Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

Homebrewing is a beer-loving mad scientist's dream

Sure, you could go out and drop a whole bunch of cash on a round of beer for you and your friends. It’s conceivable that you could stick to the tried-and-true standard of destroying brain cells the old-fashioned way: at the end of a store-bought ice cold one. But every act of destruction can be an opportunity for creation: You can make your own beer! All you need is some yeast, sugar (usually a malt-based extract kit; this is the fuel for the alcohol), some heat and just a dash of time.

Whatever flavor of beer you can conceive, you can create. If you wanted to create a jellybean-bacon-chocolate-ginger stout (and by the way, SFR does not endorse this idea), we have the technology.

"Open your kitchen cupboards or look around your garden if you wanted to add different spices or flavors. Just hunt around and think of things that might go good with beer. I've seen people use things like mint and chamomile as bittering or flavoring agents. You just have to have a light hand. Once you put a flavor in there, you really can't get it back out," says Jami Nordby, owner of Santa Fe Homebrew Supply (6820 Cerrillos Road, 473-2268).

Nordby says some are taking it even further by growing their own own barley or hops. "There are hundreds of varieties of hops, scores of varieties of grains that you can use … which also impart different flavors and characteristics like clove, banana, bubble gum flavors to clean flavors like you'd expect from an American IPA."

Homebrewing has come a long way since its deregulation following Jimmy Carter's signature on HR 1337 in 1978. This bill enabled "any adult to produce wine and beer for personal and family use and not for sale," without paying the government their fair share, of course. Thirty-eight years later, the homebrew hobby is booming. For the gearhead, it'd be intoxicatingly easy to dive right in to the big-kid chemistry set of your dreams. "It's like a science project. And then you get to drink the results," says Tania Chavez, homebrewer and in-patient rehab nurse at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center.

You can even DIY brew equipment to your own specifications and give it the requisite cool-sounding names: Brewchilla. Whirlpoolanator. Fly Sparging Hot Liquor Manifold. However, it isn't necessary to engineer the next mission to Mars to get a good bottle of suds.

"If you get into the standard homebrew size—5 gallons—you're looking at probably a 7-gallon bucket, a 5-gallon glass carboy, some miscellaneous equipment like a stainless brew pot, some siphon tubing, couple of airlocks. That's pretty much the basics," says Nordby. Getting started with all-new equipment costs about $200, including the first round of ingredients.

Hype continues to build as the craft brew scene is blowing up—hopefully not literally, though that can be a risk. Like any hobby worth doing, there is some danger. Bottles under extreme pressure can burst; carboys (a glass container usually used for secondary fermentation) can break if bumped during transport, potentially slicing open the arms of those carrying them. Chavez points to a scar on her arm and says, "I had an explosion that was related to using commercial equipment someplace. There was too much yeast left in there, and bottles started exploding."

For the most devoted, making your own beer isn't just a hobby. It's a passion. People bleed for homebrew.

"Yeah, well, you know," she says. "Only a little bit."

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