By Greig McGill
A grab-bag of thoughts and ideas regarding the great hobby of home brewing.
I’ve been thinking about a bunch of things lately, all kinda-sorta connected, but mostly just that they relate to home brewing. Perhaps it’s my brain telling me how much I miss it, stuck in my commercial brewery? I tell ya - never ruin a good hobby by trying to make it a business! Anyway, here’s a few short musings for you.
Assembling the home brewing dream team.
While interviewing for a new bartender here at Brewaucracy, it was fascinating to hear about candidates' different backgrounds, and beer journeys. Some hadn’t been into beer at all, some came from food backgrounds, some were into event management, some just really loved hospitality, and some had come from farming backgrounds. This got me mulling over what it might take to build the home brewing dream team - a group constructed of specialists with the goal of creating the best brews ever, and serving them to friends in a really fun environment.
Cue the heist-movie style music, and lets check out our specialists:
The Gear Head: This is the member who loves shiny toys. She drives a fast car, has a top end audio system, and you just know her mash tun is fully automated! She’s got the toys and she knows how to use them. There’s not a single style of beer she can’t get her system to produce. She’s going to be the one actually brewing the beer.
The Chef: A culinary creative, who loves exploring harmony of flavour, and can instinctively “just feel” when a particular ingredient will be the perfect cherry on top of the beverage being proposed. He works with the Gear Head to ensure the recipes are perfect.
Mr. Party: This dude is set up for entertaining. Big house, big personality, big address book! He’s gonna throw those parties that get the beers consumed quickly paving the way for high volume production, and he’s gonna get those beers noticed. If you want to go commercial, think of Mr. Party as your hype man. He’ll build your rep!
The Hippy: Your green thumbed friend, she loves to compost! She’ll take all the waste from your brewery and use it well. Best of all, she’ll use the resulting compost to feed hops and maybe even grain for home malting. She can make your beers truly unique, by using ingredients nobody else can get. She’ll also give you that warm glow of feeling smugly sustainable.
What do you think? I reckon it’d be hard not to make perfect beer with a team like that. Have I missed a specialist? Who’s in your dream team?
Beer style archaeology
I know I grumble about this a lot, but it doesn’t make it any less true that in practical terms, over the last decade we have “lost” numerous beer styles to the common market. Don’t believe me? Without resorting to online ordering from a large importer, and just relying on bottle shops and breweries near you, how many beer styles do you think you can find examples of, excluding the IPA family, about five types of lager, and probably a couple of stouts? Had a good Grisette lately? How about a Belgian Golden Strong ale? Perhaps an English Mild ale? Irish Red? Whether you necessarily believe in beer styles at all (and it’s a long debate with good points on both sides), you still have to admit that the beer world has looked very boring over the last ten years or so. I mean, I guess there’s lots more 10% stouts with half a grocery aisle worth of ingredients in them, so yay?
No wonder, then, that home brewing as a hobby is stagnating. We’ve all become bored, and lacking in inspiration. No matter how much you love IPA, you have to admit it was a lot more interesting when there were more styles to try out in the market, and then try to recreate at home.
Well, I have some good news for you! You still can, and you might just save beer in the process! After all, tomorrow’s commercial brewer is most likely today’s home brewer, and the market is in dire need of people not afraid to step away from the “but IPA sells” mentality and create the niches that drove the last great beer wave of variety in the 1990s and early 2000s. It might be pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but a beer lover can hope, right?
So, how do we rediscover style diversity when we can’t even buy a decent example of the style to know what to aim for? Socially, of course! There’s plenty of great information written online and in classic reference books which describes modern and historic styles of beer down to the tiniest detail. This also usually includes what made the style unique, including specific ingredients or unusual brewing techniques. All you need then is a bunch of like-minded brew buddies to formulate your recipe and taste them, honestly and critically comparing them to the style notes. You could also enter them in various competitions judged by people who have a deep knowledge of these styles, but those competitions can be few and far between, and the cost and hassle of entry can be discouraging. Brew some obscure beers and start saving this hobby!
Online Ale-ienation
COVID did a number on us all. It’s changed society in ways we are still figuring out. The thing I notice (and am deeply saddened by) the most is the early bar/brewery/pub closing times brought on by the sheer fact that people just don’t go out, or stay out as much these days. That’s just my particular selfish bent though - I love a good pub, and sometimes I’m not ready to go home by 9:30pm. But I certainly don’t expect the poor owners to be paying staff to sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the 3-4 Greigs that are still out there. Nope, I will just continue being the change I want to see in the world and hope that one day, we get back to a place where people want, and can afford, to go out and socialise together over a pint or six again.
But that’s not what this is about. No, this involves the more often commented on societal change - the Zoomification of the world. People just aren’t into meeting up as much any more. This is, in my opinion anyway, having some noticeable consequences for home brewing. Beer is a sensory thing - one simply cannot communicate all that beer is using text or speech. Many beer writers do a pretty good job of it, but I believe that the only true way to talk about beer is sharing that beer in person, and from the same can, bottle, or tap. Beer is a living thing, and for all the online tasting clubs that popped up during COVID and are still with us now, they all had the same flaw; the beer in your package might not even be the same batch as the beer in mine. And even if it is, what of the differences in how it was stored and treated between its birth at the brewery and its eventual arrival in your glass during an online tasting? How can you share an understanding of the nature of that beer, when nobody has the same beer?
If you want to brew great beer, you need to understand what makes that beer great. Beer, being an inherently social beverage, gets better when shared, and understanding that shared quality is a key aspect in brewing a similarly endowed beer of your own. I don’t mean to make it sound like magic or woo-woo, but there is definitely an ineffable quality to sharing a beer that changes the beer in your glass. Not at a molecular level, but in the way you perceive it. It concerns me that this is being lost, and perhaps I’m drawing too long a bow here, but many home brews I’ve tasted since “The Plague” have seemed to lack that small spark of joy that comes from dreaming them up in a social setting, while talking a load of cobblers with people who matter to you. Put down the keyboard, step away from the screen, and bring back the joy.