About Home Brewing

Making great beer at home is easy, according to my boyfriend Thomas Campbell. It takes very little cash, some time (more time waiting than working), and does not require too much space. You will need access to a kitchen for several hours and you will also have some cleanup to do. There will be, what some think is, a fascinating week of fermentation and then about another week of bottle-conditioning time. You will then have the chance to share the finest beer in the World with your friends and family who will take their first sip and exclaim “you made this!?”

Home Brewing in Fort Collins

Home brewing is a hobby that is well supported in Fort Collins with two home brew shops that supply kits to get started brewing at home and ingredients like hops and grains, a brew club (http://www.liquidpoets.com/) that provides a space to connect at least once a month with other home brewers of the Northern Front Range area, along with many other beer events where you can meet other home brewers and beer connoisseurs. Home brewing can help you support the local homebrew shops, connect with members of your community, make a hobby of making great beer, protect your wallet and our planet! This may seem like a new idea, but there is quite a history to brewing beer in small batches like home brewers do today.

www.rockybrew.com

www.hopsandberries.com

History of Home Brewing

Beer is an item of consumption that is not new to human beings.

http://www.beermasons.com/?page=HistoryofBeer

According to the brewing beer in small batches is a practice that goes back as long as 12,000 years. Even though we normally associate beer in general with men, “women were [actually] the primary brewers” in ancient societies like the Sumerians as well as in the colonial era in America, showing that home brewing beer has a history intertwined with both genders. As Stuart Kallen explains in his book Beer Here: A Traveler’s Guide to American Brewpubs and Microbreweries, the early 1980’s marked the beginning to a shift in beer making in America as those who were “sick, sick, sick, of insipid, over carbonated American-style pilsner” took a risk in home brewing to fulfill their “desire for fresh, natural, high-quality beers”. As a New York Times article written by Eric Asimov, published on October 15 of 1986, points out, in the 1980’s “the taste of home-made beer [was] not only prompting more people to make their own [beer], it [was] also encouraging small entrepreneurs to reproduce the taste commercially”. Thus, as Kallen states, the stroke of Jimmy Carter’s pen in February of 1979 encouraged many “dozens of brave and foolish souls [to] quit comfortable jobs, [take] out second mortgages…in order to enter the microbrewery business [where] some have failed, most have succeeded”.

It was this shift in the beer culture from consuming home-brewed beer to microbrewing that has shaped the current beer industry. Today, home brewing is not anywhere near commonplace in the United States and many people, including myself at one point, are often not aware that brewing your own beer at home is even possible. If the consumer knows that it is possible, they seldom think of it as an option because of the rumors, myths or misconceptions they have heard by word of mouth. Check out the section on common homebrew myths to see what experienced homebrewers have to say!

Debunking Common Homebrew Myths

Myth: Home brewing beer is rocket science.

Many people are turned away from home brewing because they think it is too difficult or that something would go wrong and they would end up throwing away all their hard work. Don’t be intimidated, even the very first batch of beer my boyfriend made was as delicious as any microbrew; if you can follow instructions, brewing is no harder than cooking. Nolan Rathbun, an employee at Hops and Berries explained in an interview that he tells his new customers “If you can make soup you can make beer,” encouraging them to think through every step like you would when making soup but also realizing that you can add and subtract certain ingredients to adjust it to your taste. My boyfriend, Thomas Campbell, a physics and chemistry major at Colorado State University, defends that the only really difficult step in home beer making is “waiting a full 10 days to taste the beer once it has been brewed, fermented and bottled, other than that it’s more than simple”. In Ashton Lewis’ book, The Home Brewer’s Answer Book: Solutions to Every Problem, Answers to Every Question, he concedes that “brewing beer at home can be a daunting task if you dive headfirst into advanced all-grain brewing” however, with the help of a homebrew shop you can “start brewing beer from kits containing liquid or dry extracts, pellet hops, and dried yeast.” As you will see in the guest post from Thomas Campbell, even “all-grain brewing,” a method considered more complex than using malt syrup, has very simple and easy-to-follow steps to brew beer.

Myth: Beer made at home doesn’t taste good.

You will be surprised how good your homebrew tastes. With the help of local brewstores, you can buy ingredients that will match well together and give you a beer that is as light or as dark, bitter or sweet as you want it. If, however, something goes wrong in the process of brewing, you will have to consider what could have gone wrong. Often, beginners do not realize the importance of cleaning. Lewis emphasizes that “while cleaning and sanitizing are not difficult, their importance cannot be stressed enough. Good beer requires close attention to detail when it comes to cleaning.” Campbell relates, “It is pretty difficult to make a bad homebrew if you are sanitizing and cleaning your equipment scrupulously; most bad beer is caused by bacteria other than the yeast you add multiplying in the wort and producing off flavors.” Thus, with proper, thorough cleaning of your equipment, and by picking out ingredients with the advice of the employees at the brew store (that is, until you have made enough batches and you can recognize yourself what ingredients you like and what items go well together) you will ensure delicious and cheap beer!

Myth: Homebrew bottles explode.

Campbell says that “I have never had a homebrew explode; bottles won’t explode if you follow instructions. Bottle the beer when it has finished fermenting and add the suggested amount of sugar to “prime” each bottle.”

Myth: Homebrewed beer makes your hangovers worse.

Kallen warns in his book, Beer Here: A Traveler’s Guide to American Brewpubs and Microbreweries, that “alcohol consumption seriously depletes all the B vitamins” and “without B vitamins, your body cannot convert the food you eat to energy” leading to the “symptoms of hangover—shaking low energy, dehydration, headache.” Most commercial beer is pasteurized, killing the live yeasts. However, homebrewed beer is bottle-conditioned, unfiltered and therefore contains yeast sediment that Kallen explains is “rich in B-complex vitamins” helping to prevent worse hangovers by replenishing vitamin B while you drink!

Benefits of Home brewing

• LOCAL: Homebrews are really, really fresh. Cooking the beer in your own kitchen, letting it ferment in your living room, bottling your own beer and putting caps on each one, having bottles of conditioning beer in your closet and then tasting the beer as the taste matures by the day. Now, that is local! Just like a microbrewery is closer to home than imported beer, a homebrew is closer to home than a microbrew. I don’t mean to say that home brewing is the only way to get local and fresh beer, and I am not advocating for you to drink only your own homebrew. By all means, supporting the local breweries and brewpubs in Fort Collins is also a great way of consuming a variety of fresh and delicious brews. Matt Orozco of Rocky Mountain Homebrew Supply explains that “local liquor stores do not lose business when their customers start home brewing.” Surely, we, as consumers of beer in Fort Collins, should take advantage of the access we have to great microbreweries, brewpubs and homebrew supply shops, and we should feel good that by doing so, we are supporting multiple sections of the local economy.
• SUSTAINABLE: If you are concerned with your carbon footprint, you will be happy to know that brewing your own beer offers benefits to the environment that larger breweries cannot. Microbreweries, like New Belgium in our hometown, have taken the initiative to make their brewing production as sustainable as possible, but even with the innovative and evolving nature of the current beer industry, taking a turn for the greener, we can still choose to be sustainable now rather than waiting for others to come around. Having a do-it-yourself thought process is a great step toward taking control of your role as a consumer. Brewing beer is a good place to start because we all can do it, save money, gas and the planet.  First of all, beer’s main ingredient is water, so what is the point of trucking it around the country –or even across oceans—when you can access the main ingredient out of your own tap? You can brew beer yourself, at the place of consumption, and thereby take out a huge amount of transportation. This can even save you gas, it isn’t all about breweries and their transportation of beer. When a home brewer brews one batch of beer, it takes only one drive to the brew shop to get 60 beers worth of ingredients which will take a couple weeks to drink, whereas buying a six-pack or 12-pack a week takes a drive to the liquor store each week. By home brewing you also reuse bottles instead of buying a beer at a liquor store where the bottle has been trucked around the country or state only to be used one time. This way, you can reduce transportation as well as the energy it takes to make and recycle the glass of the beer. In the article written by Jeffrey Ball titled Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints published in the Wall Street Journal, New Belgium discovered that “a six-pack’s carbon footprint was about seven pounds” with the bulk of that number, surprisingly, coming from the refrigeration of their beer. “Transportation came in fourth, behind manufacturing the glass bottles and producing the barley and malt,” showing that you are saving that much more energy by recycling bottles and homebrewing with them rather than consuming beers from microbreweries that are used once and then are recycled. An article published on http://www.grinningplanet.com titled Glass Bottle Packaging — Reuse vs. Recycling: For glass bottle packaging, glass reuse is more efficient than glass recycling explains how recycling sounds good but it is better for the environment to reuse glass bottles, like my boyfriend and I do when we homebrew. This article highlights that yes, “Recycling glass does indeed save energy as compared to using raw ingredients to make new glass” and that ”Glass bottle recycling also reduces resource use and pollution,” however when we consider glass reuse “Costs drop even more when glass packages are sterilized and reused without being crushed, melted, and reformed.” Some bottles even have reusable caps, or you can use the non-reusable caps as toys for cats, decoration on posters, an addition to a necklace, bracelet, or belt, or any other creative idea that comes to mind. You as the home brewer will also have control over the ingredients that you brew with and where they come from. You can choose to use local ingredients if the home brew store has them in supply, or you can choose the ingredients that were transported the smallest distance. You can also choose to buy the organic ingredients that the brew stores have in stock, or you can ask to special order organic ingredients. You can talk to your local farmers about buying local grains, or you can even take ingredients from your own garden to flavor your brews, like pumpkin or berries for example. You also have the option to grow your own hops, though if you plan on using these hops throughout the year you will have to plant a large crop. According to Alex Grote, an active member of the Liquid Poets Society, a homebrew club for the Northern Front Range, you can even reuse the yeast 7-10 times when homebrewing. As you can see, homebrewing offers many benefits to the environment than a bigger brewery ever could. If you love your planet and want to continue drinking a lot of craft beer for a lower price, go buy your homebrew starter kit today and see how you can go green!
• VARIETY: Home brewing allows you to connect with your beer on a whole new level as it has intrinsic value when it is coming from your kitchen, your living room, your closet. You can also connect with the Fort Collins community in a new way by taking part in the vibrant and growing home brewing community. Brewing your own beer opens up a world of possibilities as with each batch, the brewer can experiment with different ingredients, styles and techniques. It is not just another beer that you picked up in a 6-pack from the store; Home brewers think carefully as to what ingredients they will buy before going to the brew store, they design and create each beer with their own two hands. Like other hobbies, home brewing offers the consumer a chance to do something new, something different, unusual, and challenging.
• CHEAP: As Campbell explains with enthusiasm, “it is around $30 with a good recipe with a malt syrup to make 50-60 beers” and “with all-grain brewing it is about $20 to get the same amount of beers.” He continues “Either way, it is cheap beer at 50-60 cents a beer brewed with the store bought extract (malt syrup) whereas it is only 25-35 cents per beer with all-grain brewing!” Above gaining just experience with each batch of beer you brew, you also get 60 fresh, created for your taste beers, for much less than $1 a beer. A blogger known as Cheap Like Me, in her post titled Saving Money by Brewing your Own Beer, sums up the issue of saving money home brewing very well with this quote from her husband:

“The real question is what kind of beer are you replacing with homebrew? If you’re replacing great craft beers with your own homemade beer, your costs will in fact go down – and you’ll have found a very fun new hobby. However, if you’re content just buying some Miller Genuine Draft, homebrewing isn’t going to save you much money (if it saves you any at all).”

• TIME: Home brewing only requires a limited amount of time and therefore it is a great hobby for even busy people. As Campbell recounts, “whether you are brewing extract or all grain, it only takes a few hours of time spread out over several weeks” and it can even be a relaxing few hours as the tasks do not take an immense amount of thinking or work.
• GENDER INCLUSIVE: Yes, that means even women can homebrew! This hobby is appealing to both men and women across the country, the July 12, 2010 Los Angeles Times article, “Home Beer Brewing Calls to a New Generation – and to Women” discusses how more women are starting to join the women-only brewing clubs and competitions. Women are starting to challenge the typical masculine association with beer by taking pride in their own homemade brews.
• CONSUMER IN CONTROL: Home brewers can use ingredients and techniques that are commercially infeasible for the big breweries. They can regulate what products end up in their beer, unlike with microbrews how there could be additives and preservatives in the beer that are not put on the label. In home brewing, as Campbell explains, “all malt full bodied beer is the standard, and cheap additives are the exception.” This gives the home brewer a sense of control that proves to be very rewarding when they taste their newest batch of beer.
• Health Benefits: According to Luke Porter, a home beer brewing expert who published a blog on the Nandu Green website (http://blog.nandugreen.com/archives/2665), “beer, especially home brewed beer (due to it having no artificial colors or flavors, and no preservatives), can help when it comes to your health,” and he gives eight reasons why homebrewed beer is healthy for you. This surprised me, too, but after I looked at his website (http://homebeerbrewingsecrets.com/) I took his word for it, though I can not attest to his research validity. Here are the eight reasons Porter believes homebrews to be good for your health, taken directly from his blog post:

1. Studies have shown beer to increase HDL (”good” cholesterol) and decrease the occurrence of blood clots.

2. In May of ‘99, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that moderate beer drinking would lower the drinker’s chances of getting coronary heart disease by 30% – even upwards of 40%.

3. “The New England Journal of Medicine” reported in their November ‘99 issue that moderate beer drinkers would decrease the chances of their suffering a stroke by a full 20%.

4. The TNO Nutrition and Food Research Institute found that home brewed beer contains the vitamin B6, which prevents the build-up of the amino acid homocysteine (these have been linked to causing heart and vascular disease).

5. Home brewed beer contains no fat and no bad cholesterol. Drink it guilt free!

6. Drinking beer (brewed at home) helps promote blood vessel dilation, sleep, and eases urination in elderly people.

7. Beer is a proven stress reliever and sleep inducer. Nothing like relaxing with a glass of delicious beer you brewed yourself. In fact, the very act of making beer is relaxing.

8. Beer increases vitamin B6 absorption into the blood plasma by 30% – no other beverage can do this!

Drawbacks of Home Brewing

Even with all these benefits, this hobby may not be for everyone, especially for those who do not drink a lot of beer! It may not be the right time to start brewing for someone who doesn’t have extra cash. If you don’t have the brewing supplies, you will have to make an initial investment of about $70-$100 to get a brewing starter kit with all the materials as well as ingredients for your first batch. If you don’t have the $70-$100 to spend right now, think about saving up some money to go towards this initial investment. The money you will save from brewing your own beer in the future will eventually pay for the initial investment!

While one person may think that the process of home brewing is exciting, relaxing and challenging all at the same time, another person may just see it as tedious work. There are also other circumstances where home brewing would not be as appealing, for example, if there wasn’t two homebrew shops in Fort Collins, there probably wouldn’t be as large of a homebrew community. While there are online websites that will ship ingredients to you, if you do not live close to a homebrew shop you may reconsider taking up this hobby. Home brewing is not completely sustainable, taking into consideration that many of the ingredients come from New Zealand or Europe, but it is probably as close to an environmentally friendly beer that can consume in Fort Collins today.