Big Brew Q&A – George Hummel

George and 200 recipes

Last year, Home Sweet Homebrew, the shop George Hummel owns in Philadelphia, notched a quarter century of business, having been launched in 1986.

U2's fire was starting to become forgettable around that time, taking on a rattle and hum. Jerry Garcia was about ready to take up pedal steel guitar again after a long break from it, and Anheuser-Busch was pushing the still-bland-to-this-day Bud Light with a terrier named Spuds McKenzie. Back then, trying to find a Samuel Adams Boston Lager on tap was like trying to find hops in Coors Light, while talking Sierra Nevada on the East Coast still pretty much referred to geography.

It would be almost 10 years before the Garden State would host any of the craft brewers that are familiar now, but good beer could be found at a sort of under the radar brewery in Vernon Valley. 

A lot of things have changed on the beer landscape on either side of the Delaware since then, just about all of it for the better (except that Bud and Coors Light), and the rise of homebrewing is one of them.

George has seen a lot of those trends beer and homebrewing, and over the years has taught a lot of people in southern New Jersey how to make beer. Then how to make it better.

He recently took some time to talk to contributing writer Evan Fritz, who's also an assistant brewer with Manayunk Brewing in the Philly 'burbs, about the craft of homebrewing, beers that hit the spot, turning a homebrew recipe into gold, and a very famous shop customer.    

EF: Tell me about the homebrewing scene when you got involved with it.
 
GH: It was a very small portion of people that were homebrewing back then. Mostly out of necessity. There were just a few eccentrics really. They wanted to make  their own beer. Good beer. There was really no good beer in Philly at the time and some of these people would spend hours and hours on the phone with distributors and regional suppliers just to get something different and unique. As for the the large equipment and ingredient wholesalers, they are mostly the same as today.
 
EF: Your grandfather and great grandfather were both professional brewers. Did you ever dream of brewing professionally and following in their legacies?
 

GH: Yes and no. I had always thought about it. But frankly, I don't like making the same beer over and over again. That's so boring. I also can't stand all of the government regulations that go with commerical brewing. Homebrewing allows me to brew different beers and experiment and have fun.
 
EF: Your new book The Complete Homebrew Beer Book came out last year. Talk about some of the challenges of putting what you know into a book.
 
GH: The biggest challenge was when it hit me that I had 240 pages to fill, with 200 recipes, and at least one page of every recipe was the procedures. Do the math. It left me with about 40 pages to tell people how to make good beer at home. To overcome the space limitations, I got creative using sidebars for many recipes.
 
EF: You opened Home Sweet Homebrew in 1986. What is one homebrewing trend that has remained constant over all these years?

GH: Actually we didn't open the shop, our old friends Kurt Denke and Pam Moore did. Nancy and I took over in 1990 ... Hoppy beers. Homebrewers love hops. Simple as that. Maybe it is because it helps hide the caramelization of malt extracts.

EF: What brewing advice do you have for experienced homebrewers trying to really perfect their craft?
 
GH: Time and patience. All too often homebrewers try to rush the process and they do not allow enough time to do it right. Especially with sparging. People tend to rush through it and their gravity suffers ultimately.

EF: You've won many awards for your homebrew. Which one is most special to you?
 
GH: My most treasured prize was winning the gold medal for George's Fault in 1995 at the Great American Beer Festival. It was based on an old (Charlie) Papazian recipe. Of course, I  tweaked it beyond all recognition until it became my own personal recipe. The guys from Nodding Head (brewpub) came over my house and they loved it. They convinced me that we had to make a large batch of it. After trying my homebrewed version of it, Charlie even said it was better than his.
 
EF: You can find good beer all around the world. So what's your favorite country to drink in?
 
GH: America. I spent many years traveling the country, chasing The Dead and drinking the local beers. We've got the best beer scene on the planet now.
 
EF: Your home stands on the grounds of an old Philadelphia brewery. Was that a coincidence or did you know this was where you wanted to live?
 
GH: It was a total coincidence. It simply sounded like a cool fact when we were researching places to live in the city, near the shop.
 
EF: Why do you think homebrewing is getting so popular?
 
GH: It's a real extension to people's love for good beer. It's sort of like  cooking. People these days are looking for hobbies where they can stay home,  save money and yet still have fun. Many people use their hobby to learn more  about beer by making it themselves. It's really taking it to the next level.
 
EF: What is your favorite style of beer to brew? To drink?
 
GH: I a have a real affinity for American IPAs. I love hops and this style really lets them shine. I am also very fond of some Belgian beers and ambers that are not really too big. Malty ambers with a big hop flavor and aroma but mellow bitterness.
 
EF: Is it true that you sold Sam Calagione (of Dogfish Head) ingredients for his first few batches of homebrew?
 
GH: Yes. He actually cleaned out his local shops and headed north for a bigger inventory. He came in one day, before. anyone knew who he was, and bought several full sacks of grain, pounds of hops and about 10 packs of liquid yeast.

He was telling me he had made a pretty long trip because he had already cleaned out all of the local homebrew shops around him. I remember thinking that this guy is a serious homebrewer with a very serious hobby. Nope. He ended up opening a brewpub in Rehoboth Beach. To this day, Sam and I remain very close. People ask me all the time how I can get him to make appearances and things like that. I just tell them, I call him up and he says, "Sure. Whatever you need, George."
 

Beer and roaming in Las Vegas

The cabdriver kept apologizing for the unforgiving choke points in afternoon rush-hour traffic en route to the Draft House, ground zero for the beers made under the Big Dog’s Brewing Company brand.

As we rode along, the driver held up his end of the beer conversation: Bud’s no longer in American hands, he says he heard, shaking his head at the fact that some European outfit snapped it up; the Draft House is a Packers bar, he adds (as in Green Bay; the brewpub’s founders originally hail from Wisconsin; brats and cheesy things on the menu); good beer there, he says, and best of all, about 5 miles from his home.

The driver knew plenty about the place, but had one question: Why the special trip to a brewpub 10 miles off the Strip, where there was no shortage of beer, food and gambling?

Answer: The Draft House has a Jersey connection we needed to check out … that and the release of the brewpub’s Belgian Wit seasonal. It seems that Miss America isn’t the only one who fled Absecon Island for the desert palms and bright lights of Las Vegas; it’s just that she’s far better known, of course, than Dave Otto, the guy behind the stouts, IPAs and pale ales from Big Dog’s.

Dave’s been in Vegas longer than Miss A, heading out there about a dozen years ago, when Bill Clinton hadn’t yet regretted giving Monica Lewinsky a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Ray Rhodes was still coaching the Eagles. In beer terms, Flying Fish was still swimming up stream then, releasing its Abbey Dubbel for the first time; the now late, mutton-chopped Michael Jackson made a beer hunter stop at the Cherry Hill brewery; and the Tun Tavern existed only as a venerated piece of Marine Corps history, not a place for fresh beer in the shadow of Atlantic City Boardwalk casino glitz.

Indeed, craft beer and the beer renaissance in general were starting to take firm hold in the Mid-Atlantic back then. And Dave, originally from Cinnaminson, did his pubcrawls at Philly bars, while Home Sweet Homebrew provided him with malt, hops and other homebrewer supplies. (He still remembers, Nugget, that colossal-sized cat that used to keep George and Nancy company at the Sansom Street shop.) Back then, Dave was also kicking around Ventnor and the Atlantic City scene, parking cars at the Showboat and Tropicana, and driving a limo for a company with ties to Trump casinos. Not much of a job, nor direction, he says, recalling those days. He did what anyone does when life starts to seem like four walls: seek a sunnier vista. So he headed west, looking for a place to go to school and study history.

Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada.

Dave applied to a few schools, but it was UNLV that accepted him; so did Holy Cow Casino Café & Brewery, the first throw of the beer dice for Big Dog’s Brewing and Sin City’s first microbrewery. Dave worked as an assistant brewer at Holy Cow on the Las Vegas strip, turning his homebrewer knowledge into pro brewer skills while on the job.

Holy Cow closed in 2002, and its owners shifted brewing operations to their Draft House property, where fermenters, conditioning tanks and the brew kettle are housed beside the barn-shaped building and its spacious bar area, video poker and dining tables. (Big Dog’s has two other locations: Big Dog’s Bar and Grill and Big Dog’s Casino Café.) Dave took over as brewmaster a year and a half later. Besides the brewhouse, these days you’ll also find him mingling with the crowds and beer geeks that turn out for the tasting parties for new beer releases (the first round is on the house, by the way, with a complimentary appetizer), or writing about beer for Southwest Brewing News.

Dave still has family in New Jersey, and except for the White House Sub Shop, and maybe the Baltimore Grille, he’s not one to get wistful over Atlantic City. Vegas is, after all, his roll of the dice.

Looks like it came up 7. Yep, a natural.

•••••••••••

Brews we had at the Draft House (served in nonic pint glasses, with 20-ounce imperial pours and 16-ounce pours; slip a $20 into a video poker machine at the bar, your beer is comped):

• Black Lab Stout (5.5% ABV): Well-balanced, smooth and tasty, poured under nitrogen, a good starter if you’re looking for a session brew but wanting to go beyond the pale. And of course, a black Lab is the iconic brand image of Big Dog’s Brewing.
• Holy Cow! Original Pale Ale (5.3% ABV): Clean aroma and lots of hops, but not overboard with bitterness. Very much the American version of pale ale, will remind you of the first time you had a West Coast-style beer.
• Sled Dog Winter Stout, aged in Jim Beam bourbon barrels (9% ABV): Vanilla signatures abound in a quite good imperial stout. Nice brew to come back to after the hop-centric Holy Cow. Just a hint of alcohol in the flavor, tucked in behind the roasty notes.
• Belgian Wit (4.8% ABV; in wheat glass): Nice and hazy from wheat and oats, orangey and refreshing to sip. Saaz hops, coriander and curacao. Our only regret with this brew is we had to chug it and dash, so we could keep to a schedule.