Last spring Vince Michael, age 33, was getting restless. Work was still fun: he spends his days protecting historic buildings as the Chicago programs director for the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. Evenings were long: he’d expended considerable energy restoring his Logan Square greystone, and the thrill of dog ownership had worn off. While his artist wife, Felicity, spun images on her computer, Vince watched TV. But then last April he won a beermaking kit in a silent auction. The rest is history.
He flips open a notebook to page after page of his labels: “Memorial Ale, that was good–I did that for Memorial Day. Slam Dunkel, that was when the Bulls won the championship. Then–I really liked this–Independent Stout. This is when I started the Riff Bam line of beers. Riff Bam is an old cartoon character I used to do. Wicked Gravity August Ale, which I didn’t like–it was too hoppy–Scottish Ale, Riff Bam’s Hop Head Bitter. This was Cherry Bomb Ale; I put two and a half pounds of cherries in it. Then I did a Weissbier, then I did a brown ale, like a Newcastle Brown, that was like this recipe here. I followed it pretty closely. Then I made an Irish stout. It was too sweet, I mean the head on it was black, and oh–here’s Felicity Crystal Amber Ale [named after his wife]. That was very nice.”
Thus it has been to the present, with an ever-consolidating brewing industry trying hard to produce beers that, as beer authority Michael Jackson has written, won’t be “rejected by nine out of ten upwardly mobile white males between the ages of 25 and 40 living in Minneapolis.”
Not only is it easy to get good supplies; it’s also cheap. Consider the cost of a six-pack of fancy beer: $6, or $7? A home brewer’s initial investment is anywhere from $50 to $100 for the equipment, but the product itself is a bargain; Michael says it costs him about $25 for about 50 bottles. Hauling beer bottles to the recycler becomes a thing of the past, too, as home brewers hoard their empties to fill with their own brew.
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Just as important as good supplies, according to the home brew guru Charlie Papazian, is quality information. Papazian himself gets the lion’s share of credit here; no one has done more than he to propagate good brewing technique and proselytize the joys of home brew. Fifteen years ago he founded the American Homebrewer’s Association, which has grown into an 18,000-member organization with a magazine, Zymurgy, whose name means the science of brewing. Today the AHA is but one of several divisions of the Association of Brewers, which also serves as a trade association for microbrewers and brewpubs and runs the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, which gets a certain amount of press for naming the best microbrew in the country every year. Papazian’s book The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, first published in 1984, became the bible for home brewers. The second edition, The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing, has sold 350,000 since it came out in 199 1, and, a third edition should be out by fall 1994. Its charm lies in both its simple directions and its periodic exhortation to “Relax. Don’t worry. Have a home brew.”
Ah, another home brew, drained to the lees. The next steps are simple: 5) Pour the cooked liquid into a big container and add cold tap water and yeast. 6) Let it sit and ferment for five days or so. 7) Siphon it off into another large container, leaving a yeasty sludge behind, and let it ferment for another five days. 8) Siphon it into another container, leaving more of the spent yeast behind, and mix in a few cups of hot sugar water to start a second fermenting process that produces carbonation. 9) Siphon the beer into bottles and cap with a simple device that looks a little like a complicated corkscrew. Two to six weeks later chill, open, and enjoy.
Prohibition did outlaw all brewing. According to The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing, when Prohibition ended in 1933, restrictions on home wine making were lifted, but “through a stenographer’s mistake the words, ‘and/or beer’ never made it into the Federal Register.” States were free to legalize home brewing; some did. Then in 1979 Jimmy Carter signed a law decreeing that any adult over 21 could brew up to 100 gallons of beer per year for consumption by family and friends and another 100 gallons for every additional adult in the household.
