Beer is an art form for Ivan Crash.
President of Indianapolis wine making and homebrewing supply retailer, Wine Art, he crafts his own golden creations of malt and hops, using a fermenter and carboy as his pallet.
"You're the cook," he said. "You can design your own little recipe. Make the beer that you like to make. I'm doing some beer for the football season right now."
Though homebrewing conjures up visions of mad scientist types cooking up volatile concoctions in the basement, the brewers themselves take pride in the boutique quality of their work.
Contrary to the popular image, homebrewing is a tedious time consuming process, of fermenting and aging, as well as some rudimentary chemistry.
"You don't just throw everything into a pot and watch it happen," sophomore Phil Beaudoin said. "It takes a lot of time. But you learn to appreciate it. This isn't the type of beer that you want to slam down four or five in a row. This is the kind that you want to sit back and taste it. It'll take you an hour to drink one."
Beaudoin began making his own beer, with the help of a friend and his parents, when he was 16.
"We just wanted beer," he said. "We figured this would be inexpensive. We quickly found out that it wasn't. But we just figured we'd have beer, have a good time and kick back on the weekends."
Beer is made of four basic ingredients: water, malt, yeast and hops. The malt, made from a grain extract, comes in several varieties and roasts. Generally the darker the roast the darker the beer. The yeast ferments the malt sugars into alcohol, and hops provide the bitter aroma and flavor.
"We started to develop a raspberry beer," Beaudoin said. "I got kind of my raspberry wheat beer. We only used hops once. Most of the malt we used was pre-hopped. The more hops you put in, the more bitter your beer is going to be."
"The ingredients depend on what type of beer you want," said Jon Kammer of Midwest Homebrewing Supplies in Minneapolis. "You can add a sweet orange pill that would give it a Belgian beer flavor. There are people who add brown sugar and maple syrup. Pretty much anything that's a sugar, you can add to it, even fresh fruit."
The yeast strain and temperature also affect the beer. Ale yeasts, for example, are usually fermented at room temperatures, around 65 to 75 degrees. Lager yeasts are fermented at around 40 to 50 degrees with a cold conditioning period.
"Anything you can buy in the stores you can brew at home," said John Palmer of Howtobrew.com in Monrovia, Calif. "You can make English ales, German wheat beers, Irish stouts. And the quality is usually equal to or better (than store-bought brands)."
Alcohol levels in homebrews range from about four to six percent, similar to off-the-shelf beers.
"People think that homebrews must be strong," Kammer said. "But being a homebrewer you can control it, so if you make a beer that you really like, but it just wasn't quite strong enough you can add more brewing sugars at the start, which will make a stronger beer at the end."
Seasoned homebrewers warn upstarts to stay away from the beer-in-the-bag kits that are sometimes available in department stores.
"You'll get something that's halfway drinkable that has alcohol, but not really that great," Palmer said.
"Those are novelty kits," Crash said. "They call that single-stage. After a week you bottle your beer, and it's just too soon. People complain about yeasty flavored beer, and cidery beers. Our method is called two-stage. You do the first stage in a bucket, do your basic fermentation, then you do your secondary stage with your five gallon glass carboy for the beer to clarify and settle out."
Most homebrewing kits sell for between $70 and $100. In addition to bottles and cappers they include a plastic bucket for the initial fermenting phase with some siphoning tubes to transfer it into the carboy to remove the sediment.
A typical ingredients packet sells for about $20 and produces about 60 12-ounce bottles, which can last for as long as six months.
"As long as you keep it in the refrigerator, it'll be good," Beaudoin said. "We didn't pasteurize it, so it probably would not be very good sitting out. You have to keep it cold, or otherwise, it might go bad within a week or two."
Kammer said he would advise novices to be patient.
"When somebody is just starting out they're eager to try out their first beer and they just want to hurry it along," he said. "Well, the key is that it takes a solid two to three weeks of fermenting time, and after you bottle it up you want to age it for another two or three weeks. So what it comes down to is patience is a virtue."
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