A passion for good beer, three decades in the making

January 21, 1994. You could argue that’s the day lightning bolts hit the castle to bring Frankenstein’s monster to life.

That’s the day I brewed my first beer. Great Expectations, we called it. (Beth was expecting Max at the time. We cracked a bottle to celebrate the arrival, a few months later.)

It wasn’t the best beer that ever existed, but neither was it the worst. Not very interesting, by today’s standards. But it was clean and flavorful and drinkable. A tour de force, in our estimation. 

But really, the story starts earlier. We discovered good beer in England around 1985 and had spent nearly a decade trying to find anything like it in our neck of the woods—without success. Craft beer was happening on the West Coast, but it hadn’t yet caught on out East. Beer with flavor was all but unobtainium in New Jersey in the 90s. That’s why I learned to brew.

As with most worthwhile things I have accomplished, Beth gets credit. In late 1993, we found ourselves at Zabar’s, the legendary gourmet grocery store in New York City. Standing in the checkout line, I noticed homebrew kits, hanging from the ceiling. 

“That sounds like fun. We should get one of those,” I said. 

Beth’s brain was already six steps ahead of mine. (Not a difficult feat, considering.) She promptly dissuaded me, using the excuse that it would be too weighty to haul around the city. Her real motivation—get it later for my Christmas gift. I’m notoriously difficult to shop for. I tend to buy the thing I need a week before my birthday or Christmas, a perennial frustration to her gift-giving plans.

Her heart was in the right place. But we didn’t get back to NYC in time. She couldn’t find a homebrew kit anywhere near home. And Amazon had yet to be invented. So, on Christmas morning, I unwrapped what turned out to be a six-pack of Pete’s Wicked Ale. On each bottle, she had taped over the word “Pete’s” and penned “Sal’s.”

What the hell is this, I wondered? She quickly explained. She said she owed me a beer kit. Couldn’t get it in time. This turned out to be a very good thing. The beer kits Zabar’s sold in the 90s were of the brew-in-a-bag variety. Possibly OK but more than likely very not OK. Like Mr. Beer, a formula for thin, lifeless, sour, scary, badly made beer-like fluid. “Do the research,” she said. “I’ll buy the stuff.”

I did. And she did. And we were off to the races, experimenting through both UK and Continental styles—bitter, stout, Kölsch, alt, brown, mild, Abbey, strong—we could make almost anything we could think of, as good as store-bought and drink it fresh for half the price. 

The standard homebrew recipe is five gallons. It wasn’t long before we got hold of a bigger brew pot so we could double the recipe to 10. Then the game changer; we met Terry. 

Terry had already learned to brew and graduated to 10 gallons. So we’d pool our resources to make 20. And at the end of every brew session, Terry would say the same thing: you’re gonna need a bigger boat. Why not get an even bigger pot and make even more beer? 

We talked about that for years. Finally pulled the trigger on a whopper, at around 75 gallons, it’s big enough for two barrels. Our home brewery is bigger than some professional outfits! We’ve been brewing together at least two decades and have really dialed it in. Fortunately, everybody involved loves hoppy IPA, since that what we make almost exclusively. We’ll do an occasional special for a holiday; pumpkin beer in autumn, for example, or a dry stout for St. Paddy’s Day.

When we want to do something weird or out of our standard, we’ll fire up the old 10-gallon system. That’s produced chili pepper rauchbier, beach plum pale ale, chocolate stout and ESB among others. 

All these years later, we still brew, even though you can buy just about any style of beer you can imagine even in the most pedestrian bottle shop. It’s fun and it’s challenging. Like music or martial arts or athletics—you can always improve your knowledge and skill. And it’s still significantly less expensive than buying bottles and cans. We make world-class beer—often better than what you can get at the average craft brewery—for about a third the cost of retail. It’s still worth it and I recommend it to anyone with a passion for craft beer. 

If you love craft beer and like to cook, you should to give it a try. It’s really not that difficult—if you can make Campbell’s soup, you already have the skills. Brewing just requires a greater investment of time. The same skills can also get you mead, cider or seltzer.

Here’s a good place to get started. Even better—find your local homebrew supply store and introduce yourself. They are the glue that hold the hobby together and a superb resource for education. Almost universally—the supply store is a fun place to hang out, communing with other beer geeks. It’s where most professional brewers in the craft beer industry got their start. You could make a compelling argument that homebrewing created a multi-billion dollar industry. That’s impressive. And pretty compelling motivation to support them.

Best of all, at the end of the process, you get beer! Eat your hearts out, stamp collectors.

=S

TO BE CONTINUED

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