Who are we?

LuBru is a brewing partnership between Bob and Ray Lewandowski. We started brewing beer approximately 3 years ago in 2011. I (Bob) had been interested in brewing for quite awhile but had not had the push to do so. My father (Ray) was working for one of his customers that was into home brewing. At the close of work at the customers' house everyday, he would bring my father a "homebrew". He was gracious enough to send my father home with a few for me as well. This, was the beginning... We decided that night that this was definatley something we wanted to try. The next day we ordered our first extract kit from Northern Brewer. We went down the street to our local homebrew store and bought a basic homebrewing kit and we were off. 4 weeks later we had beer!!! It tasted great, but I wanted to know more.

I found a website that was dedicated to the art of homebrewing. Homebrewtalk, what a great resource! Anything and everything you could possibly want to know about homebrew. If you have problems, just ask. Chances are someone there has had the same problem or questions as you. I learned so much from that resource. But I wanted to learn more.

A few batches into our homebrewing hobby we decided that it was time to construct a wort chiller for our beer as we were sick of waiting for the wort to chill in a ice bath in the sink. We like to build things ourselves, which is something that I am greatful for my father enstilling in me. Back to the interwebs... I found the directions online for making an imersion chiller out of copper tubing available at any home store. My father went to Home Depot and and starting getting the parts. While he was in line and talking to the cashier another person in line overheard the conversation. He was explaining to the cashier what we were doing with the copper and she did not understand, but the other person did. Enter Jon Mervine (owner and Head brewer for ROC Brewing Co).

They talked for awhile and Jon offered to sell my dad his unused copper wort chiller. My dad came home and told me the story and insisted that I had to meet Jon. Long story short, I met Jon and he allowed me to assist with a few of the early brews at ROC Brewing. I really enjoyed the opportunity to help brew on a bigger system using the "All Grain" process. Jon was more than happy to answer the questions that I had regarding the change from brewing with extracts to all grain. The current version of our brewing system is modeled after the 1 BBL HERMS system at ROC Brewing. The only difference(other than the size), was that I chose to employ a small level of temerature control.

So here we are currently brewing every 2 weeks, 10 gallons at a time. Where do we go from here? Who knows. Only time will tell. Brew on!