Brew

Brewing a better beer

By Hal Brown
    Home brewers usually don't let their hobby go to their heads.
    At least in Fairfield County, they band together in a happy anarchy. The local home-brew club is known alternately as the Underground Brewers, a throwback to its founding in the early 1970s, when home brewing was technically illegal, or as the YAHOOS -- Yankee Association of Homebrewers Objecting to Organized Society.
    The group has no titular head; the organizer's unofficial office tends to be passed around when the front man gets tired of it. Although affiliated with the American Home Brewing Association, the group doesn't give that sanctioning body all it wants where rosters are concerned.
    When the AHBA periodically sends out a notice about updating its club listings, "we send it back to them, saying the lads here don't go in for all that," said Gregg Glaser of Wilton, a member of the local club and a journalist covering the beer industry for trade and consumer publications.
    "It's a great bunch of guys, all totally varied in interests and backgrounds and ages," said Tom Conti, a computer graphic artist from Weston. "The club consists of people from 21 years old up to approaching 70."
Conti, who joined the club in 1995, never liked beer until he started home brewing, and he got into that by happenstance.
    "I accidentally got someone else's mail. When I moved into my house, a post card was sent to the previous owner about a beer tasting at the Cobb's Mill Inn. I thought that sounded interesting -- let's go try it.
"I went there; we tried some 'unusual' beers, we'll say -- not your typical Coors Light and Budweiser and all that. I really liked some of them, and that's where I met some home brewers," he said.
    The YAHOOS mailing list is about 60, Glaser said, with 15 or 20 generally showing up for meetings. Home brewers in the Fairfield County area may number in the hundreds, he said.
    "We meet once a month, usually at someone's house, and bring either store-bought microbrewed beers or home brews of a particular style," said Glaser. "We taste them and judge them and rate them. We talk about it and learn from each other."
     The hobby came into its own in the Carter administration, when Prohibition-era laws that targeted home brewing were repealed, said Peter Cocchia, who runs Homemade Libations, a brewery and winery equipment store in South Norwalk.
    "At one time making beer was done for economic reasons," Cocchia said. "It was the cheapest way to drink beer. I would say the brewers you see today are doing it for the sport of it, to brew a quality beer and a beer most specific to their tastes."
    Beer still can be made relatively cheaply. Home brewers can piece together the equipment and materials for an initial batch for under $100, Cocchia said. That includes buying a carboy - the old glass 5-gallon jugs once used for drinking-fountain water - the hops, the filters, what have you.
    Brewing in the basement may bring better beer, but it's an open question whether competitions, such as the New England Brewing Co.'s annual contest, are boot camps for big-time brewing. This year's competition is Sunday at the company brewery/restaurant in South Norwalk.
    "I have guys who come in and they buy the ingredients and they buy the equipment and they brew a good batch of beer and they figure they're on their way to Anheuser-Busch to brew," Cocchia said.
    But hobbyists probably shouldn't hop on the professional bandwagon, said Glaser.
    "The [microbrewery/brew pub] industry is fairly mature at this point," he said. The openings aren't happening the way they were back in the heyday, the early and mid '90s. Especially in the past, there were [jobs as brewers] because most of the brew pubs and microbreweries that have opened in the United States in the last 20 to 25 years have been with home-brew enthusiasts. Almost all the people who opened them were heavily involved in home brewing, then decided, 'Hey, you know, let's boost this up and do it professionally.'
    "I'm sure most home brewers who are very serious about their hobby, like a lot of hobbyists, have fantasies about quitting the day job and doing this full time. As you can imagine, though, the capital to open a brewery is intense, so most people decide not to do it. When you think about it, the salary that a brewer is going to be making, if he's employed and not owning the place, vs. what most of these people earn in their regular jobs -- they don't want to take a pay cut."
    That's not to say that some don't make the jump from pastime to profession.
    "I've had at least three or four of my customers go on to brewing schools and have subsequently become brewers," Cocchia said. "There is a correlation there - a person who gets into this hobby is a person who does enjoy brewing; some of them go on to make it a profession."

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