Try brewing your beer at home, eh?
July 19, 2008
Amy Brown-Bowers
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Canadian beer drinkers tired of light and savourless, same-old, same-old from big beer monopolies are turning to microbreweries and into homebrewers, says Darren Bender, vice-president of a Calgary-based homebrew club. In essence, craft beer is about being creative, bold, flavourful, natural and local and what could be more creative or local than beer brewed on your own kitchen burners?
Renters should be pleased to know that successful home-brewing is possible in even the most modest of bachelor pads.
"You can pretty much brew in any space that you have. You could always find a way to do it," says Scott Emmink, a renter just outside of Hamilton and homebrewer of three years.
"That's the great thing about the hobby in my opinion: you can take it as far as you want or limit it as far as you want," he adds.
Jason Stranak has been home-brewing for about a year and a half. A diehard do-it-yourselfer, he was drawn to home-brewing for three reasons, "I wanted to take control, to make exactly what I wanted to drink, and to know exactly what was done to produce it. Second, I hoped to be able to save money... And third, I enjoy learning and really enjoy applying kitchen chemistry," says the Hamilton-based renter.
With the help of a local homebrew shop he tried his hand at stouts – "they can be more forgiving of mistakes," he says – and now brews a rotation of cream ales, amber ales and hoppy pale ales.
Zanis Valdmanis rents above a restaurant at Bloor and Ossington and has been brewing India pale ales and English bitters in his two-bedroom apartment for the past year.
He started with Festa Brew – a no-brainer beginners' method using pasteurized ready-to-use wort. Essentially all you do is mix in a little yeast, wait a few weeks and voila!
"Festa Brews are ideal for apartments," Valdmanis says. "You don't need half the equipment. You just add the yeast and let it bubble away for a month and then bottle it."
Valdmanis now makes his beer from scratch rather than kits but he's still careful to keep his equipment to a minimum.
"I have to really think about it equipment-wise what I'm going to be using. (Apartment brewing) has affected obviously my choice of brewing method. There's a lot of peripheral equipment that you could have. I have a very bare bones system. If I don't really need it to brew, I don't have it," he says.
His biggest piece of equipment is a 40-quart aluminum brew kettle, an old turkey fryer he picked up on Craigslist now used for boiling the grains. He stores this along with his bottles, six-gallon food grade bucket and large glass carboy – both used for fermentation – in a second-hand wardrobe.
Stranak, also very space conscious, has a designated corner in his home office complete with a closeable chest and wall hooks to store his beer and brewing equipment, when it's not in use.
As for when the beer is actually fermenting, "the pail sits at the back of my kitchen counter," he says, adding, "I do lose some counter space for a week or two but knowing what will come of it makes it worthwhile."
Most homebrewers in houses brew in the garage or backyard – there's less worry about mess, pungent aromas and getting in people's way – but brewers who rent rarely have this luxury.
Valdmanis takes over the kitchen during his bimonthly brewing. The process takes about five hours in total to make his 19-litres batches, but the actual elements on the stove are only in use for about two hours.
Stranak, whose rental comes with a porch, started brewing on the stove but moved outside to a propane burner because of "some messy boil-over situations" and the slight but unwelcome increase in his hydro bill.
"I did notice a bit of a jump in my electricity bill when I was using the stove for brewing, and an associated drop when I switched to the propane burner," he says.
While the extra cost of running a stove top for a few extra hours a month is probably negligible, hydro can noticeably add up if you run a second fridge to store your beer or an extra freezer to make lagers like Emmink does. A Toronto Hydro online tool estimates the cost of running a fridge and freezer to be about $10 a month.
But so long as you're covering your own hydro and you're not violating any safety rules, you shouldn't have any issues with your landlord.
"Home-brewing is definitely not illegal," Emmink says. "I guess it kind of goes from landlord to landlord. Some might be cooler and some might not," he adds.
Valdmanis hasn't told his landlord about his hobby, not because he's hiding it, but because he doesn't see the need to. It would be kind of like asking for permission to make pot roast for Sunday dinner, he says.
Stranak's landlord, however, is in the know.
"During one of my early brews using the stove, the landlord stopped by for a rent cheque. We talked about how to brew beer, how much it costs and I think he recognized that I knew what I was doing and that it is not dangerous. I assured him that home-brewing beer is no more dangerous than making soup or making tea and certainly not illegal," Stranak says. "People might be surprised by how accepting landlords can be if their concerns can be assuaged, in part by the brewer's skill and knowledge of their craft."
Toronto Star