Why are you a home brewer?

I get asked this question a lot. It's rarely phrased exactly like that, but more akin to "can't you just buy that at the store?"  Depending on specifically the brand and style of beverage we are talking about the answer may or may not be easy.  If this question comes up about Pedigree Porter, the answer is "no, you can't just buy this from the store," unless you live somewhere that has a good selection of Fuller's product with London Porter on tap, you can't get this anywhere around here.  It's literally taken me a dozen or more attempts to make this particular ale so that I can't taste the difference from a bottle of London Porter to what I have on tap. Now, if we are talking about Paradise IPA or Viking Blood Red IPA, I probably can get something very similar to that at the local bottle shop.  Then, why make it at home?  What's the point?  I'm sure if you are not a home brewer, you probably have these questions and the answers often don't make any sense.  But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

I started brewing at home in 2000. A colleague that I worked with in the IT consulting business had just poured me a stout that he made at home in his garage. I was blown away.  I had never tasted anything like this. It was chocolaty, smooth, and warming with tiny carbonation bubbles that tickled the tongue. It was also like 9.5% ABV and gave me a raging headache the next day. He told me I should give it a try, it's just like cooking. You follow a recipe and you end up with beer.  In hindsight, I would turn something as simple as following a recipe into a quest to build my own micro-pub at home.

Way back in the dark ages of 2000, before my daughter was born, if you wanted anything other than BMC (Bud, Miller, Coors), or whatever local, mass produced light lager, you would have to go way out off the beaten path to find it.  Craft brewing was exploding in California with Anchor Brewing and Sierra Nevada leading the charge, but I remember Gordon Biersch with a certain level of fondness. Out in the beer desert some call Texas, Saint Arnold was 6 years old and most restaurants had heard of them, but getting room for them behind the bar was a rare thing.

In my particular case, I have a mild allergy to lager yeast. I had no idea why I would lose my voice and had what I can only describe as asthma like symptoms after having 2-3 servings of whatever everyone else was drinking, usually something straw colored and a product of lagering. I happened to mention this to an allergist I was getting shots from for pollen related allergies and he said, "yeah, that's actually more common than people think. They are just not willing to give up drinking beer." I wasn't either so started searching for an alternative.

I bought "Brew Chem 101" by Lee W. Janson Ph.D. trying to understand the difference between an ale and a lager. If you asked me today, I could easily rattle off several styles that are ales and several styles that are lagers, but back then it wasn't easy. The brewers didn't think it necessary or important to label their beers as ale or lager and to make the whole situation even more convoluted, the laws in Texas made it impossible to label things correctly. Before the change to the law in Aug, 2012 any beer, sorry "malt beverage" with an ABV above 5 percent must be labeled "ale or malt liquor". You can't make up stuff this stupid. Conspiracy theories are everywhere about this law being an effort by the mass producers to control the market. I don't know about that, but thanks to Brooklyn Brewery, Jester King, Authentic Beverages and Zax, who were plaintiffs in the suit against the TABC, the labels can make more sense now. (source:Texas Tribune, Aug 9, 2012). I still didn't have any reference to tell me whether a Porter was an ale or a lager. It stood to reason that a "Pale Ale" or an IPA was an ale and that a Pilsner was a lager, but what about a Hefeweizen or a Stout? I was clueless.

This was also in the infancy of the Internet. There was no Google or Bing, but there was Yahoo and Ask (and as it turns out Yahoo was using the Google engine way back in 2000) so I was trying to dig up some information on brewing beer. Keep in mind that I hadn't even tried to brew anything myself yet, I was just trying to find stuff I could drink. I stumbled on this website from this guy John Palmer. He had this online book called "How to Brew" and was giving all this information away for free. I read the first few chapters without even blinking and noted that in the sidebar Mr. Palmer had just finished a second edition of the book and he was self-publishing it. I sent him an email and some money.  I don't recall if I sent him a money order in the mail or what since there was no PayPal at the time. In a week or so I got this paper bound book in a manila envelope and it was signed by John Palmer himself.  I read this book from cover-to-cover and started over again. I was hooked. As far as hobbies go, this had all the MacGyver ingenuity of build-it-yourself stuff and the science-like chemistry and biochemistry of being a real basement mad-scientist. This became my "nerd-vana" allowing me to geek out on beer (That phrase has been "copyrighted" by Palmer and Jamil Zainascheff for the Brew Strong show on The Brewing Network)

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I found my local home brew shop (The Brew Stop) in the Yellow Pages (we didn't have YP.com) and drove there to get a home brew kit. I made my first extract batch on the kitchen stove and when it was done 4 weeks later I took a couple of bottles back to Ken (RIP), the owner of the Brew Stop and shared with him. The second batch was similar only my wife was home this time and for 2 hours constantly complained about the smell. I have no idea what's wrong with the smell of malt and hops, but apparently it's offensive. This is how I went from a WalMart tamale pot to a stainless steel turkey fryer. I made several batches this way, but I was having trouble with head retention. The beer's head, not mine. I still have that. This elusive flaw in my beer is what drove me to all grain brewing. I was doing partial mash on my second batch, so I knew the basics of mashing, I just needed a bigger vessel. I built my first dedicated mash tun from a 5 gallon beverage cooler like the players have at football games.

By this time I was reading through Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels and trying to formulate my own recipes. This turned out to be harder than I'd imagined. I had many batches that never saw a bottle or a glass and got fed to the lawn or used to etch the driveway if they were real bad. I made an entire batch using biscuit malt as a base malt with honey malt as a specialty grain. That was terrible and doomed from the start. It was near this time that we moved. I had no idea that this too would effect my beer. I stopped trying to formulate recipes and just tried to make kits of known good quality and they came out terrible. I made nearly a dozen different beers that were so off that I couldn't drink them. A simple amber ale that I'd made before was just "off".  I couldn't describe the flaw or even begin to speculate on what the problem could be.  Frankly, I thought it was me and that I just sucked as a brewer. I was just about to give up and have the home brew garage sale of the century when I heard something on the Brew Strong podcast that resonated with me like a tuning fork. The water! John Palmer was an inspiration a second time now.

We moved and the water source was different, but how different and how was I going to fix it? I was one of three homeowner representatives to the Water Board for the sub-division we used to live in and I knew a lot about where our water came from, how it was stored and treated and for making anything but very light or very dark beers the water was great. My Amber Waves recipe and the aforementioned Pedigree Porter were two of my best beers before we moved and now I was unable to make them. Coincidentally, we were having a water treatment system added to the house to reduce the water spots on everything and an RO system was part of the deal. I collected three water samples (before the water treatment system, after the treatment system and output from the RO system) and sent them off to Ward Labs. I just checked their website (they are on Facebook now too!)and they now have a Home Brewers Test Kit which they did not have way back in July 2005 when I ordered my W-6 test.  I had to dig up some old papers to remember this. I used the results to plug into the EZ Water Spreadsheet linked here and started to "build" my water by adding the mineral salts indicated by the spreadsheet. Todd H. now has the EZ Water Calculator at www.ezwatercalculator.com where you can download the spreadsheet in various forms.  He has updated it to version 3.0 which I just
discovered while writing this article. I've been using V1.5 for years and it turned my brewing around.

Another thing that I have done for years is keep notes.  That's how I was able to dig up all this information for this article 5, 10 and 15 years later. There's even a receipt from DeFalco's Home Wine and Beer Supplies from 2006 in this folder as well.  They are the home brew shop that sponsor's the Dixie Cup that I have written about before. I used to keep all my notes in a spiral bound notebook before I started using BeerSmith to track all my brewing sessions. My BeerSmith save folders for recipes, equipment and ingredient lists are all tied to a DropBox account so they are in the cloud and the same information is available on both computers I have BeerSmith installed on. I've been warned, advised and encouraged by many people that tell me "If you keep good notes, then that one time you stumble into a truly great beer you'll be able to make it again".  I'm still not sure if those are words of encouragement or subtly trying to tell me that me beer really is mediocre (or worse) and keep trying.  It doesn't really matter because I'm a home brewer.

So, what's the answer to the question?  Why am I a home brewer?  This hobby can be frustrating, expensive, labor intensive and has very few material rewards. So why do it? I keep at it because there's always something new to explore, a new hop that's on the market, some new trend that everyone is trying (remember Black IPA's?) or some historical beverage that has been discovered like when Dogfish Head came out with Midas Touch. I've tried making "cooked mead" which is where you caramelize the honey before you ferment it.  It has a marshmallow character and is very unique. I didn't care for it, but I made it anyway.  I get to build stuff that has a practical use like the fermentation chamber and I get to use MacGyver like skills to solve perplexing puzzle problems like how do you work with 240VAC, propane and water and not kill anyone.  I was told by a professional electrician that I was crazy and looking to blow myself up.  It's been 15 years and I'm still in one piece. I enjoy accomplishing tasks that others say can't be done or are just too difficult. If you are a home brewer, you know exactly what I'm talking about.  If you're not, then you probably don't get it. I have learned more about world history through beer than all the world history and social studies classes I have taken in school. I have always loved chemistry, due in part to the passion that my teachers had for it. Mr. Russell at Andrew P. Hill High School and my Chem 1A/1B instructor at West Valley College. I can't recall his name, but he always wore overalls and a John Deere ball cap. Odd for a chemistry instructor which is why I remember it. The point is, I don't brew at home so I can sit in the garage and drink myself stupid. Funny how most folks really think that is the goal. I enjoy the creative and pseudo-scientific aspects of home brewing. I will never be a lab technician or a pharmacologists working in a real lab, with real consequences. Nor will I be the mad scientist or crazy inventor that build stuff in his basement that changes the world. Home brewing gives me an outlet for those desires and I find fulfillment in being able to create good beer (and other beverages) on the equipment I constructed. It's not great beer, I don't have the time to brew every day or week that it would take to become great. Nor do I have the audience to consume everything I make. I had at one time these fond visions of my friends and neighbors stopping by unannounced to see what I had on tap. Maybe some of you experience that, but I find that people have their own lives and don't have time to drop by for a beer. I'm a little disappointed about that, but the alternative could be worse. If you are home brewer, why? Leave a comment below to share why this is your hobby.