Eugene weekly., July 12, 2007, Image 29

Product of EW’s Advertising Department
MESSY BEGINNINGS
From homebrewer to professional
BY DOUGLAS E. FUCHS
Give a man a beer, he’ll waste an hour.
Teach a man to brew, he’ll waste a lifetime.
— B ILL O WENS , MAGAZINE PUBLISHER & BREWPUB PIONEER
T
he natural path to a wasted life cleaning kegs, sanitizing brewing equipment
and removing tons of steaming hot wet grain in a poorly ventilated brew
house begins — usually — in the confines of a kitchen. Professional brew-
ers, especially in the Pacific Northwest, start as homebrewers, cobbling together bits
of equipment to create the “warmest lining of a naked man’s coat,” or what John
Taylor, 17th century poet and alehouse keeper, called by its proper name — ale.
Homebrewers usually start by purchasing an inexpensive starter kit that contains
liquid and/or dry extract, a small bag of hops and liquid yeast. Then they begin the
joyful experience of destroying their kitchen. One of the first lessons learned by any
homebrewer is that boiling beer, called wort, strives violently to foam up and out all
over the floor. The second, and most important lesson, is that sanitation during the
entire brewing process is very, very important.
Jamie Floyd, co-owner and head brewer at Ninkasi Brewery in Eugene, home-
brewed beer for four and a half years before becoming a professional brewer.
“Most homebrewers start in their kitchen, which is the most disgusting place on
earth,” Floyd says. “I think all homebrewers understand why its necessary to be very
clean, to keep a sanitized environment, when moving on to professional brewing.”
But moving from a homebrewer to a professional brewer isn’t always a simple
step. While some homebrewers may attend a brewing school, from OSU’s
Fermentation Science program to the renowned Siebel Institute of Technology and
World Brewing Academy in Chicago, many homebrewers join a club, judge beer fes-
tivals and work their way up the ladder of a professional brewery, such as Rogue
Ales in Newport, where Head Brewer John Maier has almost turned out as many
high-quality professional brewers as delicious bottles of beer.
Homebrewers and professional brewers are a strange crop of folks that belong
more to a cult than to a guild. In the Pacific Northwest in general and in Eugene in
particular, professional brewers swap specific yeast styles and bags of specialty grain
and help each other without thought of anything as silly as “market competition.”
Blessed by Dionysus and armed with a powerful ability to drink any beer and pick
out the essential ingredients, brewers in our area work, play and drink — together.
They probably also homebrewed together all those years ago or at least can
share the joys and horror stories of homebrewing, such as the “gusher,” defined as
when a bottle of beer has been infected when bottled and spews forth with
a vengeance when opened. Many homebrewers will
open the first bottle of a new batch in the backyard,
just in case.
Jeff Althouse, brewer and co-owner of
Willamette Brewery in Eugene, says that the
primary difference between a homebrewer
and a professional brewer is that the home-
brewer can brew any beer at all, with no con-
sideration for the mass market. A homebrewer
for seven years, Althouse said that profession-
al brewers have to brew the same beer
again and again.
“As a professional brewer, you are
going to brew significantly less beer
styles than you would be able to as a
homebrewer,” Althouse says.
Or as Jamie Floyd adds, “As a pro-
fessional brewer, the days of brewing
the experimental homebrew recipe,
such as the Buckwheat Raspberry
Ginger Mint Smoked Lager, are over.”
Product of EW’s Advertising Department
THE STATE OF SUDS SUMMER 2007
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