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.