Sharon Vanorny
A large stainless steel pot sits on a portable propane burner on the floor of Ryan Browne's double garage.
"This is a five-gallon batch," Browne explains, noting this is a typical volume produced by homebrewers that makes about two cases of beer. There are about four of these setups on the floor.
Browne, who lives on Madison's west side, has help this chilly December morning from Annie Leitzke and Aaron Voskuil, friends and co-workers from the Wine & Hop Shop. At just above freezing, it takes dedication to your craft to spend all day brewing beer in a cold garage.
There is grain steeping in the first pot, and a warm, malty aroma starts to fill the air.
Brew sessions are "best with other people," Voskuil observes, even though most parts of homebrewing are easily done alone. "It's tedious if you're just watching a flame for four hours."
"Zymurgy" -- the study or practice of fermentation in brewing, winemaking or distilling -- sounds to modern ears even more magical than alchemy, the fabled process of transforming dross into gold. Yet fermentation, the base of brewing, is a process as natural as living and dying.
Calling it zymurgy -- also the name that the American Homebrewers Association has taken for its bimonthly magazine -- makes this process sound more complicated than it is, even as it invests it with a special allure. The fact is, making a batch of beer can be done with less than $100 of equipment, a couple of hours of labor and another week to a month or so to age the brew. Bottling to complete the process takes about another hour.
Browne extols the virtues of brewing in the garage, or at least not in the kitchen. If a pot boils over, the brewmeister can be chipping caramelized sugar off the stove for days. But Browne also knows some dedicated homebrewers who never leave the stovetop.
Browne says whatever the means of production, homebrewing "doesn't need to be fancy." But homebrewer Zak Holmes likens homebrewing to fishing -- "You can buy a rod and reel and go fishing tomorrow, but eventually you want to get a boat and tackle and more stuff." His garage setup includes a gravity system (three kettles, stair-stepped on three levels, so that gravity pulls the liquid from kettle to kettle), and a laptop computer running BeerSmith homebrew software.
If there's nothing extraordinary about the homebrew process, its results can be. Take, for example, Browne's homemade wheat wine, a style similar to a barleywine (despite the names, these are both beers), but much more difficult to find.
He made it with malted wheat and malted barley, Nelson Sauvin hops -- a New Zealand variety with a "white wine must aroma," Browne explains -- aged four months on French oak medium toast spirals. These small spirals of wood, charred like oak barrels to simulate oak-barrel aging, are soaked in Jack Daniels for about three weeks. It's heady, downright boozy in the finish, and impressive.
When you can make something that tastes like that in your garage, it's no wonder that interest in homebrewing is joining the resurgence in home cooking, canning and fermentation. Who wouldn't want to take control of their beer, too?
'What you want to drink'
Wendy LaSchum started homebrewing "by accident." The Oregon resident grows Concord grapes in her yard, and tried branching out from jelly to making wine. When that failed, the veteran do-it-yourselfer decided to try making beer.
LaSchum brews on her porch, in five- to six-gallon batches. Beyond the creativity involved in playing with ingredients to get different flavors, she likes that she can produce the kind of beer that she wants to drink. "Sure, you can go out and buy beer, and you like it. But maybe the brewery decides not to make it any more, or they don't sell it where you live. I can create exactly what I want, and it's a better quality beer." She likes brewing full-flavored, malty beers, but with lower alcohol content.
To LaSchum, it's all about "what you want to drink" versus "what somebody else thinks you should buy."
That's just one of the myriad reasons that bring people to homebrewing.
The American Homebrewers Association (AHA) surveyed homebrewers in November 2013, coming up with an estimated 1.2 million homebrewers in the U.S. Two-thirds of those began homebrewing since 2005.
Steve Parr, associate director of the Colorado-based group, estimates there are more than 43,000 homebrewers in Wisconsin; the group's website lists 72 homebrew clubs across the state. They range from Elkhorn's "Walworth County Intergalactic Zymurgical Society" to the Wisconsin Dells' "Dells Unified Frequent Fermenters (D.U.F.F)" (an homage to the favored beer of Homer Simpson), to Milwaukee's 11 clubs — only fitting for the Brew City.
Locally, the Madison Homebrewers and Tasters Guild is joined by clubs in surrounding towns and at UW-Madison (see sidebar). The Tasters Guild is the largest in the area, with 400-some members, according to vice president Mark Alfred. In addition to offering classes, a mentorship program and regular social hours, the club sponsors several brewing contests and its marquee craft beer festival, the Great Taste of the Midwest. Often the perk of winning a contest is having a local craft brewery brew your beer and have it on tap.
But smaller clubs thrive, too. Ross Harms started the Sauk Prairie Bluff Hoppers homebrew club, a modest group with "30 followers on Facebook, 10 members, and about five to eight people who tend to make it to the monthly meetings," says Harms. Members trade beers and recipes.
Harms starting brewing four years ago from a kit his wife gave him as a Christmas present — a typical scenario. "The first batch did not turn out well at all," says Harms. "I mean, I drank it all, but it was kind of rough."
But a fellow homebrewer coached him through what might have gone wrong, and he tried again. Now a veteran of homebrew contests, Harms singles out his German eisbock, or "ice strong beer," that won second place at the Wisconsin State Fair in 2014. The process begins with a doppelbock that's frozen, then (because water freezes before alcohol) the concentrated beer is siphoned off for the brew itself.
Some of Harms' recipes have been brewed by and sold at the Corner Pub in Reedsburg, but customers wouldn't have seen Harms' name on them. "It's not about that," he says.
"I really enjoy competing," Harms says, but even more, "I like to share, more than actually drink myself. I give away most of what I brew."
Making better brewers
At its heart, brewing beer is pretty simple. Malted grains are steeped in hot water, then boiled with hops, then cooled and strained into a fermenting bucket. Yeast is added, fermentation begins. Then, you wait. For some low-alcohol beers, the wait is as short as a few days. But most beers will take a few weeks.
Zak Holmes took advantage of a below-zero day too cold for him to work his crane operator job to brew an ESB (Extra Special Bitter) in his garage. When he first started homebrewing, Holmes says, he hovered over the kettles continually, but now he'll set a timer on his phone and retreat into the house to watch TV until he needs to complete the next step: "It's nothing magical that happens."
Holmes is president of the Sun Prairie Wort Hogs homebrew club, which has about 25 members. Monthly meetings alternate between educational presentations, interclub brewing challenges and social hours, all with the goal of making members better brewers.
Holmes is big on encouraging Wort Hog members to enter competitions: "It's nice to win, but more important is the feedback you get from judges."
When first starting, he observes, having a beer just turn out is thrilling enough -- "It's like when cavemen first made fire." But he thinks a club can help with troubleshooting when novices hit stumbling blocks with more complex styles. "The longer you're in the hobby, the better the beer," he notes. And when members make better beer, they want to stick with the hobby -- which is good for everyone. The Wort Hogs club, which has been around since 2009, is working toward sponsoring its first homebrew contest this fall.
Legal obstacles
Homebrewers have become "more sophisticated," says Mark Garthwaite, executive director of the Wisconsin Brewers Guild and chairman of Great Taste of the Midwest. Thanks to the Internet, he adds, "Homebrewers have a wealth of information at their fingertips, so it's very different than even a decade ago."
A greater variety of equipment is readily available now too, so there's less of a need for people to "cobble stuff together," he notes, and the quality of the raw materials has improved.
Kits at supply shops like Monroe Street's Wine & Hop Shop, Williamson Street's Brew and Grow and Sun Prairie's Cannery Wine & Spirits might be for a brew of a generic style, or even replicate a specific local craft brew. Many more types of grains, yeasts and hops are sold locally.
"In the old days, you'd be leery of trying somebody's first homebrews. Now, people are making pretty good beer right off the bat," says Garthwaite, who is a former president of the Madison Homebrewers and Tasters Guild.
Madison homebrewer David Steinberg has been at it since the 1970s. Back then, homebrewing was often a choice made of necessity because there were few styles sold commercially -- "You had to homebrew to get beer that actually tasted like anything," he remembers.
He's experimented with a broad range of styles and ingredients, even bringing back water from his cabin up north. Water is crucial for brewing beer, and he and others say that Madison's water is excellent for the task. "Try drinking a beer from Texas sometime," Steinberg says.
Homebrewing wasn't exactly illegal under federal law before 1979, but the imposition of stiff excise taxes (and potential fines for not paying them) made it as good as illegal for the average person. President Jimmy Carter signed H.R. 1337 into law in 1978, opening the door to homebrewing and ushering in the era of small craft brewing when the law went into effect in 1979.
Some states, however, continued to restrict homebrewing; the practice didn't become legal in all 50 states until 2013, when Mississippi and Alabama finally legalized it.
Homebrew still cannot be sold, and most states limit the amount that can be brewed to 100 gallons a year, or 100 gallons per adult in a household, but with a maximum of 200 gallons per household.
In Wisconsin, a 2010 decision by the Department of Revenue sent shock waves through the homebrew community. Under Wisconsin law as it stood, the department declared, it was illegal to transport a homebrew outside the place where it was brewed, which would have made any homebrew contest illegal.
Also illegal: meetings of homebrew clubs at which members tasted or traded their beers, and the free samples that homebrew shops offer to show what can be done.
Wisconsin homebrew clubs and the American Homebrewers Association banded together to fight the restrictions, and in 2012, Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a bill that clarified the policies. It's okay to take homebrews out of the brewer's house, and brewing competitions -- including the one at the Wisconsin State Fair -- are definitively legal.
Sense of camaraderie
When Ryan Browne moved to Alabama in 2005 to pursue an MFA in poetry, he discovered that he couldn't find any good beer. Alabama had laws on the books that prohibited sales of beer with an alcohol content of over 6%: "This didn't outright prohibit the sale of craft beer, but it might as well have," Browne explains. Few breweries distributed to the state because a huge chunk of their product couldn't be sold.
So Browne's dad, a longtime homebrewer, sent him a kit.
Browne brewed a few batches and threw a party for his fellow grad students, surprised and pleased when the faculty showed up, too. Browne recalls thinking, "This is awesome, to have faculty show up and drink beer we made."
When he discovered that key to creating community, he started brewing more seriously. After he and his wife moved to Madison, where he divides his time between working at the Wine & Hop Shop and coordinating the writing center at Madison College's downtown campus, he wanted to continue that sense of camaraderie.
In 2013, Browne started a series he dubbed Poetry & Pints, combining his two passions, beer and verse. Seven sessions (two in Madison, two in Chicago, and one each in Eau Claire, Minneapolis and St. Louis) took place in artists' studios, a brewery and Madison's Hillington Green Park. Browne cleared everything with the city -- "no glass glasses, we checked IDs, okayed it with the parks department," Browne says.
"You're giving away your beer, and you're giving away your poetry," he reflects, "but you're also giving away the beer to get people to try poetry, or using the whole event to get people to try a new beer."
Poetry & Pints debuted in Madison in June 2013 with the theme "So Much Depends Upon a Pale Ale," no apologies to William Carlos Williams. A July 2014 event, accompanied by "Session Juli-bock" and "Xtra Pale Ale," featured among others Madison poet laureate Wendy Vardaman.
Vardaman was impressed. "The people who came out were attentive and interested -- a really good bunch of listeners...most of whom were not other poets." She, like Browne, sees it as a way to reach new audiences. "Bringing neighbors together to share poetry and beer and conversation is a great way to build community and a wider audience for an art form that people don't always automatically associate with a good time," says Vardaman.
Browne is already planning more Poetry & Pints for 2015, with former Wisconsin poet laureate Max Garland slated for April 4.
Beer and writing both ultimately serve a social purpose, Browne says. "Poetry is meant to be read aloud," he says. And beer "is meant to be shared."
