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."

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."
 

Big Brew video contest winners

New Jersey homebrewers found the winners circle for a second-straight year in the American Homebrewers Association's video contest, but a crew from Oregon took the prize for capturing what National Homebrew Day is all about.

On Thursday, the AHA announced this year's winners of the annual contest staged in conjunction with Big Brew, held every first Saturday in May.

Portland, Oregon's FH Steinbart won the Spirit of Big Brew Award, while the Barley Legal Homebrewers club, teamed with Beer-Stained Letter, won for the video that drew the most views during the 10-day judging period.

This year, apparently, the AHA has done away with the second-place finish that it had awarded over the past three contest years.

Rounding out the field for 2011: Philadelphia's ALEiens picked up an honorable mention, as did California's Humboldt Homebrewers, who, for a while, gave the Barley Legal brewers a strong run for their money in the most-watched category.

Last year, the WHALES homebrew crew from Woodbridge won the most-watched award, while Barley Legal and BSL came in second place. (BSL won the Spirit of Big Brew Award in 2008, the first year of the contest.) The Society of Oshkosh Brewers won the 2010 Spirit of Big Brew Award.

Congrats to FH Steinbart, ALEiens, Humboldt Hombrewers, and of course, to the Barley Legal clan.

Homebrew Day, the video

This year's video from National Homebrew Day/AHA Big Brew, shot May 7th in the back lot at Iron Hill brewpub in Maple Shade, where the year-old Barley Legal Homebrewers club pretty much calls headquarters.

Special thanks to Chris LaPierre at Iron Hill and Tim Kelly from the Tun Tavern.

Remember to support your local homebrew shop.

And brewery.

Cheers.

New Jersey dominates in AHA video contest

This just in: Jersey beer folks dominate in the American Homebrewers Association YouTube video contest.

Woodbridge Homebrewers Ale & Lager Enthusiasts Society won for most-watched video from the May 1st Big Brew Homebrew Day observance.

Beer-Stained Letter (that would be us) got second place in the Spirit of Big Brew category, and the Society of Oshkosh Brewers got the coveted first place in Spirit of Big Brew. Congrats to them.

Special thanks go to the Barley Legal Homebrewers, who share credit in the second place finish.

Here are the links:
• Oshkosh Brewers
• WHALES
• Beer-Stained Letter

Big Brew 2010 in NJ – the video

The Big Brew was a week ago, and here's what went on behind Iron Hill brewpub in Maple Shade, where the Barley Legal Homebrewers club played host to a National Homebrew Day observance. Special thanks to Evan Fritz of the Barley Legal club for inviting the blog to their gathering and serving some great beer. They brewed a total of 140 gallons of beer for Big Brew, Evan says.

And a nod goes to Iron Hill Maple Shade head brewer Chris LaPierre for similar hospitality and availing himself for an interview on a day he also had to go to a wedding.

A couple other things: The videos is entered in the American Homebrewers Association YouTube contest, something we won two years ago (the AHA's inaugural contest). There's some leftover footage that will wind up getting used for follow-up videos. (Contest rules limited entries to three minutes maximum.)

Also, a shout-out to Keg & Barrel Homebrew Supply in Berlin, in Camden County. When Beer Crafters closed last fall, South Jersey lost one of the underpinnings to its homebrewing community. Nice to see another shop filling the void.

New AHA Web site

In the bricks and mortar world, this would be the equivalent of a growing locality landing its own ZIP code.

The American Homebrewers Association has trotted out a brand new site for homebrewers, whose interests were previously catered to within the city limits of Beertown. (The homebrewing button on Beertown now directs you to the new site.)

Charlie Papazian, the chap whose name is synonymous with homebrewing, explains more about the new digs here.

Beercrafters closing

This is some sad news:

As of Sept. 19, Beercrafters homebrew supply shop will fold its tent. In the meantime, there's an everything-must-go sale.

Online discussion board chatter didn't reveal why the shop's closing after a 16-year run, and the folks at the store today we're pressed for time and couldn't talk.

The nucleus of the Gloucester County Homebrewers club, Beercrafters got a lot of people into homebrewing and helped a lot of neophyte brewers step up to making better beer, from extract brews turned out on stovetops to all-grain masterpieces crafted over gas flames in kegs turned into kettles.

Back in the mid- to late-1990s, Beercrafters was our go-to supply store, saving us a trip to far-off Philly's Home Sweet Homebrew and the related expense of parking in the city. Their selection of grain and hops was always respectable, their advice reliable, and the people always friendly.

And come the first Saturday in May, you'd find hordes of homebrewers in Beercrafters back lot, tending mash tuns in celebration of the American Homebrewers Association's annual Big Brew day. In fact, the winner of the AHA's first YouTube Big Brew video contest was shot at Beercrafters in May 2008. (The second video is from Big Brew 2007, shot in the first year of this blog.)

Catching up

This is something we intended to do a month ago, but we never could find the results of the contest. Until now.

Here's the top winner of the American Homebrewers Association Big Brew 2009 YouTube contest (we won it last year.) Great job, cool animated intro.

Cheers and congrats to all the winners.

Big Brew ... The poetry of worts' worth

Here’s our entry to the Big Brew 2008 YouTube video contest sponsored by the American Homebrewers Association.

Where were they last year when we did this? Just kidding ...

But seriously, we did shoot Homebrew Day last year in our run-and-gun electronic news gathering style, with an eye toward posting on YouTube and Current TV, the website and digital cable television channel that airs user-created videos. (We even trumpeted our efforts in email to the AHA last year and got a nice reply.)

The AHA told us the contest idea came from the granddaddy of homebrewing himself, Charlie Papazian. So a nod to Charlie for seizing the day of user-created videos and inspiring the Cecil Beer DeMille (yeah, we know: bad pun, dated reference) in all of us.

About Big Brew
If you’re not a homebrewer, you may not know Big Brew is the annual AHA-promoted event in which homebrewers worldwide strike mashes and brew their tried and true recipes, all the while celebrating the conviviality of and finer things about beer, notably good food and the exploration of exotic or amped-up beer styles.

Last year, the AHA says, more than 9,000 gallons – 72,000 pints! – of homebrew were brewed by more than 4,000 participants at 242 sites on four continents. That breaks down to sites in 42 US states, and kettles fired up at celebrating locations in Israel, Australia, Argentina, and Russia. AHA stats show the volume has been rising annually for the past four years.

The folks at BeerCrafters in Turnersville (one of two places we relied on to stock up on malt and hops when we actively homebrew our Cross-Eyed Mary Pale Ale and Black Satin Dancer Stout) says they’ve been doing Big Brew for 15 years. BeerCrafters was the location for our video shoot on May 3rd, and you’ll notice in the video their commemorative mugs with a big blue 15 on the side.

But BeerCrafters and their affiliated club, Gloucester County Home Brewers, aren’t alone in their celebration of Big Brew. PALE ALES, a Princeton-area homebrew club, and WHALES, the Woodbridge-area homebrewers group, also get into the game. By the by, some members of WHALES – Woodbridge Homebrewers Ale & Lager Enthusiast Society – were first-round Northeast regional winners in the national homebrew competition that the AHA conducts each year. (The annual AHA national conference is June 19-21 in Cincinnati; we went in ’95 in Baltimore and again in ’97 in Cleveland.)

About the video
The AHA’s rules for the YT contest pretty much limited the length of videos to three minutes. So if you paused for an interview with us and didn’t make the cut, it’s because of the time limit. You still have our enduring gratitude, and we still have the footage, which could wind up in a end-of-year piece in December. (For the record, the video doesn’t have our signature logo/image at the end, either – again to meet the time limit.)

A last word about the video: Winning that AHA contest doesn’t matter an iota; it’s all about the beer, not us.

Onward
Monday kicks of American Craft Beer Week. The name is self-explanatory. A quick check of their website didn’t show any Garden State brewers with registered events. However, Cherry Hill’s Flying Fish Brewing is participating in the food-and-beer event, SAVOR, which is the coda to craft beer week.

We’re going to take this moment to note what’s been our glass this past week or so: Cricket Hill’s Col. Blides Bitter, FF’s Hopfish IPA, River Horse’s Double Belgian Wit, Triumph’s German Pilsner and Basil T’s (Toms River) Double Bock. Don't see your beer on that list? Don't worry, it will be.

Cheers.