Why Brewing Your Own Beer Is Worth the Trouble

My cousin David is a beer man, the sort of guy who was early on sours, unmoved by IPA mania, and able to explain the contributions of lactose to the perfect hazy—not to mention his mental map of the best brews worldwide. So, when he visited me in Montana several years ago, I sipped the samples he’d brought from Brooklyn’s boutique breweries and asked what felt like an obvious question. Had he ever thought about brewing his own?

He swallowed a mouthful of gose.

“No,” he said. “I’d never be able to match the quality of craft beer today. So, what’s the point?”

I chewed on that for a few years. My wife, Hilly, tended to agree with David. What was the point? We are living in an era of peak beer. In my town we can bike down to the neighborhood grocery store and buy premium six-packs for $10 from half a dozen independent local breweries. We’ve learned our favorites and venture into other styles as our palates expand. New varieties show up almost weekly. At our favorite tap houses, the options are overwhelming. The quality of this beer is the culmination of 6,000 years of humanity perfecting the craft. I had about as much to contribute to it as I would to the ceiling frescoes of the Italian Renaissance.

The only regular homebrewer I knew was my late father-in-law, who took up the hobby for two reasons: he liked to drink, and he was cheap. His recipe, scrawled out for my brother-in-law on the back of an envelope, called for amber malt, corn sugar, ale yeast, and honey, free to him because he was a beekeeper. He grew hops up the side of the barn and occasionally brewed with garden habaneros for an extra kick. His process was precise, but not exactly fussy. He fermented 15-gallon batches in a plastic garbage can in the bathroom.

And yet, when I think about his beer, I picture him walking into the house after a day’s labor and pulling from the fridge a weathered 32-ounce Tecate bottle that he’d brought back from Mexico to store his homebrew. He’d crack off the cap and pour a glass for anyone in the room who wanted one, the anticipating smile on his face of someone about to jump into water on a hot afternoon. The beer was fizzy, golden in color, crisp and sometimes a little sour. I’m not sure how a connoisseur would rate it, but if a beer is only as good as the people you share it with, then his was the best. Nothing in a can came close.

During the pandemic I learned, along with the rest of the country, to make sourdough bread, a process that began with an oven fire in the middle of my son’s kindergarten Zoom class. I tried again and failed again and then read an awful lot and eventually learned enough so that now, with just four ingredients—water, flour, sourdough, and salt—I bake two airy loaves for our family every week.

My confidence buoyed by that gateway drug of bread baking, I found myself thinking again about beer, my father-in-law, and my cousin David. I knew what David said was true: I would always be able to buy better beer than I could brew. Perhaps I shouldn’t be asking what I had to offer the world of brewing, though, but rather what the world of brewing had to offer me. After all, do you bother planting a garden when you can buy bigger, juicier vegetables at the farmer’s market? Do you ever string together a few chords on the guitar, knowing you’ll never sell out Madison Square Gardens? Surely, I thought, the process adds value to the product.

So this year I made a resolution to learn. The library books I checked out told me any idiot could do it. If you can make a simple soup, you can make beer. I went to our local brew shop and quickly dropped $100 on supplies including a fermenting bucket, some plastic hose, an airlock, sanitizing solution, and a hydrometer. I paid another $50 for two boxes of old swing-top Grolsch bottles that I found on Craigslist. A friend who had dabbled in zymurgy lent me some other equipment and gave me a copy of Charlie Papazian’s bible of beer: “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing,” whose continual refrain to “Relax. Don’t worry. Have a home brew,” calmed my nerves. Papazian is a former schoolteacher and nuclear engineer who counts among his students the co-founder of New Belgium Brewing Company. His book is almost evangelical in tone. The question isn’t why should you brew beer, it seems to shout, but why would you not?

Like bread, beer is fashioned from four main ingredients: water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. (OK, five, if you count love.) For a homebrewer, though, I learned that what goes into your beer is less important than what doesn’t. If you’re not scrupulous in your procedure and cleanliness, you might accidentally introduce too much oxygen into the beer, or bacterial infections, or wild yeast, all of which can produce off-flavors as diverse as “buttered popcorn,” “cheerios,” and “used band-aids,” according to Papazian. Too much direct sunlight can render a beer “light-struck,” giving it the flavor of skunk urine, a fact that delighted my children, aged 10 and 7, who wondered if skunk urine, exposed to darkness, would take on the flavor of beer. Hazards lurked around every corner. Duly vigilant, I set to work.

My first batch was out of a beer kit I bought for $35. It was a Kölsch. I like Kölsch. It’s light, refreshing, and very un-band-aid-like. The first steps involved steeping a small bag of malted grain in a big pot of water, like a giant cup of tea. Then I added some hops and the malt extract, which nearly bubbled over into a sticky mess on the stovetop. This was my wort (pronounced wert), a cool new word I planned to use as often as possible. It boiled for an hour, giving our house the steamy, industrial smells of a brewery.

When the batch was almost done, I added a clarifying agent called Irish moss, and more hops for aroma. Then I cooled it, a long process involving an ice bath in our sink. When it was about 68 degrees, I poured it into my five-gallon fermentation bucket and pitched the yeast (cool new verb, check). I attached the airlock to the rubber stopper on the lid, and slid the whole thing into the closet, next to our vacuum cleaner. Within 48 hours I was thrilled to see bubbling in the airlock, proof that the yeast was alive and metabolizing the malt sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol. I was on my way. Two weeks later, I siphoned it into bottles with a bit of corn sugar for carbonation, and two weeks after that, I gave it a taste. It was….mediocre. It was much darker than a Kölsch should be, and had a funny aftertaste. Hilly didn’t love it, meaning it was up to me to finish off 37 bottles.

If you’re wondering, yes, 37 bottles take up a lot of space. So does all the other gear. Brew days are time-intensive, often stressful experiences that involve me banging around the house, cleaning buckets and pans in the bathtub and making a mess of our counters with bags of malt extract and packages of hops. Between batches, my equipment takes up a not insignificant corner of our garage. I’ve taken to storing the bottles in two giant Styrofoam boxes in my kids’ room, next to a basket of stuffed animals on top of their dresser.

The hobby is mentally intrusive, too. Brewing beer made my self-doubt soar to new heights. I’ve started to worry in words I didn’t even know before. Have I adequately sparged my mash? Has my yeast flocculated? Is my beer properly attenuated? What should I do with the “trub” (troob), that inch-thick layer of yeast sediment at the bottom of the fermenter?

My head swirled late into the night. Call it the brewer’s burden. I’d lie awake, staring at the ceiling. “What are you thinking about?” Hilly would probe.

“Oh, nothing,” I’d say. “I just can’t decide if I should dry hop in secondary.”

Or, sighing in despair after a bad batch had to be poured down the drain: “I just had invested so much time and hope into it.”

“Well, you don’t learn much when everything goes right,” Hilly said cheerfully.

I rolled over, pointedly.

Often, my worries were well-founded. When I over-boiled some corn sugar in a batch of Märzen, I imbued the wort with the flavor of burnt toast. A quick chemistry lesson on the internet taught me the culprit was a process called the Maillard reaction. The beer was undrinkable. A total loss. But, as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. When I moved on to a hop-heavy IPA, it came in below my expected alcohol content, which I calculate by measuring the change in density before and after fermentation. But the flavor of the beer was excellent; I’d be happy if I paid good money for it, which, in fact, I did. Next, I brewed a cream ale with flaked oats and cracked corn. The result was crisp and refreshing—the perfect summer backyard beer.

The beers I’m brewing aren’t perfect. They likely never will be. But they’re getting better. They might be getting cheaper, too. After my initial investment, I have what I need in equipment. I’m still using malt extract to brew, and with these recipes the beer costs about the same as it would at the store. When I muster up the courage to try an all-grain batch, it will get a lot less expensive. I still have much to learn, but I have the feeling that I’m going somewhere. Things are looking up. I have even felt a measure of pride in my handiwork.

What’s more, my beer is environmentally friendly, in that it’s not being shipped anywhere farther than a friend’s house, and I’m reusing my bottles. It has health benefits, too. A bottle of homebrew has much more suspended yeast than commercial beer. Yeast is rich in vitamin B complex, which helps us metabolize food and maintain fluid levels. This may be why so many homebrewers say they get less of a hangover drinking their brews. So there. Brewing your own beer is better for the earth, and better for your body.

Homebrewing has taught me about physics, biology, math, chemistry, and, yes, beer. It’s also provided this bit of wisdom: if you want your life to expand, it usually has to get more complicated first. I think it’s good for my kids to watch me stumble through learning a new skill, too. Brew days in our house are a family affair. Hilly, an artist, carved a hip woodcut logo for what she thought should be my brand name: Tall Hop. (DM me for merch.) Our seven-year-old, Julian, controls the tap of our fermenter on bottling day and is also chief bottle organizer. Our oldest, Theo, loves the pop when he opens the swing-top bottles, and says things like, “Whoa, look at the head on that.” Both boys are my main morale boosters, too. My first batch was barely bottled before they were telling me I should start a brewery, and that they’d decided to save their lemonade stand money until they could contribute $100 toward my capital. My very own angel investors.

By now, the hobby has taken on its own rhythm in our house. I’m brewing about a batch every month. And it’s easily one of the best parts of the day when Hilly gets home from work, I close my computer and we crack open a cold bottle from the fridge, pour it between two frosted glasses, and play a game of cribbage, just like my father-in-law used to do. At these moments, neither of us is thinking about how much it cost or how long it took. It just feels like life well-spent.