04/01/2007

'Incredibly Good Beer'

Home brewing is hopping among hobbyists

By
Record-Eagle staff writer

TRAVERSE CITY — Mike Wooster is just starting to get into brewing his own beer.

His fourth brew is fermenting in a large jug. He checks the gravity with a hydrometer and sees the alcohol content is just about 5 percent, indicating it's almost ready to be bottled.

Wooster belongs to the Northern Michigan Homebrewers Guild, initiated in Bellaire in November. The group's 20-plus members have several different reasons to brew.

"Right now I'd just like to advance my knowledge of the brewing process,” Wooster said. "I would really like to do this professionally someday.”

The guild was formed to give members a forum for comparing their brews and trading knowledge, as well as to promote competitions and orchestrate field trips to breweries. They also make and bottle beers together at some of their meetings.

"We're teaching people the value and the culture behind craft beer,” said Joe Short, one of the guild's founders and owner of Short's Brewing Company, a micro brewery in Bellaire where the guild also holds its meetings.

Guild members are among the estimated 500,000 people in the United States who brew beer and ale for their own use, said Cindy Jones, spokeswoman for the American Homebrewers Association.

The craft is growing as a hobby, with the national association showing a 20 percent membership growth in the past year.

Record-Eagle/Douglas Tesner
Mike Wooster, 21, checks the beer he’s making at home. Wooster is the youngest member of the Northern Home Brewers Guild.

Local members range in age from Wooster, who is 21, into their 50s. Levels of experience and methods of brewing are also diverse.

"Some of our members have been doing it for years and some have just started with a canning pot on the stove,” said Jeff Cullen of Bellaire, one of the guild founders.

That's how Wooster does the first step, boiling water and mixing in the malt, simmering and then adding the hops.

"That's how I started and you can make some incredibly good beer that way,” Cullen said.

Cullen brews his outdoors in a propane-fueled turkey fryer with a converted beer keg as a brew kettle. After that, he cools the brew, adds yeast and lets it ferment for a week to 10 days before bottling. Then it sits in the bottle and to "condition” for about a month.

"When you pop the cap off and it goes phsssst!, it's carbonated and it's ready to drink,” Cullen said.

Interest in home brewing has been cyclical, said Phil Anderson, who has sold brewing equipment since 1979.

"When we started to get a lot of (commercial) micro breweries, business went down,” said Anderson, who currently retails equipment at his store, Diversions, in Traverse City.

Now, he said, interest is up again. Anderson believes micro breweries may be part of the reason, because they've given people more exposure to beers outside the mass-produced brands.

Beer tasters are similar to wine tasters in what they look for.

"We look for clarity and bouquet and mouth feel,” Cullen said.

They also taste different flavors in a good beer, much like wine connoisseurs.

"Some have a banana or a clove or a fruity ester,” he said.

Hops, a flowering plant, are used for flavoring and preserving. That's the source of beer's bitter flavor and also an important component in the aroma. Bitterness in beer may be calculated in International Bittering Units using a mathematical formula based on the recipe.

Members all have their own individual tastes and many are experimenting to find just the right recipe for their preferences.

"I like the English ales and I'm working on an amber ale,” Cullen said.

While Anderson sells a kit for $80 that includes everything needed to make someone's first home brew, Wooster spent a little over $100 making his first batch including about $30 in ingredients. Those included natural spring water, he said; city water doesn't work as well because of some of the chemicals in it.

Cullen said novices shouldn't be intimidated from trying home brewing.

"If you can make a pot of chili, you can brew beer,” he said.