After spending a couple of hours in their small kitchen waiting for the brew to boil, some of the guys are getting restless. They begin to argue about whether or not to make rice — the type of pointless argument sophomore Oren Lavie says is common during the three-hour brewing process.
“Guys, let’s brew some beer,” exclaims sophomore Max Feldman, interrupting the dispute. After all, for Feldman and the rest of his housemates, beer is a uniting factor.
Lavie and Feldman learned to brew beer from another housemate, sophomore Phill Baker, who in turn learned from friends when he was 18 and taking a gap year between high school and Penn.
“It’s a good, friendly bonding experience,” he says. “It’s better than doing drugs.”
After the friends moved off campus this year, they bought some brewing equipment on Craigslist and started making their own beer.
“We all get together,” Feldman says, calling brewing “a house event.”
“Brewing beer is just a very chill process,” adds sophomore Tom Walsh, who also lives with them.
While homebrewing is often less expensive than buying beer — good beer, that is — saving money is only an added benefit. Brewing is about the experience. “You get to see how it’s made, and you get to see all the different tastes and smells,” says Baker. “That’s definitely an exciting part.”
For Engineering graduate student Ross Marklein, brewing is a skill that will stay with him for life. “It’s not like a sport or something where, if you stop doing it, you’ll kind of lose it,” he says. “You’ll always have the knowledge.”
Marklein learned to brew this past Christmas after he and his brother agreed to buy each other the book Extreme Brewing: An Enthusiast’s Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home by Sam Calagione, the founder and president of Dogfish Head, a microbrewery in Rehoboth Beach, Del. While Marklein hasn’t tried the book’s more exotic recipes — one of the beers lists kiwi as an ingredient, for example — he has tested out the book’s formula for an imperial pale ale. “It’s like our little baby,” he says proudly of the brew.
After Christmas, Marklein bought his own homebrewing starter kit and has been trying different brews ever since. His goal is to keep learning new recipes, even after he’s found something that works.
“Even if it tastes the best, I wouldn’t want to keep making it,” he says. “I would want to try something new.”
Still, he says he’s not ready to experiment just yet. The closest he’s come to straying from a recipe was when he accidentally added dark brown sugar instead of light brown sugar to a batch. He wants to master the basics before throwing kiwis into the mix.
Marklein explains that he needed store-bought beer on hand while making his first batch because “brewing while sober is no fun.” But in the future, he hopes to save a few beers from each batch so he has something to drink while making the next one. Besides, the beer tastes better if it sits for a few months, rather than just the requisite few weeks after adding sugar, the last step in the process.
Saving the beer can be difficult, though. “We definitely aren’t the only ones consuming it. We actually like to share it, even if it means we end up giving away half [of the batch],” he says. “We’re proud of it.”
Homebrewing has become an increasingly common hobby in the 40 years since it was legalized.
In 1979 Congress passed a law permitting home beer- and wine-making. Although the law left room for individual states to outlaw homebrewing — in Alabama, for example, it is illegal to produce any type of alcohol at home — most states allow the production of 100 gallons per person over the age of 21 so long as a household brews no more than 200 gallons per year.
It is illegal for individuals without a liquor license to sell the beer they brew, although giving the alcohol away is perfectly fine. But the law stops those who are underage from brewing no better than it stops underage drinking — Baker learned to brew at age 18, and he taught the rest of his housemates before they were of age.
Feldman laughed at the legal concern. “By the time the beer’s ready to drink, he’ll be 21,” he said, referring to Baker.
Brewing beer is chemistry, according to chemistry professor Will Dailey, a self-described “brown ale person.” Before Dailey was an organic chemist, he was a cook. “In many ways, organic chemistry is the same as cooking,” he says.
Despite that, his initial reason for learning to brew about 20 years ago was that it was much cheaper than buying good beer. Like Marklein, he began with a starter kit but found that the beer the kit produced just wasn’t cutting it. “The beer that you make that way, it’s drinkable, but it’s not great,” he says. “I like to go to the edge and learn everything I can about something I’m interested in.”
He bought more advanced equipment — bigger pots, cookers and “other devices” — and eventually began making his own malt.
Chemistry is really important in the process, he explains. He has to heat the malted grain to the point where it’s hot enough to turn into sugar but not so hot that the enzymes in the grain are destroyed. Dailey also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a sanitary environment. “Cleanliness is sort of the key in good beer-making,” he says. If any bacteria contaminate the brew, the whole batch is ruined.
Although making the beer is akin to a chemistry experiment, consuming it is more of a social event. Each year Dailey and his wife stage their own Oktoberfest. They host a picnic for their friends, providing guests with five to seven different beers to sample.
Still, the brewing is something Dailey has so far done mostly on his own. “It’s pretty much just my thing, but [my wife] certainly drinks it.” Nonetheless, Dailey says he might one day share his skills with interested students through a Preceptorial.
Entering the little shop on Sansom, you are hit by a thousand different smells at once. Yeasts, hops, malt and an array of grains line the cluttered shelves occupying the majority of space in the store, and each item emits a different aroma. But Jake and Elwood — owners Nancy Rigby and George Hummel’s cats — are the first things to catch your eye.
As a customer pays for his grains and yeast, he turns to Jake, who lies lazily on the countertop. “At least you’re not sitting on my product this time,” he says. Home Sweet Homebrew, located at 2008 Sansom St., is Philly’s original source for beer- and wine-making supplies, says Hummel, whom one homebrewer described as the “godfather of beer culture in Philadelphia.”
“I basically started the business because in 1986 that was how you got good beer in Philadelphia,” Hummel says. “Over the years we’ve lost a lot of our customers to the professional brewing industry. Hummel and Rigby, his wife, bought the store from friends of theirs in 1990, and it hasn’t changed much since then. Hummel calls the brewing process easy. “As Nancy will say, guys do it.”
The store offers starter kits — Marklein bought his at Home Sweet Homebrew — but for many these kits are just the beginning. Hummel says he often helps returning customers tweak their recipes. “I really need to stay on top of what’s out there commercially,” he explains, since people often come in seeking to reproduce the taste of their favorite store-bought beer. “More often than not, they’re very pleased with what we send them home with. I’m very good at cobbling together recipes based on someone’s observations.”
He experiments in his own brewing, as well. “I’m always tweaking stuff and trying new ingredients as they become available so I can tell people how to use them,” he says.
In fact, his and Rigby’s concoctions have won many awards, reflected in the dozens of ribbons hanging on the back wall. The most notable is his Belgian grand cru, which won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 2005, ranking with the professional brews.
Brewing is a “great hobby” and a “great way to learn about beer,” says Hummel. “It’s also a great way to learn about the responsibilities of alcohol because people [who] put the sweat of their brow into two cases of beer aren’t going to sit down and drink it all in an evening.”
As one of the oldest businesses dedicated to homebrewing, it’s only fitting that the store hosts meetings for one of the oldest homebrew clubs in the country. Members of Homebrewers of Philadelphia and Suburbs, or HOPS, come from “all walks of life and disciplines,” says Hummel. “We have architects, we have lawyers, we have IT techs, we have professors.”
Started in the 1980s by a chemist, HOPS is very informal. “We are people [who] care about beer and want to see it put in its culinary world,” says Rigby, who is a member. “We don’t really have any membership requirements other than willingness to participate.” Although, she adds, “if you don’t bring beer, we make fun of you.”
The group meets the third Wednesday of every month at the shop. Throughout the year, members go out to dinner, hold events and competitions and get together to talk about brewing.
“Homebrewing is an esoteric kind of hobby,” says Rigby, explaining that homebrewers benefit from discussing methods with other homebrewers. “You become part of the community.”
Homebrew-centered clubs are not uncommon, however. “Some clubs focus more on the technical, some are more competitive than others,” says Rigby, “but everyone is pretty much united by their quest for knowledge” — and love of beer.
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In fact, Penn students hoping to join a club need look no farther than the Wharton Brewmasters’ Guild.
Organized in April 2008, the group is made up of about 100 MBA students “dedicated to the enjoyment and the discovery of great craft beer from all over the world,” according to co-founder and outgoing president Alex Athanassiou, a Wharton graduate student. The group strives to be “fraternal in nature” and “not to be like a wine club,” which Athanassiou says can get “snobby.”
Like HOPS, WBG hosts beer dinners, brewery tours and happy hours. Also like HOPS, the club’s goal is to educate about — not just consume — great beer.
The group’s next big project is its Homebrew Competition. Forty students are divided into 18 teams, each of which submits a case of homebrewed beer to be judged by a panel of experts that includes Hummel and other “professional homebrewers,” explains Athanassiou. The judging will occur at the group’s end-of-the-year party on April 27 at the Urban Saloon.
“We’re encouraging all types of beers,” he says, adding that he was surprised to see 40 entrants sign up. “We only expected it to be a handful of people” since MBA students are usually not interested in something that doesn’t advance their careers, he says.
Still, he says, some people in the club — and beyond — might be hoping to establish their own breweries.
“Most guys’ dream retirement job is to own a bar,” says Sammy Saber, E‘08, who is not in WBG but currently works on campus as a research assistant. He says he “played around with the idea” of starting a brewery. He even experimented with his own recipes, at one time concocting a pumpkin pie beer.
In the end, though, it’s just “a great hobby to have.”
