However, as with all hobbyists, homebrewers get restless and start looking for ways to improve our game. Eventually, we may become relaxed enough about brewing to start cooking up our own recipes, or bold enough to enter a competition. Then there’s the step to all grain, for those who have the time and the inclination. Maybe jump up to bigger batches, as one guy in our club said, “…to keep the band together.”

One important milestone is when you knuckle down and learn the vocabulary of beer flavor and styles. This helps with everything: quality control, recipe formulation and your odds of taking home a big ugly trophy in a homebrew competition. As a brewer and beer fan, you have some of this knowledge already, but getting a full grip on styles and the myriad sensory pleasures of beer usually requires additional study.

Successful brewing is equal parts concept and execution. If you’re working within the framework of existing styles, the need for detailed knowledge is obvious. And, even with the most freewheeling approach, it is helpful to know the rules in order to break them. Plus, why reinvent the wheel completely? Those old guys knew what they were doing. Historical styles are a treasure trove of wisdom about ingredients, process and social context—conceptual gold for the straight and warped alike.

On the execution side, it’s useful to cultivate a deep sense of how ingredient choices affect flavor. The best brewers I know can reverse-engineer a beer just by tasting it. In quality control, what’s not in your beer is often as important as what is. Brewhouse practice, sanitation and yeast wrangling affect your beers in ways that are not always obvious to the novice, but stand out like a hammer-bashed thumb to a practiced judge.

Which is why you should become one. A syllabus for the judge exam preparation covers all of the above and more. The practice you get tasting, evaluating and discussing will improve your own beers, but will also improve your understanding and appreciation of all beer: so much so that I recommend that anyone really serious about beer go for the beer judge title.

The Bar Exam

The most direct path to enlightenment is through the Beer Judge Certification Program. This volunteer-run organization sanctions competitions (jointly with the American Homebrewers Association), and tests, ranks and awards points to judges for participation in competitions and other activities. In addition, BJCP provides the score sheets and maintains a very detailed set of style guidelines. All of this and more can be found at BJCP.org.

It works like this: You study brewing and beer styles, and do some practice judging, then take the test, a combination of written and judging sections. Pass, and you become a “Certified” judge. Higher ranks such as National and Master are achieved with higher test scores in combination with judging, organizing and education points.

Competitions are everywhere. It’s a rare club that doesn’t have one of some sort. Since the number of entries is proportionate to membership, even the smallest clubs can manage. And, as a way of testing the water, the AHA has a Club-Only Competition (www.beertown.org) several times a year. It does not require a lot of experience or infrastructure to get involved with this.

If you want to ease into it and see what the judging thing is all about, volunteer to help steward at the next nearby competition. Stewarding is the important job of presenting the judges with beers in the proper order and condition, collecting score sheets and generally running all aspects besides the actual judging. In many cases, stewards can find time to taste along with the judges, so can get some close-up sense of what the judges are seeing, smelling and tasting.

It is not always necessary to be certified in order to judge, especially in smaller competitions, but credentialed judges are always welcome.

The Judging Process

Judging is just a highly structured form of tasting. First, judges are expected to describe the beer accurately—what’s actually in the glass. BJCP score sheets provide a roadmap for the judging: aroma, appearance, taste, body and a catchall called “overall.” Each section is allocated a certain number of points, fifty in total. The score sheet really does force you to consider each aspect of the beer and its style. In competitions, the beers are judged against a detailed description of the category. Perfectly fine beers that don’t fit the category don’t score well.

Usually two or three judges form a panel, which is presented with eight to twelve beers identified only by numbers. About ten minutes is spent on each beer. Judging is done without discussion until the scores are written down, then a discussion, and if necessary, reconciliation is done. Judges should be within seven points of each other. I once judged with homebrew legend Fred Eckhardt and we were never closer than 14 points on any beer in the flight. We just laughed, discussed and changed our scores. If there are a large number of beers in a category, several tables might split the judging, and then the results of all the tables in the category must be re-tasted and ranked by the most senior judges to pick the winners.

Best of show is usually a panel of three or four of the most experienced judges. Winning beers from each category are poured and lined up all at once. Judges go through quickly and start knocking out flawed, out-of-style or otherwise non-champion beers. At a certain point, maybe half a dozen beers are left on the table. At this level, all are perfectly within the style guidelines. This is when the “wonderfulness” of a beer—the particular subtleties of a recipe and its execution—comes to the fore. Getting down to a consensus on the last three is hard. Sometimes very hard. Aspects like subtlety, uniqueness, difficulty of the style and, yes, even personal preference can all come into play, and if judges feel passionately, this can drag on for a while.

Because it’s a collaborative activity, judges really get the benefit of each other’s skill and experience. Being at a table with much more experienced judges is intimidating at first, but most people are very eager to help the less experienced along, and new judges are usually better than they think they are. It’s also a great way to get to know people in the homebrewing community.

And those, it you haven’t already figured it out, are the best people in the world.

I’m not knocking brewpubs. They have to work under certain physical and economic realities that keep their treatment on the light and easy side, for the most part. As a homebrewer, you have no such limitations. Time, space, cost, and technical issues like filtration aren’t likely to be significant roadblocks to making seriously monstrous fruit beers in the home brewery.

A handful of commercial breweries seem to be able to manage this as well. Most of the Belgian lambic breweries do, although with varying degrees of authentic funkiness. The same goes for the sour red and brown beers of Flanders. Wisconsin’s New Glarus Brewery has put Door County cherries to good use in a big fruit bomb described as a “Belgian Style Red.” They brew a raspberry offering as well. Not coincidentally, these two beers won gold and silver medals in the fruit beer category at last year’s Great American Beer Festival. Elsewhere, Kalamazoo Brewing has long made a cherry stout that delivers the goods, and Delaware’s Dogfish Head offers beers made from currants, apricots and peaches.

A proper fruit beer should offer an explosion of complex fruit mingled with the rich, round flavors of malt, balanced into a compelling and memorable package.

So what does it take to get there?

Balance Is Key

Intensely fruity beers are really half wine, so some winemaking principles apply. As with any beverage, balance is a key element. Brewers think mostly of hops versus malt when considering a beer’s balance, although it’s often more complex than this.

In fruit beers, acidity plays a huge role, as it sharpens fruit flavor considerably. In wine, a lack of acidity is a grave flaw—a condition described as “flabby.” In fruit, acidity is inversely related to ripeness, and wine makers often go to considerable lengths to snag the grapes at exactly the right moment. Unless you’re growing your own fruit, you won’t have this luxury. Fortunately, it’s easy enough to add acidity, either in the form of lactic, malic or other acids, or by introducing a souring microbe as in the traditional Belgian fruit beer styles. Tannins also play a counterbalancing role, providing a texture that wine makers describe as “structure.”

Large quantities of ripe, flavorful fruit are essential. We’re talking a minimum of a pound per gallon of raspberries, or twice that for cherries—and this is just a starting point. I have used double that amount without really hitting the ceiling.

Okay, it isn’t saving-babies-in-Africa good, but American homebrewers have profoundly changed the beer scene for the better. We’ve made it pretty easy to get a palatable beer just about anywhere, and we’ve resuscitated a number of dead or dying beer styles. What we’ve accomplished in addition to that, is nothing less than preventing beer, a 10,000-year cultural treasure of humanity, from slipping into a coma of faceless industrial anonymity.

If you are a homebrewer, stick your arm up in the air, bend your elbow, turn your hand around and give yourself a few hearty whacks on the back. You’ve earned it. Through a passion and dedication driven by a sheer love of the beverage and its lore, homebrewers have experimented, evangelized, prophesied, and given up jobs their moms were perfectly proud of to put on rubber boots and brew beer in brewpubs and micros, bringing all their happy baggage with them.

It is a supreme accomplishment to have made some of the largest and most powerful corporations that are the industrial brewers do a bunch of things they’d really rather not have done. Remember, at the first frenzied peak of craft brew activity, that all the big fish started thrashing around, making stouts, buying micros, and generally acting as if their world just might be coming to an end. For a hundred years, Big Beer set the direction—paler, lighter, weaker and less bitter—with a profound sense of inevitability. And then, horrors! Geeks in their basements had taken the helm.

It is probably for the best that the 45 percent annual growth of craft brewing didn’t continue, as it might have gotten large enough for the product to be worthwhile for industrial brewers. But (whew!) the pressure’s off, and they can get back to cannibalizing their core brands with the latest licensed alcopop fad of the day and doing whatever it is they do in those cubicles.

The changes we’ve wrought on the industry remain. Craft beer has solidly established itself and isn’t going to fade away. Even in Europe, American-style craft brewing is serving as a model for the future of specialty beer.

And it begs for a perfect summer ale–crisp, dry, refreshing, but sturdy enough to satisfy, a lovely citric hop aroma leaps from the dazzling white meringue.

A style like this seems so right, so suited to the timeless cycle of seasons, that it’s hard to believe that summer ale is actually quite a modern creation, not yet 20 years old. John Gilbert of Hop Back Brewery created his famous Summer Lightning in the late 1980s, and it remains the standard bearer for this style.

Intensely Hopped, with Secret Ingredients

Paler than most English bitters, summer ales are likely to be a little more intensely hopped as well. Most versions hover between 4.5 and 5.0 percent alcohol. Hops have center stage, with moderate to high bitterness backing up loads of fresh, citric aroma. Late kettle additions, and perhaps even dry hopping, contribute to this forward expression of hop personality.

East Kent Goldings, with their spicy, resinous aromas, have always been the hop of choice for top-grade British beers. Challenger is a much more recently developed variety (1972). With a flavor that’s described as fruity, almost scented, with spicy overtones, it’s going to fit nicely into our recipe for a contemporary summer ale.

It’s an easy beer to brew, although true excellence depends upon top-flight ingredients. A base of British pale ale malt is the place to start. Maris Otter is generally regarded as the most nuanced in flavor, with light caramel- and nut-like qualities. A dash of pilsner malt will lighten the color and contribute a fresh, bright maltiness. I would use a little bit of unrefined sugar to add crispness without sacrificing character, and top it off with a few percent of wheat malt, which will help your beer settle into a compact, creamy head.

The possibility also exists for “secret” ingredients. British law long forbade the use of seasonings other than hops in commercial beers, a Reinheitsgebot of sorts. This law was put into effect sometime in the 1700s as a reaction to the adulteration of beers with substances–many of them toxic–intended to give beer an additional kick.  But spiced beers had a long history in Britain, and the use of seasonings such as coriander, ginger, grains of paradise and others continued in private breweries up to the mid 19th century. These particular spices blend extremely well with the kind of light, breezy beer we’re talking about here, and feature in the second, mock-historical brew (below) that I’ve concocted for your amusement.

As usual, the grist for these recipes is calculated at 80 percent of laboratory hot-water extract. Your mileage may vary. Hop rates are calculated for hop pellets, so if you’re using whole hops, increase the quantities by 20 percent. Since this is a pale, hoppy beer, brewing with hard water will make the hop character harsh and tannic, not at all the effect we’re seeking here. Adding calcium chloride or gypsum and boiling, then decanting, will remove enough carbonates to save your beer from astringency. You can also dilute your hard tap water with distilled, down to somewhere 50 parts per million (PPM) of carbonate.

To make an extract version of either of these beers, substitute pale malt syrup pound for pound for the malts, then toss in a half a pound of crushed pale crystal in your kettle (in a grain bag) and remove just before it gets to a boil. Sugar and hop/spice additions remain as listed here.

Either recipe can be fermented with your favorite ale yeast, although a hop-accentuating strain, such as the one originating from Young’s, might be just the thing.

Manufacturers and suppliers shipped equipment and ingredients, while members of other homebrew clubs sent cash.

“Some people who hear about the contributions think that it is silly to give homebrewing equipment to people who have just lost everything,” Atom Mashers president Mike Hall wrote in thank-you letter. “We can assure you that it is not—after the immediate short-term needs have been satisfied, the reality of the situation sinks in. Homebrewing is not one of the essentials in life, but sometimes it is the small pleasures that restore our sanity.”

American homebrewers are just plain different. Different from homebrewers in other countries. Different from amateur wine makers. Different, in fact, from other hobbyists. For instance, the most enthusiastic band of model railroaders could never change the US rail system like homebrewers changed the face of beer in the United States.

“They are still the ones setting the damn pace,” said Fred Eckhardt, who was there to put it down on paper when modern homebrewing was born.

Modern Homebrewing

It began before California Sen. Alan Cranston introduced the legislation to legalize homebrewing and President Jimmy Carter signed it into law in 1978. “It was more a matter of decriminalizing it,” said Charlie Papazian, who became the evangelist for the movement. “(The legislation) added a comfort level for the shops selling ingredients. People were more willing to stock good ingredients, to advertise they had them.”

Papazian had been teaching homebrewing classes in the Boulder area for five years when he and friend Charlie Matzen published the first issue of Zymurgy—a nationally distributed newsletter about homebrewing—and filed the papers to form the American Homebrewers Association. That was also in 1978, and the first issue of Zymurgy carried the news about Carter signing the Cranston bill.

“From the beginning, we never were brewing just to save money,” Papazian said. “In Canada and England, that was a reason to brew, because of the taxes. American homebrewers want to make beer like they can buy somewhere in the world.”

If it hadn’t been Carter and Cranston in 1978, it surely would have been another legislator and another president before long. Americans have been homebrewing since English settlers reached the New World. They didn’t stop for Prohibition and weren’t deterred by a typographical error when Prohibition was repealed. (When the law legalizing home wine making was printed in the Federal Register, the words “and/or beer” were left out, although Congress intended for them to be included.)

By the early ’70s, homebrewing Americans had a new focus. “Homebrewers brew home beer because domestic beer lacks the rich, malty taste they like,” Cranston said when the measure passed Congress. “Homebrewers share a creative desire to concoct beer to their own personal taste.”