And Then it Clicked

Typically, I learn best when someone shows me how to do something.

I'm terrible at reading books. I'm terrible at test taking. I'm terrible at online courses. It's a wonder that I graduated from a major university with a pretty decent GPA.

For the first 2 years of brewing, I didn't really have anyone to show me anything, and I still haven't had anyone around to show me how to make bread.

For the most part, I've spent years having wet dough stick to my hands, ugly looking garbage baguettes, and beers containing hop pieces in the bottle. Basically, I could've been playing with Playdough and making hoppy tea and I would've been accomplishing very similar things.

I just kept doing and reading and doing and reading, hoping that things would click.

And sometimes they do.

The most recent example of something clicking is a method for mixing dough. I've read so many baking books that describe this fold over method. They even have nice splash pages with pictures showing how to do it. I've looked up videos on YouTube. None of it made sense to me. I couldn't make my hands make the pretty looking dough in the pictures.

A few weeks back, I was making some dough, and then it was as if power was restored to a part of my brain and it just clicked. It was one of those moments where you can't remember the week previous when you had no idea. It was something you always knew. I fully understood the folding method and my breads have been much more flavorful since.

I met a few guys that brewed beer over margaritas at some random Mexican restaurant a few years back.

I was starting to figure out some basics of brewing. I understood the basic premise and why things were done a certain way, but I was still years off of figuring out how to make my own recipes. And then I started going to brew days at these guys houses. I saw their setups, how they kept beers from getting hazy, how they steeped hot water through the grains, and how they cleaned up.

Meeting this group of friends gave me ideas and probably accelerated my skills by several years.

Basically what I'm saying is, yes, I can learn anything, it will just take me a long time like baking did. Or, if I meet people that already know how to do it, and they are willing to show me, I'll pick it up immediately and excel at it.

All I know is at least once a week, I'm eating my bread and drinking my beer and it doesn't cross my mind to go to a bakery or store to pick up someone else's products, and that's a great place to be.