You Can Brew Your Own Beer
March/April 2007
Megan Phelps
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For the best tasting beer, try brewing your own!
Istock Photo/Dieter Spears
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The first time you're presented with a homebrewed beer, you
might feel a bit skeptical. After all, the bottle is all wrong. It
doesn't have a label, and it might even be a little dusty, as
though it's been sitting in the corner of someone's basement. (And
maybe it has.) But if you do drink that bottle of homebrew, you'll
discover that most homebrewed beer not only tastes as good as
store-bought beer, it's often a lot better. And — what a nice
bonus! — it's probably cheaper, too.
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Homebrew has distinctive flavors.
The best thing about homemade beer is its variety, because when you
make your own, you can experiment with any ingredients or
techniques that you choose and create beer with interesting and
unique flavors.
Unfortunately, the most successful American beers are not a very
diverse group, and tend not to have very strong flavors. Microbrews
offer a much wider range of styles and tastes, but because these
beers come from small breweries, they're not always easy to find,
and in many parts of the United States, you can't order beer or
wine by mail. (The laws about shipping alcohol are
complicated.)
There's another problem with shipping beer: It doesn't always
age or travel well. If you drink imports, the beer you like may
taste quite different in its country of origin than it does by the
time it gets to your refrigerator. When you brew your own, you have
much more control over the process.
Homebrew is green beer.
Of course, the beer isn't literally green unless you go a little
crazy on St. Patrick's Day and throw in some food coloring. (Also,
'green beer' is a term for beer that's still too young to have
developed its full flavor — again, not what we're aiming for here.)
But from an environmental standpoint, brewing your own beer is
definitely green. Here's why:
- It's very, very local. Bottles of homebrew don't have to be
shipped cross country or overseas, which saves a lot of
energy.
- When you brew on a small scale, you can compost the spent grain
and hops. Alternatively, spent grain makes great feed for chickens
and pigs, if you happen to have some around.
- You can even seek out local and/or organic ingredients,
something it's hard to find in commercial beer. Don't expect to
find everything locally, but you may be able to find one or two
ingredients nearby. For example, here in Kansas, you can grow hops
in your garden, or even find them growing wild. A good source for
organic ingredients is
www.breworganic.com.
