Home-brewed Blonde

The last few years have been spent doing more craft beer consumption than home-brew production. But after a few home-brew club meetings I was motivated to buy a large bag of pale malt. It will serve as my base grain for many future home-brews.

In past decades I’ve always ordered my grains milled, or cracked, by the home-brew supply shop. This bag of malt is unmilled. Unwilling to wait for the grain mill I’d ordered I decided to experiment a little. I hand milled five pounds of the grain, one pound at a time. The grain was in large resealable plastic bags and I used a rolling pin. It took approximately fifteen minutes.

Such was the extent of the grain bill for this beer, five pounds of pale malt. The recipe was completed with a quarter of an ounce of Galena hops and Safale 05. The total volume was 3 gallons. I guess that’s a blonde. Since one of my favorite home-brew recipes is a Belgian blonde named “Marilyn,” it seemed appropriate that this blonde be named “Norma Jean.”

BJCP Characteristics

An American blonde ale is in the same category as the American pale ale. It should be pale in color and tend towards a malty character. The hops will be much reduced in a blonde. The aggressiveness of the pale ale is not present. It’s a gateway beer.

Norma Jean does a have a nose full of grain, but it doesn’t seem bready or caramelly. No discernible fruitiness or hops. It is a pale yellow color but is not brilliantly clear. It was in primary for fourteen days, no secondary fermentation. Perhaps that would have helped clarity? It’s a pasty yellow and resembles a wit beer more than a blonde. It does possess an adequate white and rocky head.

The body is light, medium carbonation which I think was done very well. But it does seem to have a harsh, grainy texture. I actually doctored it with two teaspoons of grenadine to make it more palatable. One week later and the grainy astringency remained but was much more moderate. Perhaps some more time will further reduce this. Once past that taste there is some sweetness from the malt and an enjoyable softness on the palate.

It would still garner a low score, I think. I made it and I’d give it maybe 30/50. If that harshness continues to abate it may improve.

Comments

At first I thought the harshness was due to the hand milling of the grain. I thought perhaps I’d not gotten a good enough crush and all I was tasting was barley husk. Additionally, while I anticipated a starting gravity of 1.040 I only achieved 1.024. Bad mill again? Brewing publications I read noted that a husky/grainy flavor can come from overcrushing the grains. This might cause sparging obstructions, if I understood everything correctly, thus not rinsing the mashed grains enough. To be sure, my final boil volume was lower than I expected.

So I’m not sure about the cause of the harsh flavor but it is slowly going away. Still a fun experiment.

The grain mill did arrive and I used it for the next batch I made, an English dark mild.

Brew Day at Black Bridge

Supporting your local brewery can lead to great beer and brewing experiences. Recently the good folks at Black Bridge Brewery let me spend a day with them and brew K-Town, their understated and charming weissbier.

I arrived there on a Friday at approximately 8 am. Kevin was there, transferring some of their old ale into kegs for transport to an event later in the day. Hops, the the fawned-over-feline and possibly official mascot of Black Bridge, peeked around the stage shortly after my arrival to see who was present to worship him. Well, Kevin was there, so …

A little before Tim was to arrive he called and had Kevin start up some mash water, so I followed him over to the vessels and watched him work a couple of valves and, voila, hot water started to fill up one of the tanks. Once Tim arrived with more malt we fed that into the grain mill which had been attached to the mash tun. I’m used to working with around five pounds of malt instead of fifty and I usually purchase mine already cracked and have never milled it myself. There’s nothing complicated about that step in the process, dump the bag in the hopper and let the electric drill attached to the crank do the hard work, but at least I can say I have milled grain now. I’m sure there are other aspects to it, such as determining how fine you want the barley cracked, but that was not part of this brew day.

Once the grain was milled the hot water was transferred to the mash tun and the grains were stirred and temperature reached and …. time to wait, just like brewing at home. While waiting I got to see some new sound equipment that had been delivered and tried to help research a couple of other pieces the brewery was seeking. Around this point, Heather arrived and started going through her routine of opening up for the day.

Then it was time to sparge – rinsing the mashed grains with more hot water to extract all the sugars out of the grains. After recirculating a portion of the mash water a copper ring is attached to the mash tun. Hot water is sprinkled from this arm onto the mash and mash water is transferred to the boiling vessel.  The hot water is added via this sparge arm at the same rate the mash water is transferred into the boil kettle. It was nice to see this method, continuous sparging, in action. I’ve read about it and understood how it was supposed to work. But in my home brewing I’ve used the batch sparging method. So, in a sense, this was new for me, too.

Once the mash tun was drained it was time to clean it out while waiting for the temperature to rise in the boiling vessel. That’s right, cleaning and waiting. Just like home brewing. Oh, and of course there was some beer consumed. K-Town, in fact. I adhered to the head brewer’s pattern of drinking what was being brewed. Good call.

By this time, the doors were open and people were arriving. Tim was mingling with his customers, Heather was pouring beers, Kevin was either playing with Hops or cleaning some fermenting vessels. I think I tried to help him a little, but I may have just had another K-Town.

Speaking of hops, once the boil was reached the hops addition was measured out. I was taught the proper way to tie a string around a mesh bag. The hops, in the properly tied bag, were immersed in the boil. And then there was more waiting. Finally it was time to chill the wort and transfer it to the fermenter. After adding the yeast strain to the fermenting vessel, the wort was transferred through the plate chillers to the fermentation vessel. And we were done.

All this is just an every day routine for brewers, like Tim (and he did keep reminding me about that).  But it was great fun for me. I was able to see some brewing methods at work that I’ve only read about.  Professional nano-brewing is like brewing at home, just on a bigger scale.  There is much waiting and relaxing and drinking.  Sure, maybe there was not pH testing of mash or water treatment or refractometers – but whatever. The end product speaks for itself.

Tim would be a good educator, by the way.  He walked me through his steps, explaining each valve and why he wanted it to do what it did, explained his motors, talked about the equipment he’d like to have and how it would change his process. While eating lunch with his friend and mentor, Jason Fuller (to whom this town owes a debt of beer gratitude), he talked about hops experiments he did and how those did or did not change the bitterness and aroma values of the final beer.  He was encouraged, during his mentoring, to question everything he reads or hears about brewing, test it, and just brew beer that is his.

I learned a thing or two I can incorporate in my brewing.  I also feel a little more invested in the product being served at Black Bridge.  In addition to all that, it was enjoyable getting to know Tim and the crew a little more.  So thanks to all for the day of brewing.  Now I wanna brew more … another beer at B3 and plenty of my own.

Get to know your local, people, you never know what cool things can happen.  And if you are new to home brewing, definitely get to Black Bridge and hang out.

P.S.  The day after the brew day above we checked fermentation on this batch.  Well, that yeast was vibrant and healthy and working away.  Can’t wait to have some of this batch of K-Town!

 

Home Brew Interview: Joe Fellers – Part 3

The second part of this interview with local home brewer Joe Fellers can be discovered here. Therein he talked about local ingredients, legalities and beer trends. Below is the final segment and it gets historical and philosophical.

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– So let’s get back to home brewing. Why should people get into home brewing?

It’s one of the oldest art forms. And it’s not just home brewing, I think there’s a lost art of making things we consume. There’s too much consuming and not enough making. Prior to getting into home brewing I liked to cook, but it has somehow enhanced my love of cooking and my love of food and the process because I’ve refined my palate. It’s turned me into a real elitist prick – but you know what I tell people? Just because I don’t like ****** things doesn’t make me an elitist. I will admit that I drank four Coors Light last night

– I can cut that part out.

No. No don’t. You know what I wanted to do? I wanted to drive home but I kinda wanted something that tasted like beer.

– Honestly me and a friend did a blind taste test years ago. We sampled Bud, Miller, Coors and threw Corona in there, just for fun.

Did you do Corona in cans or Corona in bottles?

– Bottles

Yeah, see if you did it in cans you can tell … I was just going to bring that up. I recently had three Corona’s from cans and you know what it tastes like? Come to find out, there’s a reason it tastes like this, but it tastes just like, well, a 90% match, with Hofbrau House Original Helles. And that’s because some people from the Hofbrauhaus, in the mid-1800s, settled in central Mexico and that’s where the Mexican light lager comes from. They brought yeast strains with them. I knew that there were Germans in Mexico but I hadn’t had Corona in cans – other than hammered at the lake – in fifteen years. I poured it into a glass and it was a nice straw color and it wasn’t skunky. I had forgotten what unskunked Corona tastes like. But anyway – you were doing a blind taste test.

– Yeah, and that might’ve made a difference

I’m telling you, man, it’s a huge difference. Heineiken’s the same way. Heineken is a very good lager, a fine example of a European light lager. And I don’t think they’re an adjunct beer. I think it’s all grain.

– Well we did that blind test – and I’ve always put Coors down, but honestly that one tasted better than the others.

It was ice cold?

– They were nice and cold, we had other people pouring for us. I was surprised how well Coors tasted compared to the rest.

It’s interesting to do stuff like that. I wish I could do taste testing like that here. But our distributor will not allow,and Tim won’t allow, Budweiser products here and I completely understand. But I would like to do it to prove a point. People have their brand loyalty when it comes to things but they have brand loyalty up here (points to the brain case) and not what they actually taste.

– Tell us the best resources for home brewers.

Your local brewery. Always. Make friends with your local brewer and the day shift bartender throughout the week. They’ll introduce you to people. The second best resource is going to be online home brew forums. Message boards and forums are kind of an antiquated form of communication on the internet but when it comes to home brewing they are a wealth of information. That’s where I’ve learned almost everything. In a lifetime, if you spent even three hours a day, you’ll never get through all the information there.

But number one would be your local brewery. As long as you like their beers. If you think their beers are not that great, then don’t go to them. But chances are, if they’re still in business they know what they’re doing. And talk to the brewers because they’ll be the first ones to tell you, “don’t do that.” Most brewers, most professional brewers started out as home brewers. In fact, the majority of them that I’ve ever met started off brewing beer because they were underage in college. They bought a home-brew kit on line because they didn’t card them online and so they could brew the beer. It gets you drunk. It’s college. Who cares. Some Uncle Ben’s Minute Rice and some grain you bought for $15 online, might as well do it.

– Are there any brewing techniques or processes that you have discovered that can help home brewers make better beer?

Don’t be afraind to fail. Don’t be worried about “oh, man, I hope this doesn’t taste bad.” You’re going to make bad beers. You’re going to have bad ideas. You’re going to forget to do something. You are going to make the mistake of drinking while you’re brewing, which is a bad idea. It’s a terrible idea. It’s how you end up with really terrible IPAs, that’s how you end up with infections, that’s how you end up making mistakes in your quantities. You get yourself a 15% IPA when you wanted a 6% or you end up with a 2% IPA.

It’s hard for me to give advice when it comes to home-brew technique because I kinda started ahead of the curve – because of Tim. Tim has such an engineering mind that he said, “listen, I went through all this, I don’t want you to have to deal with that. So we’re going to start you off at 7 as opposed to going 1-6.” So a lot of my techniques come from that.

Clean. Be clean. If the cleanest area of your house – you could be a slob, your room could be terrible, your dishes are dirty, food caked on stuff in your fridge – if the only area of your house that is clean is where your brewing equipment is and it’s clean, you rinse it off before using it and scrub it clean after youre done using, you keep all that clean. Make sure you put your concentration in that area. If you’re going to home brew you have to keep things clean otherwise you’re going to have garbage. Garbage in, garbage out. That’s the key. Sanitization.

– Any good gadgets that have helped your brew day be better?

If you brew in a garage have a deep sink. If you have a deep sink in your garage put a hose fitting on the faucet and then run a tube off of it. Just like we [B3] have out back. I have one in my house. It’s so handy for everything. For cleaning. I’m not kidding, I walk out in my garage from my kitchen when I have to fill up more than a gallon, when I have to make stock or something like that, I’ll go out there and use it because I can set my pot on the ground and fill up from that hose. That’s my number one favorite gadget.

Spray bottle. It sounds weird. A spray bottle with sanitizer or just alcohol. I have three of them at my house at all times. I spray down everything. I actually will do a fine mist of sanitizer in my fridge like once a week, in my ferment fridge and my serving fridge. Just to keep any sort of bugs at bay. But I’ll also do a fine mist of sanitizer in my bucket. I also use isopropyl alcohol if I’m going to do any kind of hot ferment. Anything above about 62 degrees, for like my ciders, a few hefeweizens and a few other things. I have one stout I ferment at 68 degrees, which is weird. But if I do a hot ferment everything gets sprayed down with alcohol because I want to control every aspect. And that comes from home brewing. I didn’t do that before.

So spray bottles and a hose bib connector for your sink, both are invaluable.

– What is your personal brewing philosophy, if we haven’t covered it yet?

The Sumerians were brewing beer thousands of years ago. You’re going to make beer, and whether you like that beer or not, that doesn’t matter, you’re going to make beer. So always keep it simple, listen to people that know more than you. That’s it. And I follow that all the time. I’ve got one friend of mine who’s .. four batches I think he’s made, maybe five. He just kegged his first batch about three weeks ago. It’s a Belgian blonde with blood orange. It was really good except he bought a kit and it wasn’t … the blood orange syrup that went into it just didn’t last. It lasted about two weeks and now he has a blonde ale. it doesn’t even have Belgian-y characteristics to it. It tripped the trigger. It got you in. Now he’s hooked. He keeps asking ‘what-if’ questions. I tell him it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. He asks, ‘well aren’t you worried about this or that?’ And I’m not. I’ve done 216 batches and had three infections and about 10 that I didn’t like. So, 13 beers in 200 batches, okay. That’s enough failure for me to learn lessons. You’re going to fail, you’re going to screw up. But no matter what you’re still going to make beer, even if you don’t like it. Then learn from those mistakes.

– Tell me some positive things about Kingman, as a home brewer.

That any time from about 6 am to about 10 pm at night, sometimes even later, we’re a tight knit community of home brewers; you always have someone you can get hold of. Tim, even though he seems surly, he’s a real big softie, he’s a big baby, he’s a real nice guy. If you’ve got an emergency and you’re like, ‘man, I’m like 35 minutes into my 90 minute boil and I just realized that I don’t have enough hops’ – call him up and he’ll help work it out. Because chances are he’s had that problem before. Jason Fuller, same thing. Me, I work nights. Three nights a week you can catch me at 2 am. If for some reason you have a brewing emergency at 2 am you can hit me up. And I know about 5 or 6 other brewers locally who are the same way. We’re all willing to help each other out. Brewing is a community. We’re all weird, brewing nerds. We all just love this stuff.

– What is the social need for alcohol?

Oh man, that’s a multi-tiered answer. First and foremost, humans have been consuming some kind of alcoholic – excuse me – some kind of mind altering substance as a form of community for thousands of years. It pre-dates the written word … I would say it’s right around the same time the spoken word came about. Anthropoligists say that humans started settling into communities and stopped being nomads because they needed to make substances that altered their minds. And to do that you can’t just roam around – well, it’s easier to grow your wheat and your barley and your sorghum and whatever it is your growing to make your alcoholic substance. So there’s a sense of community that comes with that.

When this country was being formed it was formed in taverns. Even the teetotalers showed up to the taverns because they knew that’s where the sense of community was centered. Not only that but your small communities, even up until just barely pre-Prohibition in the US, most decisions were made, in small towns, at the local tavern or ale house. Or at the brewery. Sometimes all three of those were the same place. So you had city council meetings, you had planning and zoning commissions, you had all those different things, all those things that were decided as a community, in and around alcohol. That’s number one, a sense of community. And that’s a very ancient thing, a very old part of our brain. It goes back thousands and thousands of years.

The need for alcohol, the social need – most people don’t want to talk about it, but everybody has social hangups. Not everyone is forthright and honest without some sort of chemical alteration. Whether it’s benzodiazepines to calm your social anxiety and makes you more outward and outgoing. Alcohol covers those bases and allows me to be more honest about what I’m talking about now. Literally self-referential.

– What’s an overrated craft beer?

Stone IPA

– What’s an underrated craft beer?

Any good pilsener from a microbrewery. And the reason I say pilsener is because a lot of people don’t realize, unless they are a home brewer, that a pilsener is one of the hardest things to brew. Because there is nowhere to hide. You’ve got an IPA, you can screw up your fermentation, your mash pH and all that – just add more hops, add more hops. Boil longer. Leave it in the keg longer. When you have a pilsener and it takes you five weeks to make it and you have five weeks and one day to put it on tap, there’s nowhere to hide. You have to be perfect. There’s no room to screw it up. That’s why when I go to a brewery that has a pilsener on tap, and they call it a pilsener, that’s the first beer that I order. Just to see if it’s good. If that pilsener’s good, I don’t even have to try the rest of the beers. I know they’re going to knock it out of the park because it’s so tough to make a pilsener. Which is why I’ve never tried to make a pilsener. I did a Munich style helles one time and it was okay but it took way too long. It took me almost five weeks, probably four weeks and about 3 or 4 days. No. Give me a hefeweizen, three days primary fermentation, two days to crash cool it, keg it one day. Five days.

– Tell me about the beer scene in Kingman. Is it good, bad, otherwise?

It’s so, so much better. More people are getting turned on to home brewing, more people are getting turned on to craft beer. While I’m conflicted about a second brewery in town, I know that the more breweries the better because that means there’s less bad beer out there. Or less boring beer. Because I don’t like boring.

Home Brew Interview: Joe Fellers – Part 1

Kingman has a community of home brewers.  Now is the time to bring them into the light for they are the vanguard of such fabulous beer in this town.  Joe Fellers is one of these home brewers; many of you will also know him from his tapster duties at Black Bridge Brewery on Saturday’s.  You probably also know of the podcast he co-hosts,  Cartoon Casual.  Now you will know more of him.  This interview will be published in multiple parts, so keep reading.

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– First, tell us the story of your beginnings, your home-brewing beginnings . How’d you get started?

In the summer of 2009 I was unemployed and had just been dumped by my live-in girlfriend. So she left, I didn’t have a job or any money, but I still liked beer. So my buddy Steve said, ‘hey you should come over to this guy’s house, he makes his own beer in the garage. Come over and have some beers.’ I was sure it was going to be awful, served out of some plastic buckets.

– You had no faith in home brewing.

None. I had none, because I had had one home brew experience about ten years before and it was garbage. I was just going to go ahead and continue to buy my own beer. I mean, I liked okay beer at the time – Fat Tire, Arrogant Bastard, like the junior league craft beer stuff.

So I go over to Tim Schritter’s house and I walk in his garage – and his garage is set up basically like a brewery. Not basically, it was a brewery. He had a nice stainless steel hand-wash sink; he had six refrigerators or something in there, some for service, some for fermenting; got introduced to Tim and I proceeded to get completely wasted out of my gourd because every single beer I tried was really, really good.  And then I told Tim, “hey I wanna learn how to make beer” (spoken in Will Ferrel’s Harry Caray voice, if you know Joe you can hear it now) and he was like, ‘okay, you come back in the morning and I’ll teach you how to make beer.’ Later on, I found out he didn’t expect me to show up; but I got up, grabbed a couple of Egg McMuffins and some energy drinks and showed up at like 7:30 in the morning the next day and, uh, and that’s it. That’s how I began home brewing. He showed me how to brew beer, I looked up the chemistry – the actual chemistry behind it and got really interested in it because I’ve always been interested in science.  Through Tim, and then Jason Fuller, as well, because he’s a science teacher and a home brewer – we all saw eye to eye. It all just clicked in my brain, it totally made sense to me. It’s one of those things where some people look at something and it makes sense – I looked at recipes, at mash temps and things like that and it just kinda made sense.

– What other kind of science do you have in your background?

Just a giant nerd. I always excelled at science. I grew up in Ohio, so you had to take earth science, biology, chemistry then physics in high school and I tested out in the first two so when I was a freshman I was taking junior level classes and I just went from there. I just absolutely love it. So I had no real background in anything scientifically applicable to brewing, but it clicked in my brain – ‘oh, okay so this – we need to have a good mash pH for this and have this and this and amylase reactions …’ For whatever reasons, that all made sense to me.

– So why do you keep home brewing?

I get like a creative energy that I just need to get out.  I love to cook.  I love taking something from raw ingredients and making something different out of it. Brewing allows me to do that. And I’m not working in a commercial setting so I can do whatever the hell I want. I can experiment, and if it’s god-awful, then it’s god-awful. Like, my Bavarian style hefeweizen ferments at above 68 degrees, has banana characteristics to it.  I love chocolate covered bananas so why not add chocolate to a Bavarian style hef? Not a good idea, for the record. It’s not very good! But I figured that out by making it and then forcing myself to drink five gallons of it. Because I’ve never actually done small batch home brewing, like I’ve never done a one gallon batch – it’s been four and half to five gallon batches every time I’ve done an experimental beer.

– I just saw an article about blending. Have you ever done that with your beers, your home brews? Like if something went wrong, or just purposely blending them together?

No. I never have. Whenever I’ve had anything go wrong, it was so tragically wrong I didn’t even want to dump it down my drain. I wanted to dump it down someone else’s drain.

– Were you able to do that?

Yes, and I will not disclose where it was dumped. I’ve only ever had three tragic failures – only three I can remember were actual real bad failures. And they weren’t even failures of my own – it was the airlock getting clogged and blew the top off and infected the beer. That happened to me twice and another time was just pure dumb.

– Tell us your current favorite beer or beer style.

What’s Red Bridge? Irish red? Current favorite because it’s in my hand.

But honestly I have to say, I have to supplant that with Hops & Dreams, the New England IPA. It’s just so … I went through what a lot of people went through that were into craft beer or have been into craft beer, say, the past four or five years – the hop fatigue, so to speak.  Because IPA’s became so prevalent but also turned into a pecker measuring contest. “Let’s hop it up as much possible!” But that’s akin to the guys at the chili cook off who say “you can’t have more than a couple of spoonfuls of my chili, it’s so hot.” Well, I’m hungry. I want to taste, I want something with good flavor, I don’t want it to be just too hot. The same thing goes for IPAs, it just got to be a little too much. And now sours are starting to become like that. So for a while I just went away from IPAs, heavily hopped IPAs.  But the more I try this “New England Style,” the hazy, citrusy IPA, well I’m falling in love with them all over again. I just had to take a break and then go back to them. So lately my favorite has been the New England Style IPAs.

– So, now that your boss has left, what’s your current favorite brewery?

To be perfectly honest with you it’s almost always Black Bridge and it has nothing to do with brand loyalty, which I do have, obviously.  Brand loyalty because I work here; I’ve seen it grow from Tim making beer in five gallon buckets and serving it in his garage and getting me drunk to what you see now.  But, Tim and I, while we’re friends, I don’t get a lot of communication from him that tells me what’s coming up. He’ll tell me, ‘hey guess what I’m going to brew tomorrow’ but that’s about the extent of it. It’s not like I know what’s going on in his head.  So I’m still surprised by the beers that I’m pouring. But if had to pick a “second favorite” even though my boss is still gone, it would probably have to be Wanderlust, out of Flagstaff.

– All right, I’m on board with that. I love that place.

I do, too. And I love the idea of … I’m a big fan of the farm-to-table movement when it comes to food and I love the idea of making beer as local as possible. Because while it is cool to import things, just weird, exotic things to put into your beers, I like the extreme opposite of that which is grain that is grown down the street and yeast harvested literally out of thin air, which is what they did for several of their beers at Wanderlust. They don’t buy commercial yeast. Their 928 Local, whatever the hell it is, I don’t even know – I think it could kinda be considered a farmhouse ale – 928 Local is yeast that was propagated from sugar water being left out, just like you would a sourdough starter. And it’s delicious. So yeah I’d say that Wanderlust is my favorite, that I don’t work at.

– Have you ever been able to do that ‘bootleg biology?’ Culturing your own yeast like that?

I have. I’ve done it on several different levels. The house strain … oh, I forgot, who makes Fat Tire? New Belgium. New Belgium’s house strain that they use for the majority of their beers is incredibly hardy and it’s related to Scottish 1728 that we use here and they actually use it in their lagers as well. It’s technically an ale yeast.  But I propagated that, or harvested that, from several bottles of Fat Tire. Left a little in the bottom of the bottle, swirled it around, add it to the thing and put it in the fridge and six or seven bottles later start adding some sugar syrup to it and then you propagate.  Then made a batch of beer and saved it. I actually have a few vials in my refrigerator. But as far as spontaneous fermentation, I’ve never done that locally, but I plan on doing it this summer. I have a friend whose mom has several apple trees. I want to make a cider the traditional way. I found somebody in town who has a cider press and I want to try to make 15-20 gallons of cider and ferment the must from yeast I harvested out of the air.

 

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Hooked, aren’t you?  Well, I’m going to stop there for now.  Watch for the next post wherein we’ll uncover Joe’s other favorite alcohol’s, his view on beer trends and legal diatribes.

Learning To Brew

Learning to brew
Is the coolest thing
Making a wort
That’s worth drinking

 … Hasta La Vista, Tom Petty …

Recently I reconnected with some old friends (hi Rob & Dom!).  It takes not long to determine that I am obsessed with beer and brewing and even dabble in the alchemy we call homebrewing myself.  Therefore, one of these old friends asked me how to get started in this hobby.

I was happy to provide some starting advice and it occurred to me that I really hadn’t written up anything like that on this blog.  I’ve talked about the homebrewing adventure and some of my experiences therein but I have not included any kind of resources for anyone wishing to delve into this hobby.   Therefore, I hope a few of the following notes will be of assistance to any who wish to get started.   Once you’ve begun, well, doubtless the DIY zeitgeist will possess you and then there are many other resources to be found to help you build your system.  So this is just for the novice.

And, please, if you are a home brewer reading this and you think of a resource or advice that needs to be added, please leave a comment.  Thanks & Cheers!

Home Brew Supply Store
If you have a homebrew supply store near you (and by that I mean in the town or city within which you dwell), fantastic!  This store will be full of all the equipment and ingredients you need to begin homebrewing.  More importantly, the owners of the store will likely be experienced home brewers who can answer your questions and walk you through your brew day.  If there is not one nearby then you’ll need to consult the all knowing oracle of our time, Google.

I use Brewers Connection in Phoenix, AZ.  There’s also More Beer.  No doubt you’ll be able to find one in your state that can ship you the things you require.  These online outlets may also have various books and brochures available that describe the brewing process.  Buying online may give you the ingredients but likely you’ll still need, or want, tutoring.

Local Brewery
For pointer, experience and encouragement you need go to your local brewery.   Make friends with the owner(s) and brewer(s) there – in fact, with the entire staff.  This crew will be very knowledgeable about beer making, beer styles, beer appreciation, beer everything.  They will be ridiculously happy to help you in the homebrew journey.

Homebrewers are usually among the most ardent supporters of the local.  The staff of the local, likely homebrewers themselves, can point you in the direction of the homebrew community in your locale.  Maybe a club even meets at the brewery.  All of them will be able to give you superb guidance to making the best beer possible.  Your local may also be able to act as a surrogate home brew supply store on a brew day that goes wrong, too.

I’ll take this moment to give a shout out to Kingman’s local, Black Bridge.  The crew there is outstanding and I am indebted to them for furthering my beer knowledge.  For a very long time, I thought I knew this town and beer.  The local has helped me to realize both those postulations were false.  The best lesson you can get is that you know nothing.  Then you can move on.  So, thanks to everybody there!

American Homebrewers Association
This is a national organization dedicated to homebrewing.  They have a vast database of recipes, lots of tutorials, lists of home brew supply stores and they sponsor Learn To Homebrew Day.  This occurs annually on the first Saturday of in November. This year that falls on November 4 and its express purpose is to propagate the home brewing community.  If there’s an event near you this is a wonderful opportunity to be exposed to a larger community of brewers.

Brew on!