NHC: A talk with the AHA's Gary Glass

Which came first, homebrewing or craft brewing? 

The best answer may be that they're twins – not quite identical, certainly more than fraternal – arriving ever so close together, with craft beer growing a little faster than homebrewing, yet homebrewing never existing much more than a whisper away. 

And like any close family tie, especially among twins, one preternaturally knows what the other's thinking and doing. 

More practically, it's safe to say, homebrewing helped launch the craft brewing industry, and virtually on a daily basis it creates new commercial brewers, while the taste for craft beer helps attract people to the hobby of brewing at home. 

"It's kind of a cyclical thing," says Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association, the national organization founded 35 years ago to promote the homebrewing hobby. "The two communities, professional and amateur craft brewers, are part of one larger community. In the United States, we have breweries that produce a wider range of styles than anywhere else in the world, and it is a direct reflection of the homebrewing community that we have in this country. No other country has a homebrewing community that is as well-developed as we have here." 

As for that chicken-or-the-egg question, Gary says: "Back in the (late) 1970s, when the very first craft breweries started to open in this country, it was homebrewers who were opening (them). But there had to be some kind of initial exposure to something more than the American light lager that was ubiquitous in the country at the time. In a lot of cases, it was exposure to beer that was made maybe overseas – Germany, or Belgium or England – whether on vacation or traveling for work, or stationed in the military. People got exposure to those beers and came back and couldn't have them here, so they started brewing their own. That was kind of the start, but there's still that need of exposure to craft beer, flavorful beer, before you make that leap into homebrewing. They both feed upon each other: As homebrewing has grown, more of those homebrewers have opened craft breweries, more people are exposed to craft beer and then become part of that pool of people who can become homebrewers."

Beginning Thursday, homebrewers will take center stage in Philadelphia's craft beer scene, when the 2013 National Homebrewers Conference kicks off with speakers (Tom Peters of Monks Cafe is the keynote speaker), seminars and the crowning of this year's National Homebrew Competition winner. 

The three-day run marks the conference's return to the Mid-Atlantic region for the first time in eight years. The event has quadrupled in size since that Baltimore gathering; interest in the hobby has surged since then, and correspondingly, homebrewing supply shops have done well. Brewing supplies have even begun staking out shelf space at stores like Whole Foods. 

"It's phenomenal growth right now," says Gary, who earlier this month took some time to talk about homebrewing's popularity, the upcoming conference and the hand-in-hand relationship homebrewing continues to enjoy with commercial craft brewing.

BSL: Homebrewing, as a hobby, has clearly staked out some comfortable space and an identity that's cut loose from being an esoteric pursuit. It's much more plugged into the culture now, and enjoys a wave of popularity alongside craft beer in general. What has that meant for the American Homebrewers Association? 

GG: Since 2005, we've averaged 20 percent annual growth in membership, and we were seeing similar numbers at retail. We just did our survey of homebrew supply shops for the 2012 year, and we found that, overall, shops that sell homebrew supplies grew by 26 percent in gross revenue. Those shops that are focused on primarily selling homebrew supplies grew by 29 percent. 

BSL: That leads to this question, last year the AHA announced a milestone, passing the 30,000 mark in membership. That was truly a big moment, wasn't it? 

GG: It was a very big moment. I started with the American Homebrewers Association in 2000, and we had a little over 9,000 members at the time. It kind of went between 9,000 and 10,000 from then and until 2005, five years of being pretty flat, and previous to that it had dropped. So, ever since 2005, to see this tremendous growth – consistently growing at around 20 percent – it's just amazing. In any other kind of business, you would think that would be unsustainable in such a period of time, in eight years that kind of growth. 

BSL: And that's just people who have signed up with an organization, a head count you can audit. What are the best estimates for the overall number of people who have become homebrewers?

GG: It's definitely over a million people now in the United States. My best guess would be somewhere around like a million and a half, 1.6 million, somewhere in that area. But that really is a difficult number to pin down. 

BSL: Are you able to get a snapshot of demographics in homebrewing, how age groups are represented in the hobby?

GG: It's one of the questions we survey retailers with, what's the demographic of people buying beginner kits. What we found a couple of years ago was that almost half of the shops were seeing the biggest sales going to people under the age of 30. It's kind of creeped back into that 30 to 39 range being the most common age group buying beginner kits. But it has been in that 20 to 30 in the past several years. Before 2005 or so, it would have been more in the 30 to 40 range. That was about the time Generation Y was becoming of legal drinking age. I think that Generation Y is really fueling a lot of the growth that we're seeing in the hobby now.

BSL: Aside from craft beer's rising profile, what has contributed to homebrewing's surging popularity, or helped sustain it as a hobby?

GG: The single biggest change that has brought about this growth is access to information. Before, there were a couple of books that people (had available) to read. But now, the availability of information online ... it's really helped homebrewers succeed from the get-go, be able to make great beer from the start, which really hooks them into the hobby. People are succeeding with the hobby at an earlier stage than previously.

BSL: Let's talk a little bit about the National Homebrewers Conference, which is in Philadelphia this year. With the spike in interest in homebrewering, that has certainly posed some challenges for organizing the annual national gathering, hasn't it?

GG: We plan these conferences years in advance. I signed a contract for Philadelphia after our 2010 conference in Minneapolis, and then the 2011 conference had a 50 percent jump in attendance. I hadn't really anticipated that kind of growth. When I signed a contract for Philadelphia, I wasn't anticipating what we ended up with, which is, we'll have somewhere around 3,400 attendees in Philadelphia because we were able to expand our space available for this conference. We were very fortunate in Philadelphia that the hotel we're at is attached to the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

BSL: When was the last time the conference was on the East Coast, in this area and what was attendance like?

GG: It was Baltimore in 2005. We had about 850 attendees, and that was our biggest conference to that time. Last year, we had about 1,800; we sold out that conference in two days. That was in the Seattle, Washington, area. This year it took 20 hours to sell out, almost double the capacity.

BSL: So, again, this is a tricky task, finding a place to stage the conference, then gearing up for it ...

GG: That is the big challenge going forward. Finding those venues that are affordable for the attendees, recognizing that the attendees are hobbyists when most conventions are for business people who have their businesses paying their way. But with this conference, the attendees are paying their own way. It's important to us that to make sure it's accessible to as many members as possible, so we can try and keep the price down. Finding the venues that can house 3,000 to 4,000 or more attendees that are at that affordable level, that's the big challenge.

BSL: And sponsors, vendor participation, that has grown as well?

GG: I think it's 64 exhibitors this year. We used to have just a handful of exhibitors not too long ago. Last year, we had 40-something exhibitors, and this year we just ran out of space. There were more businesses interest in exhibiting than we actually had space for. It was vastly more than what it's been just in the last few years.

BSL: Philadelphia is known within and outside the region as a great place for craft beer and Belgian beer styles. When you're planning the conference, do you aim for places where you can feature the local beer culture?

GG: Yeah. We try to find a location that's accessible to members, but that's also a desirable destination ... (Philadelphia) is one of the best beer cities in the country; one of the first cities to have a citywide beer week was Philadelphia. It's definitely a very well-established beer scene and is continuing to evolve. 

BSL: Part of the homebrewing culture is necessity driving invention, creating things you don't have but want or need to help you brew better ...

GG: Yeah, absolutely. For a lot of the homebrewers out there, myself included, a big part of their love of the hobby is you do kind of create your own equipment, build a brew stand or little innovations to make your brewery better. I have no doubt at all that I spend more time and money tinkering with my equipment than I do actually brewing on it. That's part of my own personal interest in the hobby, and certainly a lot of other homebrewers are like that, and then come up with that great idea. They (may) have the capacity to start making it commercially and making it available to other homebrewers. For example, Blichmann Engineering ... John Blichmann was an engineer, made tractors for a living, and just started creating gadgets for his own brewing purposes, and realized other people might be interested in those things. He eventually had a company, and it became a full-time business. He's got employees, and high-end, stainless steel top-quality equipment now available to homebrewers.

BSL: And some nano-brewers as well.

GG: Right. 

BSL: You noted how access to information, especially online, has played a big part in the growth of homebrewing. And your organization responded with some changes to its own website. 

GG: For a long time, beertown.org was the official website. Back then it was the Association of Brewers, which included the Institute for Brewing Studies and the American Homebrewers Association, the Brewers Publications ... I think it was 2009 when we launched the new websites and broke the AHA portion of Beertown out and made that into HomebrewersAssociation.org, and created CraftBeer.com as the consumer facing website we use to promote all craft beer.

The response was tremendous. It really allowed us to focus those particular groups. I would say the AHA has done a much better job of serving our members as well homebrewers under HomebrewersAssociation.org than ever could have under Beertown. We have 40-something-thousand people on the AHA forum, which I couldn't have fathomed when we launched the new website. Previous to that we had an email forum, which was just for members. We made a conscious decision to make it open to all homebrewers, and I think we've seen, as a result, that was a very wise decision. It allows us to provide that information (via) that forum to every homebrewer out there. 

BSL: One can easily say that inside almost every homebrewer is a brewer yearing to go pro. A lot do, and a lot turn seek formal training. Do you have any statistics on perhaps how many people have pursued formal brewing programs because of the AHA?

GG: That is an interesting question, and I don't have the answer for that. I do know a lot of those programs like Siebel Institute, American Brewers Guild, U.C. Davis are certainly involved with the American Homebrewers Association. They're exhibitors at our conference, advertisers in our magazines. They certainly see we are funneling people into their schools. Interestingly, there have been several universities that have started brewing programs of late ... Colorado State in Fort Collins does a business of beer program for people looking to start a brewery. There are brewing programs just getting underway in Auburn University in Alabama. (Alabama) just legalized homebrewing, and they've got a program to train people to be professional brewers.  

BSL: Speaking of professional brewers from homebrewer stock, can you talk a little about that long-established and continuing trend?

GG: We're seeing explosive growth in homebrewers who are taking that next step and starting their own brewery. The Brewers Association has over a thousand breweries in planning; we just surpassed 2,000 total breweries in the country in 2012. Growth in the hobby is translating into growth in the number of people who are taking that next step and opening their own breweries.

1,000 batches & a homebrew shop later ...

Brett Mullin checks labels on kegs of homebrew
dropped off at his supply shop in Westmont. The
kegs were later delivered to the National
Homebrewers Conference in Philadelphia.

For Brett Mullin, the carboys in the garage of a home where he was helping redo a basement begged the question. 

What are those? 

Beer. 

From where, exactly? 

Home. Yes, you can make beer in your garage, the homeowner said. 

Impressed and curious, Brett, then barely past his 18th birthday, was hooked on the idea and decided to give making beer at home a shot.

With a kit given to him as tip by the homeowner, he turned out an IPA, augmenting the task with some additional equipment and supplies he picked up the next day at homebrew shop that has now since closed. 

"I started it at 11 o'clock at night. I didn't finish up until like 4 or 5 in the morning," he says.  

That was 11 years, a career change and 1,000 homebrew batches ago. "Ever since then, I've been brewing like crazy," he says. 

Beer, indeed, has become a dedicated pursuit for Brett, a guy who brews six days a week and teaches other people how to brew, as well. His past curiosity is now an occupation: Brew Your Own Bottle, the homebrew supply shop he opened after a chronic shoulder injury forced him out of carpentry work, just observed its third anniversary in business.

With the three-day National Homebrewers Conference kicking off in Philadelphia on Thursday, Brett's shop, like others around the region, has served as a drop-off spot for kegs of homebrew destined for serving at the conference.

Brett timed the brewing of his 1,000th batch to fall around his shop's anniversary. (Nine composition books filled with brew-day notes and details chronicle his years of beer-making, the diary of a malt activist, if you will.) 

"I did what's called a double-double," he says, explaining the 10-gallon for Batch 1,000. "You take your first mash, your first runnings from that and you mash that in another beer. You're basically making a very high alcohol, very malty kind of beer. It came out with an original gravity of 1.120. I figure it's going to finish out at 1.020 or 25, about 13.1% ABV."

Brett divided up the batch (made with 44 pounds of grain) so he could use different yeasts to ferment it: Two with British ale yeast, another with an Irish ale yeast. 

"It'll probably take two weeks to ferment out to, say, 025 or 030, and then over the next year, it'll keep dropping down a little bit at a time," he says. 

Not one to sit still, he's already thought of the next brew. For that, Brett's going back to his roots, an IPA. But after all the time he's been brewing, that IPA is one he has refined into what he expects from an India Pale Ale. Thus it's a nod to Heady Topper. His version was crafted through comparative sampling of the Vermont double IPA and his own creations.

"I think I have it pretty much nailed. It's perfect for me, and I'm probably going to brew that again because I only have 10 gallons left of it. It's one I always have on tap," he says.

And that very first IPA, that beginning beer? Brett still has some of it. Over the years, it has flavor-morphed from IPA to something like cream ale and doesn't score well on the test of time. 

"It's not a very good beer," he says. "It did not age well at all."

One more from the pumpkin patch

Staying with the topic of pumpkin beers for a little bit ...

A very big thread that runs through craft beer finds brewers surveying the landscape and looking for ideas they can use to create a beer. (OK, yeah, that's how a lot of life works – drawing upon influences to produce something you call yours.)

Pro brewers do it; so do homebrewers. Call it homage ... call it borrowing. Call it knowing a good idea when you see it.

Sal Emma and Terry Leary, a homebrewing duo from Cape May County, fit all three.

Making a pumpkin beer and adding the usual pie spices to the rim of the glass, like salt on a margarita glass, sounded like a worthwhile technique to Sal, who encountered it when he was served a pint of pumpkin beer at Sweetwater Tavern, a Northern Virginia brewpub, a few years ago.

The idea sounded pretty good to Terry, too, and thus, their fall pumpkin ale was born last year. A couple of weeks ago, the pair went about the business of reprising it for this autumn, brewing it in their 2-barrel setup, using sweet South Jersey pumpkins in their mash and some honey in the boil.

(This past spring, the two won a homebrewer contest sponsored by the Tun Tavern and At The Shore weekly entertainment tabloid published by The Press of Atlantic City newspaper. See the accompanying video below. Terry and Sal followed up their contest-winning robust porter with a killer IPA that could give Tröegs Perpetual IPA a run for its money.)

Some background ...
Sweetwater, a restaurant-brewery in Sterling, Va. (with a couple other restaurant locations), began making the pumpkin ale a year after opening its doors in the mid-1990s.

Brewer Nick Funnell, the guy who's been in charge of Sweetwater's beers since the beginning, mashes with pumpkin and adds a blend of traditional pumpkin pie spices in the brew (the spices come from a merchant local to the brewery).

And for a garnish – the part that stuck in Sal's mind – Nick says the serving glasses are rimmed with roasted pumpkin seeds and more pie spices to, well, spice up the drinking experience.

The glass trick, as you can imagine, lets the drinker control the spice experience, either by constantly rotating the glass for more, or drinking from the same spot for less.

Because everyone's palate is different and personal preferences matter.

That's the part fresh in Terry's mind. His preference is for less spice, as in just pumpkin in the mash. The spices go on the glass.

"We grind up (salted) pumpkin seeds," Terry says, "mix the ground seeds with nutmeg, allspice and cinnamon – create a dry mixture of that – then reduce apple cider to a semi-thick roux, dip the glass to about quarter inch in, then dip it in the seeds and spice."

Notes Sal: "We grind 'em real coarse because you want to be able to chew the pumpkin seeds."

For their 2-barrel batch, they started with about 160 pounds of grain – Briess 2 Row, some biscuit malt (you want that pie crust notion), some caramel malt and special roast. To that mash, they added 30 pounds of pumpkins bought from a Cumberland County farmstand. (Last year, they used Libby's canned pumpkin.)

"The pumpkin variety is Long Island Cheese, also know as Cheese Wheel, an heirloom known for its sweetness," Sal says. "They were grown by the Bertuzzi family in Vineland. The seeds from those pumpkins will be in the glass-rimming treatment. Even the seeds are sweet."

The pumpkin adds a some color to the beer, Sal says, "a little bit of essence of pumpkin. It's not a real pumpkiny beer. Terry thinks it's more an aroma kind of thing."

In the boil, they added 15 pounds of honey (hops included Chinook, Willamette and Centennial, with a dash of homegrown Cascade at the very end for aroma) for a beer (around 6% ABV) that is shaping up fine, with that pumpkin essence in the nose.

"(The) beer smelled and tasted great at racking," Sal says, "very malty, not over the top
in hop bitterness but a nice, long hop finish."

Halloween's not far off; neither is their beer.

Big Brew Trifecta: 3 Q&As with Beer People

EDITOR'S NOTE: In observance of Big Brew and National Homebrew Day, Beer-Stained Letter has a trio of Beer People/Beer Life Q&A features: Talks with longtime homebrew figures – Joe Bair and George Hummel of Home Sweet Homebrew in Philadelpia – and an interview (posted Thursday, May 3rd) with Matt Brophy, the brewmaster and chief operating officer of Flying Dog Brewery who, like a lot of pros, entered the business via homebrewing ... 

Joe Bair (left) with Ryan Hansen of PALE-ALES

Joe Bair has been a part of New Jersey's craft beer scene practically since its genesis.

When Triumph Brewing opened its doors on Nassau Street in Princeton as the state's second brewpub in 1995 (the Ship Inn up in Milford edged out Triumph for the lead), Ray Disch and Adam Rechnitz quickly had a new neighbor, someone who would encourage folks to not just drink better beer, but to make their own.

At the urging of his friend, Mark Burford – then owner of New York Homebrew, but better known now as the guy behind Blue Point Brewing on Long Island – Joe opened Princeton Homebrew, turning his back on his job at Princeton University doing administrative work in molecular biology and putting his life savings on the line.

Craft beer back then was just starting to get a foothold in the mid-Atlantic region, and the annual of observance of National Homebrew Day was but 7 years old. Fast-forward to now:  The American Homebrewers Association estimates there are 750,000 homebrewers in the US, and paid AHA membership has topped 30,000.

Come Saturday, homebrewers will again gather at locations all across the country for their annual simultaneous day of brewing – the Big Brew.

As for Joe, on Saturday you'll find him at his shop, now on Route 29 in Trenton, turning out Big Brew batches of wort for the homebrew club PALE ALES (Princeton and Local Environs Ale and Lager Enthusiast Society), whose members will gather at Suydam Farm, in nearby Somerset County.

Across the state, you'll find like-minded homebrewers celebrating: North Jersey Home Brew and Sussex County United Brewers and Alchemists in Sparta; Barley Legal Homebrewers in Maple Shade; and Cask & Kettle Homebrew with the guys from Final Gravity Podcast in Montville. That's just a short list, the ones registered with the AHA Big Brew website, but there are doubtless more.

------

BSL: What was it like in early on, the business of encouraging people to make their own beer?
JB: I think about that all the time – how I sold then to how I sell now. Back then, I thought the whole process to selling homebrew (supplies) was to set up some really good, slick learning thing where you show people all the stuff you need and walk 'em through, and they buy a kit. That was a good formula in the beginning.

BSL: What attracts people to homebrewing? Is it different now vs. when you first opened?
JB: Everybody is forgetting that most of the reasons why people homebrewed back then was we had shit beer. It was horrible. It was embarrassing to say you came from America. Lowenbrau and Heineken or something like it were considered fantastic. Now, those are more swill. But back then, anything but American beer.

BSL: Homebrewers, especially beginning ones, are hell-bent on making their beers better as fast as they can. It's almost like a race to get to refinements and brew a great beer. With all the information available now, are people are getting to that finish line faster?

JB: If everybody stoppped brewing because they had a bad batch of beer, there'd be no beer. Everybody's had a bad batch of beer. Hey, get used to it, Join the club ... You have to get over all these things. Sooner or later, you get really good at it, and you meet other people who are just starting and they go through the whole thing.

BSL: Do you think nowadays people hit that point of embracing and actually enjoying all of the finer brewing details, like the science stuff vs. just basic procedures, faster than say folks did back in the 1990s, when the hobby was first getting some traction around here?

JB: Right now – and it's been this way since at least around 2000 – people, instead of looking at brewing as something that's laborious, everything that they look at is interesting: Do this because it's interesting, understand this because it's interesting, which is a lot better way of doing things – finding fascination, doing things the right way, understanding things.

Most of the people around here, when they started brewing, we started them off with adding their own grains, their own hops ... and they didn't even realize it. They're being kind of pushed along in a very gentle way to start paying attention to things like temperature, to start paying attention to putting your own hops into recipe formulation, things like that, that you would not get from just opening up an already-hopped can of something.

Sooner or later you're making your own recipes. You don't have to look at any other brewer's recipes. You can make your own. You can make your own equipment. Most of this stuff is just a lot of plumbing.

BSL: Talk about some of the brewing tricks, now vs. then.
JB: I remember dry-hopping was something that people would say Oh?!?!? That was like getting out there, putting an ounce of hops in your secondary was Wow, that's advanced brewing. But now, with dry-hopping, they're saying put it in five hours before bottling it, you'll get better results than putting it in two weeks.

BSL: Hops, all the new varieties, seem to be the bright shiny object that can quickly grab homebrewers' attention these days. There's way more available to today's homebrewer than before ... 
JB: When I opened my store, Pride of Ringwood at 7.8% was the highest alpha hop I sold ... Then they came along with Centennial ... all of a sudden there's another hop, like Hey what's this, Nugget? There's always something new that comes around.

BSL: With the Internet, people can shop anywhere. But isn't a local shop -– an actual store – a nexus? People in a store talk to one another, and that creates a buzz. That's as much an ingredient in beer as barley, no?
JB: I've never heard it put that way, but yeah. It helps people to have tangible personal relationships ... that they can come in and ask 'What did I do wrong?' or 'How do you go about doing this or that?' It's very hard to translate that to the mega Internet beer supplier customers. They say go to Homebrew Talk and learn from this. You're not getting directly to somebody who knows; you have to filter out the stuff. (In some cases) you have people who've brewed one or two batches of beer in their life giving instructions to other people, like you don't need to do secondaries, or cut the tube off on the bottom of your Corny keg ... There are so many things that are out there. It tends to amplify, the Internet, some of the things that are wrong.

BSL: Homebrewers have long fed the ranks of pro brewers. What do you make of the latest industry growth wave, those polished homebrewers who went commercial by stepping into the game at the very, very small scale, like a barrel or two?
JB: Back before prohibition, there was an outrageous amount of breweries in every single town. Everything works on a big sinusoidal curve. We start at one place, it appears we're moving forward, and we go small to large, large to small.

When I opened my business, they asked me to prognosticate the future (of brewing). I said that any town that's a town will have a brewery in it. When I said that back then, people were going like, What!?!? And now I would say any community that's a community will have its own brewery. And that's the way it looks like it's going, and I think that big sinusoidal wave is back.

The big, huge mega brewers ... for a long time people were saying they're a good American company. What's the Super Bowl without an Anheuser-Busch commercial? They're on the down slope; they're not on the up. They're not even an American company anymore. They pushed this whole thing – you want beer, you drink beer – and it was one style, pale lagers. It's changing. Microbrewers are getting more and more of a share; the homebrewers are getting more and more of a share. It's not that a whole bunch more beer is being brewed, it's that a whole bunch more smaller brewers are doing it .

BSL: What's the most exciting thing about homebrewing right now?
JB: I would say the homebrew clubs. When I started PALE ALES in 1995, there weren't that many homebrew clubs. Now there's a club being started it seems like every month.

BSL: Clubs nowadays appear better organized, more ambitious.
JB: It took awhile for our club. Some people wanted to do it for charity, others peple would say, Hey, I'm here drink beer, I'm not here to do charity. There were some people who said, Hey, we need more brewing. Everybody had their own little way the club was supposed to go.

Now there are competition clubs; there are clubs that just meet at the same place, clubs that go around to all the different breweries or different bars; there are clubs that have speakers (such as) distributors, water people, the basic ingredients of beer, bar owners ... There are so many different facets to the whole thing.

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."
 

Flying Dog's Matt Brophy talks of his Jersey ties

Flying Dog's Matt Brophy

When you think about it, Matt Brophy's beer aspirations were meant to have wings.

His foot in the door to the craft brewing world was Flying Fish in Cherry Hill in the 19990s. And for nearly a decade now,  he's been with Flying Dog, taking a Denver-to-Maryland route where there's greatness in gonzo, some wild and wicked label art by Ralph Steadman, and the Hunter S. Thompson echo of the Celtic axiom "Good people drink good beer."

No shit.

But long before his pro brewer days, while he was a youth in South Jersey (by way of Pittsburgh), beer, as in brewing, found Matt. It poured from the radio as homebrewer talk, a tide of inspiration that was really a wave of ambition. Matt went with the flow.

Recently, Matt took some time for a Q&A to talk about how he got his start in brewing, his hearing the call of out West, and the Flying Dog beer culture that unleashes the hounds to come up with those cool bat-winged brews. It seems like a fitting interview to mark this Saturday's National Homebrew Day.


BSL: You're a South Jersey guy, can you talk a little about that?
MB: I actually moved to South Jersey in 1990, as a freshman in high school. I went to Woodbury High in Gloucester County, and started homebrewing when I was a junior

BSL: Flying a little bit under the radar?
MB: Yeah, I was 17 years old ...

BSL: So, talk a little about that early start ...
MB: My mother knew about it, but I think she was just happy I was interested in something. But my story starts – of course, I had been drinking beer a little, you know what we kind of refer to these days as factory beer – I was home sick from school one day and heard Charlie Papazian on Radio Times promoting his book, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, and it really captured my imagination. I kind of learned a lot in the course of an hour about how interesting beer really is, the history behind it and world beer styles, a lot of things I just wasn't aware of.

So I went out and bought his book that same day, and I read it cover to cover in just a couple of days, and by the weekend, I was out buying homebrewing equipment. I fired off my first batch and waited, you know, two or three weeks and finally got in the bottle and waited another week or two for bottle-conditioning and had a couple of my 17-year-old friends over, and we cracked the bottles open and took sip, and it was terrible but we drank it anyway (laughs).

BSL: But clearly you were undaunted by that ...
MB: I kept trying, I kept brewing and quickly was able to improve the quality of the beer I was making. Pretty quickly after that, mostly motivated for economic purposes, I switched to all-grain brewing but also saw some other benefits once I started doing that. 

BSL: So in your youth you were marching to a completely different drummer altogether.
MB: Pretty much.

BSL: What kind of music were you listening to?
MB: We were kind of old school kids. We listened to some oldies and stuff, into some classic rock, that kind of thing, that morphed into a little more jam band kind of thing, Grateful Dead stuff. Since then it's gotten a little more eclectic but pretty traditional, at least Americana type 20th century music.

BSL: There's a common thread with jam band music and beer ...
MB: We have a beer, our Double Dog, and the way the hopping works on it, you know we start with a bittering hop and then we kind of fade into another hop as the first hop kind of fades out. So sometimes when I'm talking about the beer, I describe it as a little bit like what happens at a Dead show where some elements stick around as it morphs into something else.

BSL: Where did you get that first homebrew kit? Did you get it from the now-closed BeerCrafters, or did you go across the river (to Philadelphia)?
MB: Is it Home Sweet Homebrew on Samson in Philly? I might have gone there first. I don't remember what year BeerCrafters opened, but I remember being there, too. I think Philly was first, but pretty soon afterward I was solely shopping at BeerCrafters.

BSL: What was your very first good batch of beer, the one where you said 'I zeroed in on this, this is really, really good'?
MB: I remember brewing a pilsner. At that point I had a beer fridge going, too, and I put the carboy in the fridge and watched it – that's what's great about glass carboys, you can see the action, where with big stainless conical fermenters, you don't get to see inside ... So I put the carboy in the fridge, the temperature was probably in the mid- to upper-40s, it was pretty cool, and it had that nice fermentation. I'd check on it day after day. Those bubbles would continue to slowly rise and it finally ended its fermentation. I put it in secondary, let it lager for a little while longer and I got in the bottle. I entered it the Moon Madness competition in Pennsylvania. I don't remember how old I was at this point, I think I was 18, I remember my mom having to drive me over because I won a second place. I thought it was kind of cool winning this ribbon for a pilsner I brewed, I was particularly proud of it. I thought it was a great representation of the style; I felt that I'd followed pretty much all the traditional techniques and everything to get it to where it was. It was a little ironic for the award: I got a ribbon and a Munton & Fison pilsner kit (laughs). I just brewed a pretty good pilsner, I really don't need the kit.

BSL:  When was it that you knew this was a career, that this is what you wanted to do?
MB: It was about at that time. By the time I left high school, I knew that I wanted to pursue this professionally. I also knew I was kind of too young to really get too far into the industry. I went to Gloucester County Community College for a while, business type classes ... I was also doing some work, some carpentry stuff, installing laboratories for a little while, traveling up into Manhattan, like at NYU, and into Pennsylvania at some of the pharmaceutical manufacturers. I found it to be pretty gratifying work; I liked working with my hands, I liked being a true craftsman. I remember my observations then that anyone who's a craftsman, who's done anything for any length of time, really becomes an expert, and it's second nature to them. I knew that's what I wanted to be, a great craftsman. But I wanted to be a great beer craftsman.

I remember working with these guys and talking to them on our trips up and down the New Jersey Turnpike, telling them I was going to be a brewer. I think they thought I was full of shit. When I was 20 years old that's when I approached Flying Fish and (then FF head brewer) Joe Pedicini.

BSL: And that's where you were able to get your foot in the door?
MB: They were still kind of in the construction phases, the equipment had been dropped in place. I was sweeping floors, cleaning lines, whatever needed to be done around the brewery. It was a great experience, hanging around Joe and Rick (Atkins, the assistant brewer). I learned a lot from those guys, good-hearted, passionate people, very passionate about beer and the craft.

I felt like I was able to spend some time there to get some practical experience under my belt, to see the actual inner workings of a production brewery.

BSL: But at this time you were also eyeing some formal schooling at the Seibel Institute?
MB: I took the program there, and when I returned from Seibel, Joe Pedicini was actually leaving and Rick Atkins became the head brewer, and I became the assistant brewer. I did that for about another year, and this gets us up to about 1998. It was the beginning of 1998 when I started traveling around the country. Nothing against Jersey, but I wanted to travel around a little bit.

BSL: Get some different perspectives, right?
MB: I also wanted to immerse myself in another market that was a little more craft-centric. New Jersey at the time was – Flying Fish was one of maybe just a handful, tops, of craft brewers in the state. There was some craft brewing activity in Philadelphia. But amongst my friends in Gloucester County, there weren't too many who were interested in it, and I just wanted to change the culture I was immersed in.

I kind of did that classic road trip, traveled across the country, north, south, east, west, kind of everywhere and visiting breweries along the way, talking to brewers, taking pictures, checking out their equipment, you know, just getting some advice on what path I should take.

When I got to Colorado, I just fell in love with the state and the fact that craft beer was booming; there were a lot of passionate people out there that I met. That was half way through my trip.

BSL: Onward to the West Coast, then?
MB: Way up the Pacific Coast to Portland and Seattle and Vancouver and back down to Colorado again. That was the summer of 1998. I came back and it was probably June or something, and I told my girlfriend, 'We're moving to Colorado.' We gathered all the cash we had between us, which was probably around 3,000 bucks and we loaded up my old Volvo, drove out to Denver.

BSL: How quickly did things come together for you out there?
MB: It was one of those deals where we were getting a little worried. The cash supply was starting to get a little low and we really didn't want to have to turn around with just enough gas money to get back to Jersey. But the timing worked out just right where I got a position at Great Divide Brewing, and my girlfriend, who's now my wife, got a position at Colorado State Bank.

BSL: How long were you in Colorado?
MB: We spent 10 years there. I worked at Great Divide from 1998 to 2003, and I've been with Flying Dog since 2003. In the interim, while I was working for both these brewers, I took care of the beer for a brewpub up in the mountains called Great Northern Tavern. It was a 10-barrel system and about a 90-minute commute each way; during ski season it was a ski resort area. It would keep me pretty busy. There were stretches of time where I would be brewing mostly in Denver, or one place or another, for 27 days straight with a day off, three or four weeks straight ...

BSL: That's a pretty tough schedule. They're had to be some benefits for keeping that pace.
MB: It was really good because I was able to get some good perspective on brewing at the pub level and brewing at the production level and all of the challenges associated with both. In retrospect, it was time well spent.

BSL: At the pub level you probably got to play around a little bit with styles, like having your own canvas to paint.
MB: Yeah, it was. There were a couple standard beers. A lot of tourists come through, a lot of non-craft-centric people, so you wanted to keep something on there that was pretty friendly, but yeah, I did a lot of special beers – I'm a hop-head, a bit, so I'd play with different hop combinations and do IPAs and ESBs, did a couple of Belgian-inspired beers and just had fun with it.

BSL: Talk about how you ended up at Flying Dog.
MB: I was pretty excited about the direction Great Divide was going, but I felt that it was good to get some experience at different facilities, different beers and different production methods ... Flying Dog was just a couple blocks away. All of the brewers would just hang out: the brewers from Flying Dog would come over to Great Divide or vice versa. Just in some conversation, just seeing what the Flying Dog guys and the culture was all about, I decided to make the move a couple blocks away. I'm glad I did. I was very proud to work for Great Divide, and still am. I'm very pleased at their high degree of success and the integrity and quality of their beers. They're doing really good work these days.

BSL: But how cool is it to work at a place that has Hunter S. Thompson as a guiding light?
MB: Culturally, Flying Dog is a great place. At this point, I'm in a leadership position, with others on a leadership team. It's great to really kind of guide the company forward. For me it's being part of a team, being a part of everything that goes on with the beer, which is where I wanted to be when I was 17 years old. From that perspective, it's a dream come true.

Culturally, everybody in the organization, you know, I don't think people are waking up in the morning and going 'Ah, crap I gotta go to work.' People come in here and they're happy to be here. They're passionate about what they do, and when I get off this call, I'll probably go out and have a beer with some of the guys. And when we talk, we talk about beer; we talk about the pilot (brews) we got going. We've got Disobedience, our abbey dubbel, in the fermenter right now; we're all excited about that, we're going to do some bottle-conditioning, some 750s, you know, just kind of working on the plans, just some of the shoptalk that's associated with it.

BSL: Relocating Flying Dog to the East Coast, you were involved in that? That was a monumental project.
MB: My role was to try to maintain consistency with beers. For about two years, we produced beer out of both facilities simultaneously. It's a challenge. It gives you a new respect for the big guys who have 13 facilities around the country or around the world and their level of skill at maintaining consistency. So that was a big challenge. Part of that obviously is just recipes, part of it is the processes and how people are being trained on the equipment. It was a big project, but it was a great learning experience for me.

BSL: And just a few years ago, everything was finally shifted?
MB: It was 2008 when we decided to concentrate our operation here in Frederick. It was January 15, 2008, when the last bottles came off the Flying Dog Denver production line. I stayed there for a few more months ... we moved a bunch of the fermenters from the Denver brewery here to Maryland to increase capacity here in Frederick. Then we kind of locked up shop and I was out here in the summer of 2008.

BSL: Different geographic regions, especially east vs. west, used to mean really different palates, different preferences, especially among tastes for hoppier beers. Times have changed, of course, but by all accounts, Flying Dog's focus really transcended that nuance.
MB: It goes back to the culture of the organization and our level of passion and our preferences for the beers that we make. I speak for most of the brewers and the production guys when I say we're hop heads. So we like the IPAs, but that doesn't mean that I might not go grab a Woody Creek White on a hot day. We've got a new beer, Underdog, coming out. It's 4.7% alcohol. We're calling it Underdog Atlantic Lager. It's brewed with Golding hops, nothing too assertive from the hop end of things, but something that's drinkable but has a good hop presence for people who like hops.

There really are no meetings at Flying Dog where we say, 'What does the market need?' We kind of say, 'What do we want? What do we want our portfolio to look like?' A beer like Raging Bitch is a perfect example of some experimentation; that came up as a concept a few years back. We wanted to do something new. Well, we're Belgian fans, we like hoppy IPAs. Can we take some elements of those two types of styles and put them together as something that's going to work? After a little bit of experimentation, we felt really good about it. And in the case of Raging Bitch, it's our No. 1 seller.

BSL: What does 2012 look like for R&D at Flying Dog?
MB: This year, we've cranked up the creative process here quite a bit. We're doing this Brewhouse Rarities series. It's pretty limited, basically 100-barrel batches. (In the fall of last year) we offered anybody in the brewery who wanted to pitch a creative concept, or basically a beer, to what we call the Remarkable Beer Team, which is kind of the group I work with that manages all of the processes and creativity here ... So these guys would kind of pitch their ideas, you know why we should do it ... (For example) this guy he does his pitch, he tells us what kind of hops he wants to use, what the gravity is going to be, he's got an idea for the name, you know, the whole thing ... We had about 18 ideas; we're using about 12 of them.

There were a couple instances where some ideas overlapped so much that we kind of teamed those guys up together, but a lot of them are individual brews. So now these guys went to work at the end of last year doing their pilot brews – we have a 1-barrel pilot system – you know they do a couple pilot brews, really dial in what they want to do, scale it up to the big system, then brew on the big system ... It helps kind of spread out the creative influence – my title is chief operating officer and brewmaster, but by no means do I take credit for the total creativity that comes out of this brewery. We have a lot of creative thinkers and a lot of creative minds out there in the production world, and then our marketing team, even the administrative staff, they're all passionate about beer, and that all came together with the project (and our other new beers) coming out this year.

BSL: How many people make up the brewing staff there?
MB: We've got 13 or 14 spread out through what we call, well, the front end of production, which is the brewhouse, cellar operations, filtration and quality. Then we have about another 15 or so that take care of the kegging and the bottling ... 40 sounds about right in total, maybe 45. We just hired a canning manager because we're going to be running cans. Underdog will be our first beer in cans; we're really looking forward to that. So we're growing, more people are getting added ...

BSL: You also have a year-round oyster stout coming out ...
MB: We do. Pearl Necklace Oyster Stout. We did this as kind of a collaboration, I'd call it. We've done a couple of projects, like Backyard Ale, which was a project with Bryan Voltaggio, he has his Volt restaurant here in Frederick. So we worked with him on a beer. And the idea is that it's a learning process, we want to find partners like that – Bryan wanted to learn more about beer, we wanted to learn more about the cool shit he does with food; this guy's amazing with everything he brings to the science of food preparation and culinary skills ... So that was a great relationship. We did a collaboration with Brewers Art in Baltimore, and it was good to just work with another brewer – Steve Frasier and his perspective, he's using the Belgian malts, putting together a recipe with him. That was educational.

We approached this (Pearl Necklace) from the same standpoint. There's a nonprofit organization called the Oyster Recovery Partnership ... With the Chesapeake, over the years there's been a lot of, you know, save the bay (talk). We didn't want to come out there and say 'Hey, save the bay, and we'll contribute this,' or just have some kind of corny promotion associated with one of our beers. We wanted to dig in a little deeper and make it a little more meaningful. So I went down to Cambridge, Maryland, with a colleague from the brewery, and we visited the Oyster Recovery Partnership's hatchery. It's pretty amazing what these guys do: They take oysters from the embryonic state and grow them up – they feed them algae – then they use something called the Shell Recycling Alliance, and these guys actually bring the spent shells from all the restaurants in a few different cities in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, and they'll use these shells as substrate for these oyster babies to attach to ... To date, I think they're responsible for half a billion oysters being added back into the bay.

Pearl Necklace, a portion of the proceeds goes to benefit this oyster recovery partnership. It is actually helping restore oysters to the bay. And if you read a little bit about osyters, you pretty quickly realize what a positive impact they have on the cleanliness of the bay. In 1850, the bay wasn't completely navigable because of the oysters in it

We also visited Rappahannock River Oysters there in Virginia. These guys have a little tasting room where they serve their oysters, and they also serve our beer. We went down there, spent a night with those guys. They took us out on their boat and showed us how to sustainably grow oysters. These guys have three different oysters that they grow, in different locations off the Rappahannock River. You learn about how the (water) salinity affects the flavor, and that's really the big difference between the oyster varieties.

So, again, a great learning opportunity, a great partnership, in this case a three-way partnership. We had the beer out in draft in November of last year, and it did really well. And that's the thing, with Pearl Necklace, it was so popular – I loved it, the production team just loved it – and we want it year-round. So we're going to make that a reality. So it will be a full-time beer available in draft and six-pack, 12-ounce bottles, and just like the original version, a portion of the proceeds from the sale go directly to the Oyster Recovery Partnership.

Homebrew permit saw rise in final year

With Big Brew/National Homebrew Day just a month away, here's an interesting statistic concerning New Jersey's now-buried requirement that homebrewers get a permit to make beer in their backyards.

Last year, when the requirement was in its death spiral thanks to legislation moving through Trenton, there was a spike in the number of homebrewing permits issued by the state Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the agency that regulates all things dram in New Jersey.

From Jan. 1, 2011, to the last day of December, ABC issued 633 permits to make homebrew. That's more than twice the number issued for 2009, when ABC granted 299 permits, and 213 more than the year before (for 2010, the number was 420).

With the stroke of a pen on Jan. 9, 2012, Gov. Chris Christie turned the permit obligation into a footnote, freeing homebrewers from a near-paper tiger mandate that nearly all of them had been ignoring to begin with.

True to form, when word of the permit's demise got out, homebrewers didn't exactly take to the streets singing "Ding, dong, the witch is dead!" It was more like they yawned, and said, "Meh."

Click to enlarge

Still, there were those who brewed at home who felt pressured to comply with the nearly 20-year-old regulation. They ponied up the $15 fee. Many others did so because they were partaking of the hobby through brew-on-premise shops, which, for reasons of protecting their businesses (and legitimately so), required patrons to apply for the permit before any brewing could take place.

What's more, BOPs probably accounted for last year's spike in the number of permits, given that there are at least two now operating in the state, Brewer's Apprentice, a fixture in the Freehold area since the mid-1990s, and Brew Your Own Bottle, a newer BOP and supply shop in Westmont in South Jersey. 

Like a lot of things surrounding craft beer, homebrewing is riding a wave of popularity, too.

The American Homebrewers Association, the national group that supports the hobby and sponsors Big Brew/National Homebrew Day, says its membership has crossed the 30,000 mark, a milestone for the organization that sprang from the 1978 legalization (technically, it's a federal tax exemption) of making beer at home.

The AHA also estimates that these days there are 1 million homebrewers in the United States and more than 1,000 homebrew clubs.

Big Brew this year will be observed on May 5, with homebrewers striking mashes simultaneously (or close to that) across the country, brewing from AHA-provided recipes (this year it's brown ale) or their own.

But the reality is, the event is a show of solidarity and camaraderie around the craft of making beer.

In New Jersey, there's an extra reason on Homebrew Day to raise glasses in a toast: Even though Gov. Christie's eliminating the permit obligation may seem like some pro-forma going through the motions,  it does provide some relevant cover for those who enjoy making and sharing their creations. New Jersey homebrewers can indeed say, "Ding, dong, that witch is dead."

Homebrew Competitions

The Tun Tavern is once again holding a pro-am homebrew competition, and Cricket Hill Brewing was planning another one toward the fall.

The entry deadline for the Tun Tavern's contest is Tuesday, May 1. And yeah, that's less than a month away, but this competition was announced weeks ago on homebrew forums, such as the Barley Legal Homebrewers, so consider this note a reminder. If you live in North Jersey, don't let the fact that this is in South Jersey keep you from entering. Well-made beer always wins.

Entries should be comprised of a six-pack or the equivalent of whatever style you're submitting, plus your contact information (email, cell phone number, land line ... just make it so you can be reached.)

Grand prize is a chance to scale up your winning recipe and brew a batch that will be served at the Tun's booth at the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild Festival, June 23 aboard the battleship USS New Jersey at the Delaware River waterfront in Camden. The prize also includes passes to the festival. The Tun's phone number is 609-347-7800.

As far as Cricket Hill's contest goes, we caught up with brewery co-owner Rick Reed at a Friday night tour and asked if they planned to hold another competition. If you remember, it was a homebrew competition that produced CH's nicely done Russian imperial stout, plus an IPA the brewery released just a couple weeks ago.

Rick says they plan to hold another contest, some time around or after August. Best bet is to mark your calendar and check with the brewery toward the end of July to see if their plans hatched in early spring are is the same in late summer.

NJ homebrew permit is dead. Kaput. Gone.

It's official: New Jersey homebrewers are no longer legally obligated to pony up 15 bucks to the state to make their beer.

Governor Chris Christie has signed legislation to eliminate the 21-year-old permit requirement that most homebrewers had said fuhgettaboutit to in the first place, either because they never knew about it, or they had reservations about getting the state involved in their lives and their much-loved hobby.

On Monday without comment, Governor Christie signed the legislation that was introduced in spring 2011. The signing is noted on the governor's web site, amid a collection of other bills also getting his signature that day.

(If you're a craft beer enthusiast in the Garden State, it's hard to ignore the fact that Chris Christie has been a friend to beer since taking office in 2010. Last May he signed a proclamation for American Craft Beer Week in New Jersey; his lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, made a trip to Flying Fish Brewing last fall; and now the elimination of the homebrewing permit. That's more than any governor has done to give beer a boost since craft brewing was sanctioned in New Jersey in 1993.)

Homebrewing has had the blessing of the federal government since thoroughbred horse racing last had a Triple Crown winner (Affirmed), when Congress exempted 200 gallons made for personal consumption from taxation. New Jersey lawmakers said yes to the hobby 13 years later, in 1991.

However, there was a catch to Trenton giving its blessing, something that New Jersey homebrewing enthusiast Ed Busch, at the time a member of the American Homebrewers Association board of governors, saw as an unavoidable trade-off for getting lawmakers to go along with the idea officially green-lighting people making beer at home. (It should be remembered that after Prohibition, states were given great authority to regulate alcoholic beverages within their borders, and that Alabama still does not allow homebrewing, while Oklahoma finally relented in 2010.)

Thus the permit was born in the same breath as Trenton's proclaiming that making up to 200 gallons of homebrew per year was legal (echoing the federal law), thus giving Garden State homebrewers cover from overzealous local code enforcement officers who wanted to play revenuer.

Joe Bair, who opened his Princeton Homebrew shop in 1995, on Tuesday applauded the end of the permit, saying Ed had always envisioned it being scrapped at some point. Sadly, Ed died about five years ago, never seeing his intuition play out as reality.

"Ed Busch said it would eventually get changed, and I'm sure he's happy in his grave that it has," Joe says.

The biggest problem with the permit law, Joe says, was never the $15 fee imposed on homebrewers, but rather their taking a hit on their rights against search and seizure. Getting a permit meant state alcoholic beverage regulators could pay a call on you whenever they wanted.

"People were surprised when they got their permits in the mail to find that out," Joe says.

To the state's credit, the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control kept its distance from homebrewers. Still, the existence of the permit requirement, though often obscure, turned homebrewers who knew of the obligation into scofflaws when they ignored it.

"It wasn't because they didn't want to pay the money," Joe says. "It was they didn't want to give up their rights against search and seizure."

Homebrew permit closer to being scrapped

New Jersey's homebrewers are a step closer to doing legally what they have done under state regulators' noses with impunity for a couple of decades now – make beer without signing up for a $15 permit.

Lawmakers this week approved a bill that would do away with the oft-ignored homebrewing permit requirement, sending the measure to Gov. Chris Christie for his consideration. Based on the support he has shown so far for the state's craft beer interests – specifically his declaration of American Craft Beer Week in New Jersey last May – there's a fair chance Christie could sign the measure.

The practice of making beer at home for personal consumption was legal even back during Prohibition, when the production and sale of commercially brewed beer, wine and spirits were outlawed. Homebrewing has enjoyed the federal government's expressed blessing since the late 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter signed legislation to that effect.

New Jersey lawmakers officially sanctioned the hobby in the early 1990s. Back then, homebrewing enthusiasts who championed the practice accepted Trenton's imposing a permit requirement as a trade-off for getting it set down in writing that making up to 200 gallons of homebrew per year was legal. In short, it was the best deal to be had, as far as getting state lawmakers to say what the federal government had been saying, and thereby fending off any local code enforcement officers who wanted to act like a revenuers.

Despite the requirement, however, state regulators were never exactly heavy-handed about enforcing the permit obligation, nor the restriction that the beer homebrewers made be served only at the locations where it was made. No one has ever been busted by the Division Alcoholic Beverage Control for not having a permit. And in fact, the number of homebrewing permits issued annually over the past six years by ABC, for example, has barely approached 400, while the Colorado-based American Homebrewers Association says the ranks of Garden State homebrewers on its membership rolls dwarfs that figure.

But it's hardly suckers and scaredy-cat homebrewers who chose not to be scofflaws with regard to the state permit requirement.

Historically, most of the people who apply for the permit are those who make use of brew-on-premises businesses, like Brewers Apprentice in Freehold, or Brew Your Own Bottle, in Westmont. And with good reason: Brew-on-premises operations are sitting ducks for enforcement, and the owners risk their businesses by not having patrons sign up for the permit before making beer at their sites.

Nevertheless, despite the apparent history of non-existent enforcement, a sponsor of the measure still struck a dramatic and populist tone about the need to dispatch the permit requirement. (And for the record, it's a good thing Trenton has stuck up for homebrewers, even if there is a hint of naiveté to it.)

"Homebrewers should not be viewed in the same light as the bathtub gin makers, moonshiners and swill brewers from Prohibition, nor are they running speakeasies out of their homes," says state Sen. Joseph Vitale of Middlesex County, home of the WHALES homebrew club. "Today's homebrewers and winemakers take up the hobby to produce a product for their own enjoyment and which they can share with their families. Getting rid of this permit requirement is the right thing to do."

Vitale goes on to say: "For the person who wants to simply try to reproduce their favorite beer at home, or the enthusiast who wants to make a high-quality beer of their own, the state shouldn't treat them as it would a commercial brewery. It's about time we clear out this unnecessary and unenforced permit requirement from the books, and lift the scofflaw status from thousands of residents who simply want to lift a pint of their own creation without fear that the state's peering over their shoulder."

In fairness to the ABC, the agency had the authority to peer over homebrewers' shoulders but chose to keep its distance. The bigger sin has been the $15 fee the law demanded (though never actively pursued), which you could interpret as a tax on homebrew.

And for the record, the American Homebrewers Association has said Trenton lawmakers have the right idea about scrapping the permit, but the wrong notion about striking homebrewing from the state's books. The AHA prefers language declaring homebrewing legal and exempt from taxation be put on the state's books, just forget the permit.

Also what's lost on Trenton, apparently, is the close tie homebrewing does in fact enjoy with commercial brewing, the former being a feeder system to the latter. As is the case across the country, there is a large number of commercially licensed craft brewers in New Jersey who jumped into business based on their homebrewing prowess. And many more are considering following suit.

Nonetheless, Trenton has given beer enthusiasts in New Jersey something to toast.

Charity begins at foam

A beer and food pairing to put on your calendar, but leave your appetite and bring your sense of good will.

Barley Legal Homebrewers, the 200-member strong South Jersey/Philadelphia-area homebrew club, will hold a Thanksgiving food drive this Saturday (11/19) at the Pour House bar in Westmont, trading 4-ounce samples of their brew creations for food donations.

The three-hour event runs (2-5 p.m.) was organized by club officers Evan Fritz and Devin Garlit, who say the soured economy is putting the squeeze on more and more people these days.

That has left area food pantries struggling to keep up with the greater demand for the help they provide.

Club members themselves have been buying turkeys and other foods for side dishes and collecting contributions of the same from the public, storing the food at Brew Your Own Bottle homebrew supply shop in Westmont.

"We're collecting full Thanksgiving dinners, from the turkey down to the stuffing, vegetables and rolls," Evan says. "There are a couple of families people in the club know are struggling, so we'll help them first. The rest will go to food pantries. Some of the food pantries say they're in bad shape this year."

No more runner-up; this time he's champ

July in New Jersey doesn't resolve to August without a new state homebrew champion being crowned.

This year Dave Pobutkiewicz lays claim to the title of Best of Show in the New Jersey Sate Fair homebrewer competition, taking home the honor with a helles bock that the Pompton Lakes resident will get to reproduce for the taps at Krogh's brewpub in Sparta as his top prize. (Dave's victory was announced over the weekend on the Facebook page of Sussex County United Brewers and Alchemists homebrew club.)

This bock is a stalwart brew that's taken Dave a few places, notably the Great American Beer Festival in Denver as a finalist in the Samuel Adams LongShot homebrew contest, back in 2007. (That's Dave pictured with Jim Koch from Boston Beer Company.)

Brewed at the start of 2011, Dave says the beer (6.75% ABV) came together perfectly. Not that it hasn't before. Dave's a brewing zealot, meticulously keeping notes on his many brews. (Just this past weekend, he brewed a cream ale and an IPA hopped solely with East Kent Goldings). Members of his beer club, Defiant Homebrewers, also thought Dave nailed it with his latest take on his helles, and they've sampled enough incarnations of the bock to know.

"Everybody was like, 'This is the one,' " Dave says.

Dave's no stranger to the State Fair contest – for years, he's routinely finished somewhere in the winner's circle, including runner-up to the top prize. But this is his first Best of Show, and with the 2011 title under his belt, there's plenty of satisfaction.

"I can mark this one off the list," he says.

Yet, it's the LongShot contest that is sort of a Holy Grail for him. Four of the six homebrews he entered in the State Fair contest also were submitted in this year's LongShot competition. (His helles, an ESB, Oktoberfest, and Belgian strong dark were entered in both contests, while a nearly 2-year-old 12% barleywine and a hefeweizen rounded out his fair contest submission.)

Alas, a chance at LongShot glory, to have his recipe reproduced by Boston Beer for a national release, eluded him this year.

"The LongShot I try really hard for," Dave says. "I've been there before. I gotta get back there; I gotta repeat on that."

Dump the permit, keep the law

How many homebrewers are there in New Jersey?

Good question.

The state's Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the agency that now regulates both commercial and amateur brewers by way of licensing and permits, can only tell you that it granted permission to 386 homebrewers in 2010.

But the American Homebrewers Association, the Colorado-based organization that promotes homebrewing and watches those brewers' backs as far as trends and regulations go, says its paid membership from New Jersey likely tops the number of homebrewing permits issued last year by the state.

In fact, those 386 permits from last year are the most New Jersey has issued in the past six years, with the lion's share of them going to patrons of brew-on-premise establishments. You have to go back to 2007, when 359 homebrewer permits were granted, to find a similar peak within that time period.

Why are there more homebrewers than the state can account for? Probably because most people who jump into homebrewing in the Garden State don't know they're supposed to get a permit in the first place. Homebrew supply shops aren't obligated to play cop and enforce the permit rule, and many shop owners say that if they did, they'd lose more customers to Internet sales.

So it's a good thing that there's a bill in the Legislature, A4012, that proposes dumping the 20-year-old permit requirement, plus its restrictions against making or serving homebrewed beer anywhere except the address put down on the permit application, not to mention the provision that allows the ABC to carry out spot checks on permit-holders to ensure compliance.

There's also the matter of the permit's cost – 15 bucks. "The money that they charged to get that, administratively, I can't imagine that it was cost-effective," says JoEllen Ford, owner of The Brewer's Apprentice, a brew-on-premise and homebrew supply shop in Freehold. "What were they hoping to accomplish? I don't understand what the objective was to begin with, what were they trying to stop or prevent."

To many, the introduction last month of A4012 was indeed welcome news. However, the AHA notes a caveat about just tossing the permit regulation. The way the bill sponsored by Middlesex County Assemblyman Craig Coughlin is written, the AHA says, it appears to just rely on the federal legalization for homebrewing. That is to say, you can legally brew up to 200 gallons per adult per household per year.

The federal standard may seem safe, but the AHA says it doesn't leave on New Jersey's books some stipualtion that homebrewing is a legal practice and that the product of homebrewers' efforts will not be taxed. The AHA recommends that states expressly say homebrewing is legal and not subject to taxation. (Coughlin did not respond to several messages left with his office seeking comment on his bill. His district, by the way, is ground zero to the WHALES homebrew club of Woodbridge.)

Homebrewing, once the province of Prohibition-era drinkers thirsty for a beer, was legalized by the federal government in 1978. New Jersey followed suit 13 years later. Exactly why the state decided that Garden State homebrewers would also need a permit each year to strike a mash in their garage has sort of been lost to the mists of time.

But Joe Bair, owner of Princeton Homebrew (along Route 29 in Trenton), says the permit ended up being included in the state's codification of backyard beer-making because of some tradeoffs between homebrewing proponents, notably the late Ed Busch, a former member of the AHA governing committee, and the Legislature.

At the time, there was considerable opposition from restaurant and bar groups concerning craft brewing and homebrewing.

"He (Busch) had to sign off on all this ridiculous stuff," Joe says. "In order for him to get the thing passed, he had to eat that. At the time, he was a member of the AHA governors, and one by one, all the states were making homebrew legal. He didn't want to delay it anymore, he wanted results, so he compromised on that.

"He had to do whatever it took, and the result is he passed the law. That's not to say it's the law he wanted to get passed," Joe says.