©1996, Randy Mosher for All About Beer magazine
This column is for those of you who haven’t yet taken the malty plunge into the world of home brewed beer. There’s really no reason not to brew. It isn’t expensive, it doesn’t take a lot of time, and it isn’t all that hard to get satisfying results. If you have the kitchen skills to make a pan of lasagna, then you have what it takes to brew a batch of beer, and then some. If you need a little encouragement, here’s nine solid reasons why you should fire up your brew pot.
1. Brew what you want
The marketing geniuses at the world’s industrial breweries have no clue what kind of beer you like. Even if they did, the best they could do would be to dump it into a pot with a hundred thousand other preferences and brew an accountant-approved approximation of the resulting mélange. Which is exactly what they do. By brewing it yourself, you can have what you want, when you want it. You are the niche market supreme. You can brew for yourself, your lover, your parents, your new brewing friends, or the guests at your company picnic. Every real or imagined style is within your reach: dunkel pilsner, smoked habañero ale, strong pale ale, wheat porter. If you seek singularly exotic beers, your own nanobrewery can produce the most rarefied in the world.
2. Brew for knowledge
Brewing adds a huge new dimension to your understanding of beer. Unlike wine, which is largely about agriculture and weather, brewing is about process: the way malt is made and kilned, the way beer is mashed, at what time hops are added to the boil, the temperature of fermentation. These and dozens of other factors each have a profound effect on every beer. Brewing really is at the intersection of art and science. The best way to learn, we all know, is by doing. Or in this case, brewing.
3. Sharpen your palate
Whether watching nervously for flaws in one’s own, or trying to untangle the secrets of a favorite commercial beer, brewing makes one highly attuned to the many tastes that come together in beer. Chocolate malt, cascade hops, pedigreed yeast and hundreds other ingredients cease to be meaningless names, but snap into focus as living entities imparting their unique personality traits to beer.
4. Relive the past
Much of the past is lost to us forever, but brewing gives us a unique power to raise the dead. Beers of fifty, a hundred, a thousand years ago may be brought to life, not with total accuracy perhaps, but near enough to transport you to another age quite effectively. You don’t have to imagine how it felt to quaff a strong, dark, smoky, herb-infused gruit ale from medieval Germany. If you brew, you can track down some bog myrtle, cook one up and taste it for yourself.
5. Express your true nature
Brewing is a direct creative act, a far cry from the byzantine purposes to which our cubicle-bound labors are usually applied. You can get an inspiration for a new beer, go home and brew it, and in a few weeks delight yourself and your friends with your masterpiece. But more than merely simple pleasure, homebrewing is beer as art, a high calling of our nature, an ancient magical ritual potion—spirits summoned from the earth.
6. Be the life of the party
Your friends will be bragging shamelessly on you, even as they mysteriously forget to bring beer to your house, but this is a small price to pay for membership in the glorious community of brewers. Brewers often develop an intense passion for brewing. This, combined with the social bond developed by the simple act of sharing a beer, creates a true kinship among brewers. Brewers have secret knowledge and skills that support a bit of swagger, too.
7. Brew as a meditation
Except for those mad moments when the kettle boils over for the sixth time, brewing is a very relaxing and rewarding activity. Monastic traditions have long recognized the power of manual labor to fortify the soul. Take the harvest of the earth, mix it with pure water, bind and purify it with fire, then transform it with the mystery of yeast, once known as “Godisgood.” There’s plenty to contemplate here. And I can tell you, a shelf full of freshly-bottled ale is indeed a pacifying sight.
8. Embark on a new career
Most microbreweries began as a gleam in some homebrewer’s eye. Yes, you too can give up your fast-track software or biotech career to wear the rubber boots of the brewer. In fact, if you are thinking of starting a small brewery, it is essential—even if you don’t plan to be the brewer yourself—that you learn to brew. Craft brewing is a very product focused business, and you can’t afford not to know as much as possible about how the product is made. Plus, if the brewery doesn’t pan out, there’s always the fast-paced, high-paying world of beer journalism.
9. Simply the best beer
Finally, and most importantly, well made homebrew is unquestionably the best beer in the world. With some practice, you actually can brew with as much control, using the same ingredients as the typical microbrewery. Your beer can be superbly conditioned, adjunct-free, unfiltered, unpasteurized, or anything else you want. Or don’t want. Blowing the dust off a five year-old homebrewed barley wine and cracking it open to revel in it’s malty, vinous essence is a sensory treat seldom equaled in the world of mere commercial products, and I urge you, with all my heart, to give it a try.