BOULDER, CO—The American Homebrewers Association (AHA) released the results of its fourth annual Homebrew Supply Shop Survey, detailing the current state of the home beer and wine supply retail industry. The results indicate that, on the whole, shops are thriving as they cater to the growing community of homebrewing enthusiasts.

Reviewing data from 275 shops spanning 47 states—a 32 percent increase in participants from last year’s survey—the survey found that on average, participants saw gross revenue increase by 26 percent in 2012. For shops that primarily sell homebrew supplies, gross revenue increased on average by 29 percent. This is 2 percent higher than last year’s results and 10 percent higher than results from the first AHA supply shop survey conducted in 2009.

“As homebrewing continues to grow, retail shops are responding accordingly, satisfying the needs of their increasing customer base,” said Gary Glass, director, American Homebrewers Association. “Homebrew supply shops serve as the heart of local homebrewing communities. The success of a local shop will ensure a thriving community of homebrewers.”

Additional highlights from the survey include:

• Homebrew Beginners: The majority of shops (80 percent) experienced increased sales of beginner homebrew equipment kits, signifying a considerable boost in interest in the hobby. The largest segment of people buying the beginner kits were individuals 30 to 39 years old.

• New Lease on Brewing: In 2013, 43 percent of responding shops said they have been open for three years or less, up from 34 percent in 2012, indicating considerable growth in new shop openings.

• Beer vs. Wine: Sales of beer ingredients outpaced wine ingredients among home beverage supply retailers, with an average of 35 percent of retail revenue coming from beer ingredients versus 21 percent from wine ingredients.

The full report contains additional information on customer demographics, marketing and sales. Results demonstrated significant advancement in several areas considered by the AHA, including gross revenue, store openings and beginner equipment sales, indicating a growth in the industry. The AHA conducts this survey every year to provide homebrewers and supply retailers with the latest industry information.

But when homebrewing expands beyond this, when the brewers are throwing parties to give away beer to friends, or even getting licensed and selling it to brewpubs, but not on a scale large enough scale to be classed as microbrewers, what have they become?

They’ve joined the ranks of a small but growing group of nanobrewers.

The increasing number of nanobrewers across the country is being spurred by several factors. First is simple economics: It is cheaper to make beer at home rather than buying it. There’s also simply the love of beer and the desire to share brews with others. And when you mix those two together, typically, there is a desire to get bigger and move into near-commercial brewing.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this trend towards nanobrewing, said Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) in Boulder, CO, who pointed out that many of the newcomers to the homebrewing field are under 30 years old. “This generation tends to seek out ways of personal expression and creativity,” he said, “and, people are looking to do things more locally in terms of beer, and you can’t get any more local than brewing at home.”

Not only are nanobrewers’ numbers proliferating, but their breweries are also becoming more recognized.

“I first heard the term ‘nanobrewing’ five or six years ago,” said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association, the umbrella organization that includes the AHA, “but I’ve been hearing it more in the past five to six months in terms of very small breweries.” It’s a mixture of people who get into nanobrewing, which keeps this tiny market exciting, he explained. “You may not have profitability as a driver, so you can probably find some interesting characters behind the beers and a high level of passion.”

And indeed, there’s passion to be found whether these nanobrewers are just starting out or are well established.

For the Love of Beer

Nanobrewing typically begins with a pure love of beer and a desire to make the best a brewer can.

Chris Enegren has created a highly advanced homebrewing system in his garage in Moorpark, CA, from where he produces slightly less than 20 gallons of beer per month, which he then hands out in samples at tasting parties on an irregular basis. Upon his graduation in 2006 with a degree in mechanical engineering, Enegren teamed up with his brother Matt and friend Joe Nascenzi with the goal of taking their home-brewing hobby to the next level.

“Our first goal was to convert our then portable brewing system into something more scientific, resembling a small-scale industrial system,” said Enegren. “After countless hours of research and development, we turned our rag-tag homebrewing operation into a streamlined nanobrewery complete with official uniforms.”

Now Enegren Brewing Co. has a fully electronically controlled, semi-automatic three-tier brewery, capable of producing 10-gallon batches of beer. The company produces beers depending on the three brewers’ whims: stouts, brown ales, dunkelweizens, pilsners, pale ales, bocks, and so on.

Since automating their system, the quality of their beer has gone up. “We’re now making better beer because everything’s better controlled,” said Enegren. “It’s laid out in a logical line of operations and we’ve built up a command central to run everything―one person can drive the whole system and from there the brewery can do things on its own.” The beer is also better, said Enegren, because if something goes wrong, they can see why.

This has not been a cheap endeavor. “I put a lot of money into the electronics and automation, because the main thing was to create a real brewery and the only way to do that was to brew as much as we could and take notes on everything,” he explained.

Enegren regularly enters his brews into contests and uses the comments from the judges to improve his beers. He also gets feedback at his parties, where the 20 to 50 guests fill out cards stating what they like and don’t like about the beers.

From Dusk to Dawn

Barnyard Brewing is a much less sophisticated system than Enegren’s, but that’s not to say that its beers are not as good, or its nanobrewers less enthusiastic.

Owners Mike Hummell and Heath Hoadley run Barnyard out of a backyard in Lawrence, KS, but have big plans and hope to soon make their operation bigger. Currently their beers include a golden ale, an Irish red, a porter, a dunkelweizen and a double-fermented golden ale flavored with peach wine.

Brewer Heath Hoadley of Barnyard Brewing

The duo brews these beers on Sundays and Mondays, the only time they can work together since Hummell works days for Wonder bread and Hoadley works nights as a cook. They spend these two days brewing, cleaning and sanitizing, dawn to dusk. Hoadley also stops by most days to check on the beers.

“If I were to spend 13 hours doing something, it would always be brewing,” he said.

But along with the fun, there’s the responsibility, said Hummell. At times when they’re brewing two batches at once, he sets his alarm every hour through the night to check on the fermentation temperatures. Since Barnyard doesn’t have a license, guests at parties thrown throughout the year drink its beers. These parties attract up to 400 people, who are invited through email blasts, flyers and word of mouth.

“This is a town that’s very big on supporting its people and it’s a town that’s very supporting of craft brews,” said the grateful Hummell.

Hummell and Hoadley set up shop in July 2008 after Hoadley moved back to the Midwest following a series of brewing jobs in Oregon and Washington. He’d previously studied to become a brewmaster at several schools, including the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago and Doemens Academy in Munich, Germany.

Despite Hoadley’s experience, said Hummell, there are challenges. Hummell is a self-confessed family man with a wife and two kids, so giving up a full-time job that pays health benefits to take a chance on full-time beer brewing isn’t something he can yet afford to do.

Getting Paid in Experience

Nanobrewing on this scale is just one step up from homebrewing. It’s homebrewing with an audience of tasters, although these nanobrewers do have loftier goals than most homebrewers who simply want to relax in the evenings with a good drink they’ve brewed themselves.

But where nanobrewers like Enegren, Hummell and Hoadley are aiming to go, Seth Gilligan has gone.

This Seattle-based nanobrewer has been brewing since 1997 and set up his company out of his home two years ago. He moved to a storage unit in 2007 after he spilled a coffee stout on his wife’s cream carpet and was effectively banned from brewing at home.
And from his small storage space, around 10 feet by 12, for two years, he brewed beer in equipment he custom designed and built from scratch with his team of helpful brewers. He also sold growlers of beer to the many passers-by on the trail conveniently located right outside his doors.

And since the storage unit, Gilligan has moved again, and is currently looking for a larger space, one that also gets a lot of foot traffic nearby. He is also working out deals with some local bars to carry his beers, which he’ll make through contract agreements with other breweries until he finds his own brewing spot.

The brewery produces eight half-kegs every month, with Gilligan and his partners, Mark Leavens and Zach Woehr, spending the better part of their weekends brewing.

Gilligan’s Brewing Co. produces a range of beers, including a chamomile beer with wheat, honey, vanilla and sweet orange peel. This latter, said Leavens, is the most popular brew. “It’s unconventional and people here in Seattle are clutching on to it because it’s so different.”

What the three brewers love is the experimentation they do, developing recipes that appeal to their fancy. “I get paid in experience and beer,” said Leavens. “The benefits [of this job] are amazing.”

Breaker Brewing Company in Plains, PA, is one step ahead of Gilligan’s and already sells to nine local bars, which, said owner Chris Miller, “is enough to get us started and get our name out there. We’re not making a whole lot of money but we’re sustaining.”

Miller and his friend Mark Lehman set up the company in 2005, when they began using homebrew kits in Miller’s kitchen, but they soon decided they needed to be more involved and able to sell their beer legally. Breaker Brewing Co. now operates a 1.5-barrel brewery system, brewing 45 gallons at a time out of Miller’s garage. And in fact, the money that they’ve plowed into this is not insignificant. Having built everything from the ground up has cost around $15,000, and they’ve spent an additional $5,000 or so on legal fees for the licensing process.

Miller and Lehman would like to get even bigger, and quit their day jobs in computing, possibly sometime in fall 2010.

“It’s taken off a lot of faster than we thought,” said Miller. “You have to take risks but you have to do it as smartly as possible.”

Breaker Brewing, named after the coal breakers that used to be a common sight in the nearby area, offers seasonal brews as well as five to six staples. The latter include Anthracite Ale, an amber ale that tastes somewhere between a pale ale and an IPA; Olde King Coal Stout; and Goldies Strawberry Blonde, whose ingredients include strawberry juice.

When Nano Becomes Micro?

Vine Park Brewing Co. in St. Paul, MN, sells their beer in growlers.

This unusual operation is two businesses in one. By day, it’s a brew-on-premise location where consumers use the equipment to make their own beer and wine; by night owners Andy Grage and Dan Justesen sell the beer they’ve produced on their two-barrel brewing system in 64-ounce growlers. They make six to eight gallons per month.

Andy Grage and Dan Justesen of Vine Park Brewing Co.

They brew their own beers on Mondays, when the other business is closed, and brew from all-grain rather than extract, for a higher-quality beer. Brews include the popular Stump Jumper Amber Ale, which Grage likened to a Fat Tire, and the Horny Toad Pale Ale, which he described as a smooth drinking ale with a floral hop aroma, a somewhat bitter flavor, and a slightly fruity finish.

“Over the past one and a half years we’ve developed a lot of regulars for our growlers,” said Grage. “At the beginning we thought it would be existing customers [from the brew-on-premise business] because they go home empty-handed on brew day, but it’s people in the area who stop by and get two or three growlers.” In fact, 60 percent of customers are people who walk in off the street.

Beyond selling growlers of beer, there’s another step before microbrew status is achieved―although many nanobrewers aren’t aiming for this at all, preferring instead to remain nano with the flexability for lots of creativity.

However, Peter Ausenhus and Margaret Bishop are a husband and wife team who are selling their beer from a real-life brewpub, in Northwood, IA.

Worth Brewing Co. opened for business in March 2007, with Bishop, an engineer, and Ausenhus, a beer-lover, behind it.

Now the two brew around 60 barrels a year in 10-gallon batches. Beers include the Dillon Clock Stopper, a Kölsch-style beer; a brown ale, their top seller; an English mild ale; and an Irish oatmeal stout.

Ausenhus tries something new at least once a month, which is typically the favorite among his customers. “That’s probably the advantage of having a nanobrewery―that I can try lots of beers,” he said.

Almost all of Worth Brewing’s beer is sold on site, although the brewery does fill growlers to go, too. The pub is open Wednesday and Friday nights and all day Saturday and it attracts mostly locals―30 to 60 people. On Saturdays, the crowd comes from further afield―beer aficionados from up to 60 miles away.

It may be a nano trend, sitting in the shadow of microbrewing, but it’s clear these brewers are onto something. They’re having fun, creating unique beers, and some are even making money at it. So look out for a nanobrewery near you―if there isn’t one, look again: they’re easy to miss.

In the process, the large brewers began dumbing down all of their own beer types. Beer color was as pale yellow as the brewers could make it. The hop levels fell to barely detectable amounts, close to the human taste threshold. By 1978, the world’s largest brewers had just about totally ruined the great beer styles of the world.

Cold-fermented and aged, lager beers had become the world’s major brewing style since their introduction in the mid-19th century. The cold-brewing method made lager beer smoother, more mellow and less bitter than the old ale beer types, which were warm-fermented quickly with top-fermenting yeast (above 60 degrees F/15.5 degrees C).

The faster ale ferment produced beer with heavier and more intense taste factors. The British and Belgian brewers were masters of the old traditional ale beers. In this period, only a very few American brewers pursued the ale tradition.

Prohibition also had the effect of destroying the good name of homebrew. My stepfather’s homebrew was a classic example of that miserable breed. His recipe: one 3.5-pound can of Blue Ribbon Hop Flavored Malt Syrup, ten gallons of water, ten pounds of corn sugar and a cube of Fleishman’s yeast. His lone fermenting vessel was a beautiful 10-gallon porcelain crock that stood behind my mother’s kitchen stove. At the end of ferment (about a week signaled by a low-key bubble formation on the surface of the beer), he bottled it in reusable dark quart bottles. A secondary ferment in the bottle, initiated by the addition of a level teaspoon of corn sugar, served to carbonate the finished beer after another week or so.

Unless you really needed an alcohol fix, this beer was truly wretched. It cost my dad a penny per quart, and he continued brewing the stuff until I was in college after the end of the war. By then, he was investing two cents a quart, but it satisfied the alcohol needs of my friends and me. We were after the cheap alcohol effect, and you couldn’t beat the price (free to us) nor the alcohol content (about 6 percent)—especially so since I didn’t reach legal drinking age until 1947, after service in the Marines, where I enjoyed American “3.2” beer (4 percent ABV) on military bases during the war. What I learned from all this was that drinking homebrew was only for the desperate among us.

Say ‘Hello” to Good Beer

When I was recalled for the Korean War, I sampled my first really good beer in Japan (Danish Tuborg). I was amazed at how good that tasted. I’d had no idea that beer had such potential. I became acquainted with delicious imported ales and American-brewed Rainier Ale, a strange concoction that turned out to be a bastard ale, i.e., brewed warm with bottom-fermenting (cold-fermenting) lager yeast. At least these beers had taste, while the mainstream mega-brewers were busy removing all vestiges of flavor from their ever more miserable products.

In 1967, I traveled down to San Francisco, the city of my birth. There, in the company of a friend, I chanced to visit the Old Spaghetti Factory on Green Street. They served San Francisco Steam Beer from the Anchor Brewing Co. Now that was a beer to note! My friend commented that Anchor Steam reminded him of homebrew. I had to wonder where he might have sampled any homebrew of such distinctive quality. But the idea stuck with me, and I began to wonder if one really could brew a beer like that at home.

I soon gave up on beer, and concentrated on exploring the good wines that this country produces. I started to make my own, with the help of Wine-Art, the local Portland home-winemaking shop. My wines were good, and Jack McCallum, the owner, suggested that I should teach a winemaking class for the local community college in 1968. It was great fun, and I discovered that the shop also had a great homebrewing section, with a Canadian recipe for a European-style lager beer, which was fermented warm in the manner of most homebrewers. It was quite different from that made by my stepfather.

This one was based on using only malt extract syrup and/or dry malt extract, with no sugar to ruin the taste. Moreover, the production system called for a brewery-style large kettle boil-up of the wort, during which one added real dried hops, and then transferred the cooled hot wort to an open primary ferment. This, along with a closed secondary ferment (a major feature in winemaking), under a fermentation lock in a winemaker’s glass carboy, made me say, “Wow!” There was a big difference in taste. This beer was like no other beer brewed in anyone’s home that I’d ever tried. It tasted pretty much like one would expect good beer to taste. I incorporated this recipe into my winemaking classes, even though homebrewed beer was still illegal.

Wine-Art owner Jack McCallum was so impressed with my re-write of his very good homebrew recipe that he invited me to write a book on the subject. In 1969, I did just that. A Treatise on Lager Beer came out in 1970 as a small, 52-page, booklet. We sold 110,000 copies of the book’s seven editions or revisions.

At that time, there were only 73 U.S. brewing companies operating 133 brewing plants in 31 states. Industry predictions told us there’d only be 10 by 1990. One could speculate that they’d all be brewing Budweiser clones by then.

But as the techniques of modern, scientifically-based homebrewing appeared, curiosity about small brewing began to rise. Fritz Maytag’s San Francisco Steam Beer techniques also began to draw interest. This culminated in the first American microbrewery the New Albion Brewery in Sonoma, CA, opened in 1976 by Jack McAuliffe.

Enter Michael Jackson and Charlie Papazian

Meanwhile, in England, Michael Jackson appeared with his monumental, soul-satisfying World Guide to Beer in 1977. I had suspected that there was a great variety of good beer out there, but I had no idea of the magnitude. Most of the beers found in the United were sold by the country! Who knew there were also styles?

Ale and lager, light and dark? What other kinds of beer could there be? Charles Finkel soon showed us, when his importing company, Merchant du Vin, brought in some of Jackson’s recommendations, including the great Belgian Orval Trappist and Lindemans Kriek, as well as British Samuel Smith Nut Brown Ale and Pinkus Ur-Pils from then-West Germany. Good beer had returned to America.

In Boulder, CO, in 1978, Charlie Papazian formed the American Homebrewers Association, our country’s first national homebrew organization. In December of that year, he introduced their journal, Zymurgy. He had been teaching and encouraging modern homebrewing in that city for several years by then, and he published his first book The Joy of Brewing (1976), whose sequel, The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing (1991), is still the definitive text on that art. The end of 1978 also signaled the legalizing of homebrewing along the same lines as homemade wine had always been, even through Prohibition.

The Return of the Ales

The year 1980 was a banner year, as homebrewers and other interested folks began opening small micro-breweries, including Sierra Nevada in Chico, CA by homebrewer and homebrew shop owner Ken Grossman, and Boulder Brewing in Longmont, CO.

These events brought Papazian and myself together with Michael Jackson at the first Great American Beer Festival in 1982, which included beer from some 40 breweries. Although not very impressive, what it did signal was that one could open a small brewery and enjoy modest success.

From 1981 to 1987, some 80 new microbrewers opened their doors in this country and Canada, due to the efforts of mostly new homebrewer entrepreneurs. By 2002 there were 1,503 breweries operating in this country! Not all have survived, of course, but some 1,449 were in operation by the end of 2007. Microbreweries have spread across the world, producing a wide variety of Jackson’s styles, showing up in such strange and disparate places as Japan, Korea, Europe and even Africa and southern Asia. Most of these new brewers produce ale beer on draft, which can take as little as seven to 10 days from brew kettle to beer tap. None of this would have happened without the work of Charlie Papazian and his brainchild, the American Homebrewers Association, which helped build a home for all these new brewers.

Many of you already enjoy their benefits: easy camaraderie amongst a willing pool of drinking pals; an exchange of information about beer, brewing and life in general; organized activities and an opportunity to achieve something bigger than one could do alone. For those of you not yet hooked up, I urge you to connect with an existing club or, if need be, go off and start your own.

Charlie Papazian started his club way back in the late 1970s, as a way of building a community of participants in the homebrewing classes he taught. Based on Charlie’s fearless vision of a brighter, beerier tomorrow, he turned it into the American Homebrewers Association, which eventually spawned the Association of Brewers, now the Brewers Association, which represents America’s commercial craft brewers as well as its homebrewers. Think of the AHA division of the Brewers Association as your national homebrewing club.

At their best, beer clubs can be just fantastic, but everything goes through cycles, and maybe your club is not so lively as it used to be. People often assume the same responsibilities year after year, and burnout is a real possibility. There are things you can do to bring the life—and fresh blood—back into your club.

For God’s sake, get some new people involved. They’ll have new ideas and will be fresh and ready to help as soon as they feel comfortable in the mix. Brewers (or people who would like to be) are all around you. Put a stack of flyers in the local beer bar or brewpub. If there is a beer festival near you, ask for a table to promote your club, and while you’re at it offer to supply some volunteers. Most times, organizers will jump at the offer.

Conducting a session specifically oriented to beginners, and advertised at pubs and the local homebrew shop, will likely turn up some new and eager folks. The AHA celebrates “Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day,” on the first Saturday in November, and if you participate, they’ll help promote your event. Another national event, “Big Brew,” offers great opportunities for connecting with new brewers. It’s the first Saturday in May. Check out both at www.beertown.org.

Pass the tasks around. Often, the same people hang onto the same jobs simply out of inertia. Similarly, those willing to help are often timid about stepping up into leadership, so you have to make a real effort to identify good candidates and invite them to participate. In my club, we created an Events Committee to try out new people as a steppingstone to being on the board.

Expand your range of activities. In my club, the Chicago Beer Society, we find that members get tired of the same old events. Refreshing or replacing them altogether is sometimes necessary to maintain interest. Competitions, educational events, road trips, group brews, campouts, tastings and much more await you.

Take on a challenge. Sometimes stretching your limits is a great way to re-energize your group and bring your local community together. For smaller clubs, holding a modest competition, or an educational event like a BJCP judge class may be challenge enough. Larger clubs may want to hold a beer festival, host the AHA regional first round, or even the National Homebrewers Conference. Larger events may require multiple clubs to get involved, another great way to expand and strengthen the community.

Get involved with your craft brew community. Home and craft brewers have a lot in common, and most craft brewers know that homebrewers are their most ardent and vocal supporters. There is a lot we can do together, and the benefits flow to everyone. Depending on the size and experience of the club, there are a range of possible events, from tasting dinners, to festivals of all sizes, to multi-day extravaganzas such as the Spirit of Belgium, put on every few years by BURP, a homebrewing club in the DC area.

My own Chicago Beer Society specializes in beer, as opposed to homebrewing, events. We find, when properly run, they attract new people into the club, promote great beer in general, offer a venue for commercial brewers to hang out with us and with each other, as well as raise funds for less profitable activities. We are a dues paying member of the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild, and do some events jointly with them. Over the past few years we have run a variety of events including a Brews and Blues Cruise, blind tasting dinners, real ale and barrel-aged beer festivals, and our crowning glory, the Brewpub Shootout, where local breweries compete for best food, beer and pairing. (Hint: awards generate participation.)

While we find commercial and homebrewing events are happy under one roof, beer enthusiast organizations are popping up in places like Washington state and Pittsburgh. The AHA is also trying to encourage this activity, and is working on some helpful information on how to make it work for your club. Again, Beertown is the place to look. And while you’re there, check out the GABF Pro-Am competition, which brings home and pro brewers together to compete for real GABF gold.

Get political. As legislatures react to recent Supreme Court decisions regarding distribution, there are politics afoot in many states that would seriously impact your access to good beer. In states like North Carolina, homebrewers have worked with others to repeal or change unreasonable state laws, such as North Carolina’s limit on alcohol content in beer. The Brewers Association is collecting names of interested individuals who will be alerted when their action can make a difference, as it has recently in several states (www.beertown.org for more information). This is another good reason to get friendly with your state craft brewers guild.

Get involved with the broader craft foods movement. In organizations such as Slow Food (www.slowfood.org) are people who are already excited about high quality, locally produced food and drink. Producers and retailers of artisanal foods are always looking for ways to get their products in front of willing customers, and they know that good beer is a powerful draw.

So you can see there is no shortage of things to do and places to take your club. All it takes is vision, determination, and a few really good beers to share. I’ll see you at the next meeting!

Only a few of these early brew shop proprietors were properly tuned into the potential of the hobby. The chain-smoking denizen of a particularly notorious Chicago brew shop denied the existence of the local brew club and remained hell bent on selling every customer his sure-fire combination of a can of extract and a 3-pound bag of dextrose until the very day his shop shut its doors forever.

How Far the Art Has Come

But from these impoverished beginnings, a passionate and sophisticated movement developed. Hops, malt and, most of all, information started to become available, and many of us tore Fred Eckhardt’s imperfect little books to shreds as we fed on his brewing revelations and uniquely cantankerous charm. About this time appeared a new kind of shop owner who saw the value in clubs, typified by John Daumé in Woodland Hills, CA. Daumé generously nurtured the Maltose Falcons, giving them the opportunity to build themselves into one of the great homebrew clubs on the planet.

Charlie Papazian recognized the value of community early on by, as he taught homebrewing classes in Boulder. Lucky for all of us, he had the nerve to think big, and he gave homebrewers—and later craft brewers—their own national organization.

And we continued to brew. Along the way we revived the venerable porter and India pale ale styles, which had pretty much vanished in their British homeland. We revived once-popular American beers like pre-Prohibition pilsners and stock ales, and sought out obscurities like Kentucky common beer and Pennsylvania swankey.

As we have marched along, our little band of brewers has gathered up a fascinating cast of characters: geeks and goddesses, artists and engineers, judges and poets. Yeast hunters, hop growers, party throwers and malt monks. We revived the dead, rescued the past, and charted a course for the future. We have built a culture of borderless collegiality, a welcoming community that may be our greatest achievement.

The Good-beer Revolution

Our influence has extended far beyond our sphere. Craft brewing, now a $3.5 billion business, was largely built by entrepreneurial homebrewers. Today, you would be hard pressed to name a small brewery not staffed largely by former, sometimes even current, homebrewers. The basics of beer judging were devised first to evaluate homebrewed beer. Without the behind-the-scenes effort of a horde of homebrewers, commercial beer competitions and beer festivals would be nigh impossible.

And we do love beer. Our thirst for hops appears insatiable. A dribble at first, in beers like amber and red ales, then a rush into pale ale, dripping with the uniquely American Cascade hop. We pressed on to India pale ales, rich and resiny, topped with the grapefruity tang of high-alpha hops whose vivid personalities command fierce loyalty from their fans. And today, a torrent–hops gushing out of our half-drained glasses of double IPAs, an arms race that rages on to who knows where.

Where indeed? Despite our achievements, there remain plenty of opportunities to strengthen and refine our institutions and individual skills. The camaraderie that is so strong within local clubs should be equally strong between clubs, as it is starting to become in certain regions. The pool of judging expertise continues to expand and should grow even more sophisticated in the future.

The American Homebrewers Association continues to thrive and has been given even greater autonomy by its newly reborn parent group, the Brewers Association.* Consequently, the framework for a national organization has never been stronger. Increased involvement will lead to expanded influence and opportunities, and I personally encourage you to join forces with us. The role of homebrewers as ambassadors of great beer will likely expand and come into sharper focus. We will be the ones who fill the void that exists in the area of organized beer appreciation.

Above all, we will continue to think big. In the Chicago Beer Society, we fantasize about a bricks and mortar clubhouse, a sumptuous temple of Gambrinus serving our every beer whim. Is this as ridiculous a dream as it sounds, or something to really work toward? Would today’s reality have seemed just as unreachable back in the dark days of 1980?

No dreams, no destination. So let’s keep going.

American Pale Ale

As it would hardly be a homebrewing column without a recipe, I leave you with the following recipe for American pale ale. It seems a bit quaint now, but it was a powerhouse in its day and is still quite delicious. Surely a classic!

*By January, 2005 the Association of Brewers will join forces with the Brewers’ Association of America to form a single, stronger organization called the Brewers’ Association, to represent the interests of small brewers. Homebrewers retain their seat at the table in the new organization, and our member-elected governing committee has been charged with charting the future for the AHA.