O.K., I do have memory going back before 1989, but sometimes I think they have t-shirted me past the point of no return. Some of the high points (low points?) include my head floating, amongst those of several other Foam Ranger renegade homebrewers, with the legend: “They won’t stay sober—Night of the Living Fred.”

Another has a WWI German-helmeted me, accoutered in a disgustingly scant leather garment, encrusted with various rings, some of which are obviously not visible and inserted god only knows where, and making demands of the viewer: “You Will Submit.” That’s the back of the shirt. On the front is a slightly leather-clad young lady with really high heels, telling the world that she had submitted. It turns out she had submitted her homebrew, but that’s another story.

My favorite in this line of silliness is the seventeen-dollar bill with the legend “In Fred we trust, all others pay cash.” Or maybe it’s the one with me and Pancho Villa. I’m the good-looking guy with the hopped sombrero, the beer can bandoleer and the goofy smile. Did I mention the shirt where I wear an almost magnificent codpiece? Maybe we shouldn’t go there.

The culprits in this scenario? The mighty Foam Rangers, and their partners-in-crime, the KGB; both Houston homebrew clubs. They, like most homebrew clubs, are groups of really eccentric people. We’re talking serious crazy, here. If there’s an Eccentrics Anonymous Society, they, and homebrewers across the country, are definitely candidates for membership.

The reader might very well tell me, “If it’s such a problem, why do you keep going back down there?” The answer is that I’ve been doing it ever since I was 12-years old. I can’t help myself. Besides, someday they might very well make a t-shirt I can’t resist.

Oh, and every year they let me do a beer-and-who-knows-what tasting. I get to force some really insidious beer-food combinations down their throats. Combinations that make beer and ice cream seem totally logical and sane. Of course, anything seems sane at one a.m., especially if you’ve been drinking all day. This year it was beer and junk food snacks! Who would be crazy enough to drink their beer accompanied by junk food?

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.