president," Sweeney said. "These roles have given me a unique perspective of the dedication of our board, volunteers, medical professionals, staff, [...]

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Some more secure ways to pay while on the go

It seems almost inevitable these days that your credit card information will be at risk from a retailer’s system breach or worse, your card number stolen and used for fraudulent purchases.Clearly the established credit payment systems are lacking. Next generation payment methods like mobile pay and chipped credit cards promise improvement; whether they will help or introduce new security concerns remains to be seen, so use at your own risk. Using your smartphone to [...]

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Merged insurors adapt to new Highmark Direct brand

Further proof of June’s merger between Highmark and Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania was new signage installed recently above Suite 109 of the Bartonsville Plaza. A rigging crew mounted the name change from Blue Cross Store of Northeastern Pennsylvania to Highmark Direct. All 13 of Highmark’s retail stores now operate under the same name. There are other Highmark Direct outlets in Easton and Dickson City. The stores serve informational and [...]

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How to Save Money with a Home Brewing Hobby

About a week ago, I posted an article on how to save money with a board and card gaming hobby. That article came pretty directly from the heart, as board and card games are one of my primary hobbies (along with reading and… well, home brewing).

Naturally, several people wrote to me asking about my other interests. How do you cut back on the costs of a home brewing hobby? How do you make a reading hobby cheap? This week, I’ll address that first question (and tackle the second one later this month).

So, let’s dig in, right from the beginning.

What Exactly Is Home Brewing?

Home brewing is simply brewing beer at home. You start with basic ingredients – water, yeast, and some sort of grain – and allow the yeast to feast on the grain, producing a small amount of alcohol right in the water. That’s what beer is, at the core. All of the different varieties – and there are tons of them, all of which are simply variations on that core recipe – boil down to that core mechanism. Just put some grains in water, add yeast to the mix, and wait for a while and you’ll have some kind of beer.

Of course, you’re going to want to make something that’s palatable, and that means using particular grains and particular types of yeasts and particular additional ingredients to make something tasty. You’re also going to need containers for the stuff to ferment in (it produces gas while fermenting and you also don’t really want to leave the surface exposed to air, either) and containers to store the beer when it’s finished. Depending on what you’re making, other equipment is needed as well.

The truth is that home brewing is definitely one of those hobbies that can be as expensive as you want it to be. I can make decent beer in a plastic bucket. On the other hand, I have friends that have their entire garages devoted to elaborate home brewing setups with thousands of dollars worth of equipment, kegging systems, and other things that push them right up to the edge of being a microbrewery business. (You can make 200 gallons of beer per year for personal use in a household with two adults, which adds up to an astounding 2,133 bottles of beer.)

For me, it’s firmly a hobby for personal enjoyment. I enjoy the process of making small batches (around five gallons) of beer once in a while, mostly to be shared with family and friends. I definitely do things on the cheap side, but it could get really expensive really quick if I allowed it to.

So, how do I keep it relatively inexpensive? Here are some strategies that I use.

Start With Very Simple Gear and Upgrade Only When You Have a Reason (or Need a Gift Idea)

My first several batches of homemade beer were made in a five gallon plastic Culligan water jug that someone gave to me. I attached a one inch piece of clear rubber hose to the top to serve as a blowoff hose. I bottled the beer in bottles I saved over a long period of time and capped them using the cheapest caps and cheapest bottle capping tool I could find from the home brewing supply store.

All told, my initial gear added up to about $10 for the cheap capper and the little bit of rubber hose. It was far from perfect, but it did the job just fine.

Over time, I slowly upgraded that equipment. I moved to a glass carboy from the plastic Culligan jug. I started using an airlock instead of the blowoff hose. I got a better capper eventually (after breaking the first one) and added a few additional pieces of equipment here and there.

The key thing to keep in mind is that all of these upgrades weren’t strictly necessary. As I became familiar with the process, I began to see how certain upgrades were useful and I eventually made those upgrades. However, many of my gear upgrades came as a result of my wife searching for Christmas gifts for me, to tell the truth. Home brewing has provided many, many gift ideas over the years.

Use a Lot of Kitchen Gear You Already Have

Many useful items for home brewing are things you already have in your kitchen. As long as you thoroughly clean them both before and after using them for brewing, there’s no need to buy separate equipment.

For example, I often use a stock pot for cooking my grains (for those unfamiliar, heating grains up causes them to brew like tea, emitting much of their sugar and other compounds into the water, some of which the yeast later transforms into alcohol). It’s just an ordinary kitchen stock pot that you can get at pretty much any store, and we use it for other things, too.

You don’t need to duplicate anything that you already have in your kitchen. When you’re learning how to home brew, look for things you already have and use those. Just make sure to keep everything very well cleaned.

If you already have a stockpot at home, there’s no need to buy a separate one for home brewing. Photo: Colby

Make Your Own Equipment

Some home brewing equipment for specialized beers can be quite expensive. Trust me – you can spend a lot of money on equipment for various purposes. However, most of that equipment is actually really simple stuff and you can make it yourself for much less money without a whole lot of effort.

I’ll use a mash tun for an example here. A mash tun is simply a container used in one type of brewing to extract sugars from the grains. You use it when you want to maintain a certain temperature for a long while. It basically needs to be a large insulated container with a false bottom and a spigot at the bottom to let the sugary liquid out at the end of the process.

You can buy these from home brewing supply stores, of course, but it’s not hard to make one. Just find a used five or ten gallon insulated water/beverage cooler. Just replace the spigot with a better one – you don’t want to have a typical water cooler spigot emitting near-boiling water – and simply put a piece of steel mesh from the hardware store on the inside of the spigot to filter out the grains. A beverage cooler with maybe $10 worth of modifications is the same as a $200 home brewing mash tun.

There are lots of pieces of equipment you can make on your own in this way. The easiest way to learn about them… well, here you go!

Join a Local Home Brewing Club

Almost every city of reasonable size has a home brewing club of some kind. Home brewing clubs are amazing resources for learning how to home brew, try the things others make (usually by just swapping, but home brewers are usually very generous), and learn about techniques for saving money like building some of your own equipment. I’ve participated in two groups over the years and still would be if it were not for scheduling conflicts (my kids win out, believe it or not).

Most home brewing clubs are completely free to join. Some have small membership fees that usually go to pay for events or some shared resources.

If you’re interested in finding one, there are several places to look. The two most likely places for finding such a club are meetup.com or this directory on the American Homebrewers Association website. Both tools will help you find clubs near you.

Get Involved in Group Buys of Supplies

One of the big advantages of being in a home brewing club is that people will often get together for group buys on specific materials for home brewing. They might collect enough money to make a wholesale purchase of barley or hops, for example, and then get together to split up the goods after it comes in.

These things are usually pretty ad hoc and they also tend to somewhat restrict what your next few batches of home brewed beer will be like, but the cost of the ingredients ends up being very low when this type of bulk buying happens. You can get pounds and pounds of grains or hops for less than what a single pound might cost you from a store or an online seller.

It’s the bulk buying principle at work. If everyone gets together so that they can purchase something at a wholesale price, whether it’s a specific kind of hops or a specific barley, everyone involved saves money. Sure, it might restrict your home brewing a little bit, but that’s just a convenient excuse to experiment.

Use Yeast Across Multiple Batches

Yeast is a key ingredient in making beer. It performs the magic of turning some of the sugars into alcohol, turning grain-flavored water into a delicious drink.

However, buying yeast over and over again can get expensive. If you want to save money on yeast, one method is to simply stretch one yeast purchase over a bunch of batches of beer.

This process is called washing yeast, and it’s described in this great article from BeerSmith. Basically, all you do is take some of the sediment from your current batch, add some water to it, slosh it around, and then just keep the water, leaving the sediment behind. After a week or two in the fridge, a sediment of yeast will form in the bottom of the jar, which is exactly what you want. Just add some sugar to the jar the day before you brew and the yeast will be ready to go to town. This procedure can stretch one packet of yeast across five (or so) batches of beer, saving you some dollars.

Freeze Extra Yeast, Too

When you follow the above procedure, you’ll often find yourself with more yeast than you intend to use. I often wind up with huge amounts of yeast, far more than I need for a batch.

The thing is, you don’t have to dump the excess. You can just freeze it in a small freezer bag and it works like a champ. All you have to do is save some of that precipitated yeast from the above procedure in a pint-sized freezer container. When you want to use it, let it thaw slowly in the refrigerator for a few days, then slowly bring it to room temperature by leaving it out on the table. Add it to some warm water in a sanitized container and give it some sugar to eat and you’ll find yourself with tons of yeast for your next home brewing experiment.

You really can stretch a single yeast packet over years if you’re careful. (Of course, you’re also the strange guy with containers of yeast in their freezer, but that just means you have something in common with avid home bakers, too.)

Re-Use Sanitizer a Few Times

I use Starsan when I sanitize my equipment. Starsan is a very common sanitizing agent for getting rid of the things that can contaminate your beer.

The thing is, Starsan is actually reusable, so when I use a little to sanitize an item, I’ll pour it back into a small bottle and use it again. I usually get two or three uses out of Starsan.

One friend I know has a “second use” and a “third use” bottle of Starsan (each of which are original bottles that Starsan came in). If he uses Starsan fresh from the original bottle, he’ll dump the used Starsan back into the “second use” bottle; if it came from the “second use” bottle, he’ll dump the used Starsan into the “third use” bottle; if it came from the “third use” bottle, he disposes of it properly according to the instructions. He keeps them separated with a little piece of masking tape on the “second use” and “third use” bottles.

Starsan can actually be used over and over again until the pH gets too high, but to be on the safe side, I only use it three times at most.

Brew ‘All Grain’ Style

Many people get started in home brewing by using kits that come with all of the ingredients you need to make a particular style of beer. Most of the time, these kits come with malt extract, which is very convenient but also fairly expensive. Malt extract is essentially what you get from boiling grains in water, straining out the grains, and then boiling the sugary water down to a syrup.

Once you move on to trying your own recipes, there’s really no need to keep buying expensive malt extract. Instead, just buy the grains – they’re way cheaper – and simply boil the grains yourself at home.

The easiest way to get started with this is to try the “brew in a bag” method, something I hinted at above. With this, you essentially make a “tea bag” out of your grains using a small mesh bag and simply boil that bag in a few gallons of water. It’s harder to perfectly control the temperature when doing this, but it gets the job done.

When you’re wanting to move on to beers that require more specific temperature control, you’ll move from “brew in a bag” to using a mash tun, which is a piece of equipment you can make yourself, as described above.

Shop Around for Grains

I’m often surprised at the kinds of places where I can find great prices on grains for home brewing. I’ll find bins of barley and other such items often where I least expect them.

For example, my local food co-op often has the best prices locally on several different kinds of barley, so I’ll usually go there for many barley types and only visit the local home brewing supply store for specialty grains.

Take a look at the grains available in the bulk section at the grocery stores you shop at. They often sell barley and sometimes sell several varieties of it. With barley being such an essential ingredient in making beer, if you can find a cheap source for the type of barley you need, you’re going to be money ahead every time.

Use Your Own Grain Mill

If you do choose to go the “all grain” route, one challenge you’re going to face is the need to grind your own grains. Barley needs to be ground down so that the insides are exposed in order to brew effectively, and the only real way to do that is with a small grain mill.

Of course, many home brewing supply stores have a grain mill available for customers to use, but the problem there is that it restricts you from buying from any store that doesn’t offer a mill. You can’t buy whole grains from online stores, for example, and they will make you pay more if they have to grind it for you. Over a large number of brews, that can end up costing you quite a bit.

A simple mill is very inexpensive. You can get a manual grain mill like this one for less than $20. Of course, the amount you can spend on such a device is practically endless, with all manner of electronic devices that grind your grains for you, but a basic mill like this is all you really need.

Grow Some of Your Own Ingredients

If you’re a gardener, you can actually grow some of the ingredients needed for home brewing in your own garden.

Growing barley, for example, is actually fairly easy – and growing them yourself lets you experiment with heirloom barley and specific varieties. Here is a great article from Mother Earth News on growing barley for home brewing. Hops can be grown as well, but they require more work.

You can also grow other ingredients you might use in specific beers. Elderberry, nasturtiums, hibiscus, and many other flowers and herbs (and even some vegetables) can be grown in your garden and used for making beer.

Buy Less Craft Beer

Home brewing produces a product that’s a good replacement for craft beer that you might already purchase, so rather than increasing your beer consumption, just decrease the amount of beer that you buy.

I was never a heavy beer buyer or drinker, as I’m the type of person who might enjoy one or two flavorful beers on some evenings, but making my own beer means that rather than increasing my total consumption, I’m simply decreasing how much I buy.

These days, my craft beer purchases are often in the form of single bottles or mixed six packs so that I can try a bunch of different things, figure out what I like and don’t like, and use that as input for my future home recipes.

That means that most of the money spent on funding my home brewing is actually money that I might have otherwise spent on craft beers.

Final Thoughts

Home brewing is a wonderful hobby, one that has left me with a lot of great memories and enabled me to enjoy some amazing creations produced in my own kitchen and garage.

However, there’s no denying that it can be an expensive hobby. You can certainly dump a lot of money into home brewing if you’re not careful.

My best suggestion? Start off cheap and brew until you understand why you would want to upgrade your equipment or materials. Everyone has a somewhat different setup and somewhat different needs and skills, so take things at your own pace. Only upgrade if there is a real, tangible reason to do so.

Good luck, and enjoy!

Related Articles:

• How to Brew Your Own Beer (and What It Costs)
• How to Start a Brewery: Small Business Saturday With Proclamation Ale Co.

The post How to Save Money with a Home Brewing Hobby appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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Want to Travel the World While Working Remotely? This Company Will Plan Your Trip

What if your workday started in a café in Buenos Aires’s famous Plaza de Mayo, and your weekend plans included dancing the tango with a handsome stranger?

A few weeks later, you might open your laptop and settle on your beach towel, overlooking the ocean on an island in Thailand.

This lifestyle is a reality for Remote Year participants, who’ve recently set out on the program’s inaugural journey.

What Is Remote Year?

The program takes a group of remote workers to 12 destinations around the world — a different one each month.

As a “class member,” you don’t need to worry about accommodations, travel between destinations or sourcing a workspace with reliable Internet. Remote Year handles all of the logistical footwork — just work, feed yourself and explore.

The program even puts on social events so participants can mingle, and hosts guest speakers and tours. It’s like summer camp for adults, for a year, in 12 different exotic locations.

But what does it take to be a remote nomad? And is it worth paying for a program when you could organize your own year of travel?

How Remote Year Works

The most obvious reason to sign up for Remote Year rather than planning a year of travel on your own is, well, that’s a lot of flights and bus trips and guesthouses to organize.

You pay a $3,000 down payment to reserve your spot, and then $2,000 per month, which gets you pretty much everything but discretionary travel and your meals.

Although the accommodations vary in each city, from university dorms to hotel rooms, you’re guaranteed to have your own room.

And some of the accommodations are very nice, indeed: Katelyn Smith of The Remote Nomad shares video footage of her digs in Cavtat, Croatia, with a private kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and free laundry on-site:

You need to already have a remote job — Remote Year isn’t an employer. If you don’t already work remotely, the program recommends asking your boss if it’s an option

Or, consider taking a side hustle full time, starting a freelance business, or finding a location-independent position a job board like Indeed or FlexJobs.

Is It Worth It?

With a total cost of $27,000 for the year before food, drinks and other expenses, Remote Year definitely isn’t a frugal way to travel.

Participant Arikia Millikan, who left the program early, traveled the world for a year as a freelance journalist before trying the program — and continues to travel solo since she dropped out. She’s visited Belgrade, Berlin and Istanbul, and says she only spends about $1,000 per month.

For Millikan, Remote Year “isn’t actually about working at all,” but is rather “a poorly executed tourism operation.”

She finds less expensive — and more productive — travel opportunities on her own, by staying in a hostel or as a house guest and speaking with locals in each area to find options within her budget.

Tourism is expensive. Traveling doesn’t necessarily have to be. — Arikia Millikan

But Smith says Remote Year fostered the “strongest sense of community [she’s] ever felt,” and that it “made [her] a better person.”

Her blog post on what to expect of the program cites such intangibles as traveling with a group that “gets you” and getting a crash course on the digital nomad lifestyle as worthy reasons to pay so much money for the program.

And you’ve got to admit, having all the details worked out ahead of time is a pretty nice perk.

With the changing costs of airfare based on season and location, figuring out where to go next while staying within your budget could be exhausting. Millikan admitted planning her own travel was time-intensive, estimating she spent five to 10 hours planning every transition to a new city.

Another Day in Paradise?

Though clicking through the Remote Year blog is sure to inspire jealousy (at least it did for me!), the program does come with a few drawbacks.

Although all the travel logistics are taken care of, hidden costs and at-home planning can create big headaches of their own:

• When does your lease end? Since you don’t get to decide when your year of travel starts, you might be hard-pressed to find a subletter in time.

• Do you have pets? Who’s going to pet sit for an entire year?

• Which vaccines do you need, and how much will you end up paying for them out of pocket?

• Hey, you know all that stuff you have? What are you going to do with it for a year?

While almost everyone says they “love to travel,” a nomadic existence of this magnitude — and for this amount of time — is a huge commitment. In her post on Mashable about preparing to depart on the adventure of a lifetime, Stephanie Walden writes:

I’ve had more than one friend tell me, ‘You won’t come back the same.’ While I know this deep down, it makes the goodbyes sting just a little more. Something feels a little more permanent.

Even if you’re already working from home and want to take advantage of your location independence, to participate in Remote Year, you need to be comfortable with instability.

The one “solid” thing in the program, the itinerary, is liable to change — and according to Millikan, it did this year. The group ended up in Cavtat, Croatia, only after the organizers were unable to find sufficient accommodations in Dubrovnik. Cavtat is now listed on the 2016 itinerary.

That said, if you can pull it off, I’m hard-pressed to think of an easier way to accomplish so much travel for so little planning — and since you spend a full month at each destination, you have the chance to get a sense of what it’s really like to live in a given country, rather than just visiting.

And let’s not forget, the program is just getting started: Who knows what might change next year? Maybe one of our readers will find out firsthand.

Applications for next year’s program, which starts in February, are already under review — but they’re still accepting new ones, so if you’re interested, get yours in!

Your Turn: Will you apply to take part in Remote Year 2016?

Disclosure: We appreciate you letting us include affiliate links in this post. It helps keep the beer fridge stocked in the Penny Hoarder break room.

Jamie Cattanach is a junior writer at The Penny Hoarder and a native Floridian. She’s passionate about learning, literature, chocolate and finding ways to live the good life as cost-effectively as possible. You can send smoke signals (or, you know, friendly greetings) to @jamiecattanach on Twitter.

The post Want to Travel the World While Working Remotely? This Company Will Plan Your Trip appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.

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‘Truvada whores’ give safe sex the flick

IT COSTS $10,000 a year and has been called the “game changer” that could eliminate HIV. But not everyone approves of the little blue pill.

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