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The 10 Types of Craft Beer Drinkers

May 23, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

With an ever-increasing selection of high-quality beers available, well, pretty much everywhere, craft beer enthusiast are experiencing an age of taste enlightenment, a malt and hops renaissance clad in glass, bearing colorful, cleverly labeled heraldry. With so many options, it was inevitable that drinkers and drinking habits would naturally stratify, form groups based on behaviors and preferences and concentrations of alpha acids. I give you, distilled from the hot mash of beer culture, the ten archetypal craft beer drinkers. For the record, I’m some kind of mix between #4 and #9.

(Side note: I used the pronouns “he” and “his” for simplicity only, and am by no means suggesting this is a male-only thing. We’ll just assume that “guy” in this context is as gender malleable as “dude.” Everyone is a dude, male or female or equine or mythological.)

1. The Local

This guy drinks beer brewed in his home state, and maybe the bordering few states, exclusively. He’s a champion of the local craft scene, often espousing the local nanobrew that is climbing in popularity in a new brewpub two towns over or announcing what seasonals his favorite nearby brewery will be shipping out next. He doesn’t scoff at great beer from other places, but given the option, he’ll say “think locally, f*ck globally” every time. You can’t really be mad at him for it either; he’s a catalyst for brewing progress, keeping the smaller brew pubs alive, supporting the system at the roots, nourishing all those little guys with precious praise and dollars.

2. The Old Faithful

This guy has worked the same job for ten plus years, orders the same meal every time he goes to that same restaurant, and to absolutely no one’s surprise, always drinks the same beer every weekend from the comfort of a well-worn chair. It’s usually something pretty good: an IPA from an established brewery or a modern, well executed lager. But, like an old man stuck firmly in a rocking chair at a retirement home lamenting how the world “used to be,” he gets grumpy and dismissive if someone suggests he tries something new. He’ll likely drink that beer until he dies, or until the brewery goes under, at which point he’ll try to find a beer exactly like it which may be the only time in his life that he tries new beers.

3. The Critic

This guy is a roiling mess of negativity, who despite having downed some of the best beer in existence, cannot seem to say anything good about any beers. His rampant criticism of anything and everything beer related makes the people around him wonder if he actually likes beer at all, or if he just really likes to talk about how much he doesn’t like beer. He’s not uneducated, often correctly pointing out faults like over-hopping, high acidity, off flavors, and weak malt backbones. He’s probably tried more beers than most people who claim to “love/adore/admire” craft beer. But no one has ever seen him actually enjoying a beer. The day he does, the universe might implode.

4. The Appraiser

This guy is the antithesis of The Critic, who, despite tasting some stuff that a man stumbling through the desert dying of thirst would reject and wave off, loves pretty much everything that passes his lips. Even beers that could potentially be toxic or cause a severe allergic reaction; even bizarre beers, like that homebrewed rutabaga porter he tried last week; even beers that are stored and served in screw top two liter Mountain Dew bottles are OK in this guy’s world. If the beer really does taste awful, he’ll find something else to compliment, like the labeling or cool off-curlean blue of the bottle cap. When his drinking buddies say, “How can you drink this shit? Tastes like Scotch tape mixed with pureed owl pellets!” he’ll respond with, “Yea, a little bit I guess. But it’s definitely not the worst I’ve thing I’ve ever had!”

5. The Clueless One

This guy really wants to be part of the craft beer wave, really wants to fit in with all his friends at the bar on a Friday night as they take turns sipping from a sampler, but the combination of an unsophisticated palate and a possible learning disability keeps him from grasping the finer nuances of good beer. He’ll often ask, attempting to look beer-literate, if a lager is a pale ale, or if a stout is a hefeweizen. He means well, and seems to enjoy his beer, but can’t for the life of him keep styles or breweries straight. He once correctly identified an IPA and now that is all he will order, partly out of fear that people will realize he has no idea what he’s talking about, partly because he’s proud he finally got one right.

6. The Flavor Finder

This guy could be also be named “The Bullshitter.” His ability to identify flavors – many of which were not intentionally added to the brew – borders on paranormal. He’ll sniff at the settling head of an IPA and make verbal note of the subtle wafts of “raspberry, turmeric, and waffle batter.” He’ll take a sip and, swirling his tongue around his mouth, ask if you noticed the way the hops created “a dirty, rusty flavor” but “in a good way” then point out how the finish is like “molten cashews, cooked over a fire of pine needles and Brazilian rosewood.” The dude will claim to taste things humans can’t physically taste, like passion and eccentricity. If he is really tasting all of this stuff, there might be something really, really wrong with his tongue. Or maybe he’s about to have a stroke. No one knows.

7. The Beer Snob

Everyone knows one of these guys, the person not just happy to crack and pour and drink his beer, that guy who cannot control the urge to explain why the beers he drinks are vastly superior to the beers you drink. He’d never be caught dead with something less than 9.5% ABV, somehow equating alcohol content to quality. If it’s not a double or triple or Imperial version, he won’t even consider drinking it, as it is clearly below his refined tastes and standards. He spends his free time on BeerAdvocate and RateBeer writing short, overly-harsh and condescending reviews, always adding the note, “it’s no Old Rasputin” to the end of each. No one really likes this guy, but he thinks he’s doing the beer-drinking community a favor by ranting about the “impurity of large scale brewing” whenever he can.

8. The Beer Snob Snob

This guy has gotten all meta and is snobby about how snobby the beer snobs snob. He is the counter-culture backlash against the condescension that permeates the beer world, falling back on non-craft beers with lots of folk lore, like Pabst Blue Ribbon and National Bohemian. He wears square rimmed glasses, porkpie hats, and too-tight pants. This guy isn’t actually into beer for the sake of the beer, he just really, really likes to annoy people and say the word “irony” a lot. As soon as good beer isn’t cool anymore, it won’t be cool to like bad beer, which means it won’t be ironic to like any beer at all, and this guy will fade into mismatched, dub-step thumping obscurity.

9. The Comparer

This guy can’t help but compare the beer he’s currently drinking to every other beer he’s ever drunk. The first words out of his mouth after a virgin sip of a new (to him) brew, are always, “Hmm, this reminds me of…” It’s his mission to compile a mental database of every beer ever, to create connections between breweries, to be a walking, talking reference encyclopedia of craft beer. He’s actually great to have around if you’re trying to find new beers of a certain style to try, but otherwise his incessant obsession with categorization and beer hierarchy make him tough to hang out with. Never, ever, under any circumstance, unless you need to kill two or three hours, ask this guy what his favorite beer is. Trust me on that one.

10. The Brewbie

The new guy! The excited guy! The guy who just tried his first Stone Ruination IPA and just can’t stop talking about it! A new craft beer fan is born in the maternity wards of brewpubs every Friday night. This guy is usually overly enthusiastic, recommending every person try every beer ever, even if they’re underage, not a beer fan, or not even a human. He’ll go on about how IPAs are his favorite, no ambers, no pilsners, no stouts, no IPAs again; drunk on the new breadth of styles and flavors he’s just discovered, and also the beer itself. This guy tends to drink too much out of excitement, not realizing that his new beau is a good 2 or 3 or 5% ABV higher than the stuff he was drinking in college. No one gets mad when he gets a little out of hand though. His zeal and excitement remind us of ourselves when we first took a sip of that beer that turned casual drinker into enthusiast, and turned beer into art.

“Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer.” -Arnold Schwarzenegger

Craft and Draft: Writing and White Lightning

April 24, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Some of the Jungian Collective Unconscious must have slithered into my brain on that day, about three years ago, when I was trying to come up with a name for this blog. I like to think I named this blog in the way most people name blogs: I randomly came up with something alliterative, convinced myself it was clever, gloated to myself about how clever it was, and then registered the domain.

But in choosing this name, I inadvertently formed a tributary that emptied into those ancient streams of whiskey, and tapped into a keg of ideas bigger than this little blog. I never really considered its meaning, all the latent unspoken truth in two words and a conjunction, until I’d been writing for a while. I never noticed that connection between writing and drinking that dripped into every post, my running themes, and my entire literary life.

We all know that m any famous writers, historically, drank. Many current writers drink. Many unborn masters of literary prose, still swirling in the cosmic well of zygotes and potential, will drink. Alcohol is as natural as wanting to express and communicate ideas. As long as yeast eats sugar and paper eats ink, writers will drink and drinkers will write.

I drink. Not exactly a shock to anyone who reads this blog or knows me otherwise. In the harsh light of reality I probably drink too much, if you compared my intake to the recommendations of doctors, Surgeon Generals, or Mormons. But I don’t drink to dull any emotional pain, for there is very little pain in my life to dull. I don’t drink to escape an unfair world in which I have no control, for I’ve worked hard to be in control of my life.

I drink because I like the taste of alcohol. Ale, wine, whiskey, rum, et al. I’ve gotten to a point where “beer” is probably my favorite flavor. It really has nothing to do with the alcohol content, but more so with injecting my palette with pleasurable experience. I’d gnaw on beer flavored gum if it was available and wouldn’t get me fired for drinking (or chewing) on the job. I’ve eaten “energy bars” made from spent beer grain. I even pop hops into my mouth while I’m homebrewing, nibbling on pellets or chomping on cones.

But I also drink to experience an ephemeral connection to something older, something external myself. A fleeting glance at the infinite. A forbidden communion with greater truth that we pay for with a hangover. A way throw my brain out into the same world as Joyce and Hemingway and Poe, to see what they saw, to figure out why they were looking in the first place. In the same way many people pray to find their gods, to ascertain certain truths, to understand their lives and the universe, I genuflect at the altar of the nature deity, CH₃CH₂OH.

Glass in One Hand, Pen in the Other

What makes alcohol special? There are many other ways to alter one’s mind if that’s the goal: meditation, prayer, marijuana, mushrooms, opiates, exercise. But all of those things are hard to do while writing. Every tried to write while jogging? Believe me, it doesn’t work like you’d hope. A lot of other drugs require both hands or complete focus for a period of time, during which you can’t write. Alcohol sits and waits for you. It doesn’t mind that you’re neglecting it while typing away. It is your passive, quiet friend at the back of the party who you haven’t talked to for 2 hours, but who will still toss you a beer from the cooler when he sees you heading his way.

In addition to being legal and relatively cheap in most places, alcohol lends itself well to the physical aspects of the writing process. It takes time to form a good paragraph, craft a good metaphor, just like it takes time to tame a good single malt, to savor a good IPA. The glass goes down as the word count goes up. There is a direct connection between an increase in productivity and a decrease in liquid.

When you stop to take a moment to reread or to think of your next transition, you can take a sip, let the beer or wine or spirit lubricate the rusty metal of those mental gears. And then just as quickly as you picked the glass up it is back down, your fingers back on the keyboard, the next step in the delicate waltz of clicking and sipping.

And just like an idea takes time to congeal, to fully form into something effective and readable, the alcohol slowly, methodically creeps into your mind. Opiates and cannaboids hit your brain quickly and unforgivingly; you’ll go from sober to stoned too quickly for even your most energetic ideas to keep up. But alcohol, no, it is patient. It lets your ideas sprout wings as the buzz rolls in. You get drunk on creativity and the booze itself, nearly at the same time, as long as you’re not downing shots and shotgunning beers like a Frat boy during Greek Week.

Two sides, same coin

Those artistic types who drink, who appreciate the craft in equal balance with the crunk, seem to fall into two categories. The writers who drink to drown their demons, hide them from the world, and the writers who drink to let the demons loose, free them from their midnight cages.

The prior are the kinds of people who live on the teetering edge of debilitating stress. The kind who stagger down a fine, fine line between wanting and needing. These people constantly wage a war against their pasts, trying to forget or make sense of those unfair events, using alcohol as a way to quiet the manic buzz of painful history darting around their mind for just a minute so that they can create.

If you are like this, you’re in good company: James Joyce was a ball of neurosis, likening his favorite white wine to the lightning he feared. Tennessee Williams knocked back more than his fair share, trying to confront his sexuality in a time when such things were kept well behind closed closet doors.

But for every head there is a tail. The latter kind of writer embraces the blur, loves the lack of inhibition that comes from the warm and fuzzy ethanol bloat. These writers (including the one you’re reading right now) include the booze-fairy among their muses, letting the scents and bubbles and lacing mingle with and taint their pool of metaphors. These people find inspiration in the bottle and the bottom, often letting their minds wander into unexplored landscapes while firmly holding the hand of inebriation, discovering things they probably wouldn’t have in the harsh burn of a sober morning.

If you’re one of these writers, you’re likely to meet Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Faulker, and a ton of other famous writers who weren’t shy about their drinking habits, whenever you finally make it to that mead-filled greathall in Vallhalla.

Cursed Blessing

Disclaimer! It is not healthy to drink heavily. In fact it’s quite unhealthy if science is to be believed. Excessive drinking also leads to crappy writing, mainly because your fingers hit all the wrong keys and your eyes can’t really see the screen. Alcohol is a power that should be treated with respect, lest it consume you as you consume it. My father passed an adage on to me some years ago, a clever warning about the dangers of that one last beer: “The man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, and the drink takes the man.”

There is a weird pervasive attitude in the world of art that a person must have a screwed up past or some ravenous personal demons to be successful. It sometimes goes as far as to suggest that the alcohol or drugs or other addictions were the reason for the success. They cite the great artists and authors, point out that some of the most perfect art was created by some of the most broken people. They claim the best memoir is built from a horrible childhood, and the best canvases are covered in just as much blood as paint.

I’m gonna have to go ahead and call bullshit on that. There are any number of successful people who lived either decidedly plain or otherwise happy lives. Like Erik Larson or David Sedaris or David Quammen. They still have plenty to say, wonderfully fresh ideas, and enjoy abundant, well-deserved respect.

Pain isn’t necessary. Helpful? Sure, maybe, for some people. Mandatory? Nah dude.

Alcohol is just another experience out there. One that a lot of creative types turn too, probably out of ease and access and history. One that can be fun or awful, that can enhance or destroy. It’s up to you as a person and an artist to decide how or when or if to use it. But remember to be reasonable. No one writes well hungover.

Remember Hemingway’s immortal words:

Write drunk, edit sober.

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
-Hunter S. Thompson

Guest Post: How to Drink like a Writer – Find a Bar and Move In

April 22, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

This week, to honor the name of my blog, I’ll be talking about drinking, writing, drinking while writing, writing while drinking, and maybe even writing about drinking while drinking and writing. To that end, Ed from The Dogs of Beer has written a post about the history of writers, their haunts, and their drinks. If you’d like to write a guest post for LitLib, send an email with your ideas to literatureandlibation@gmail.com. Enjoy!

You can see why we call him, “Big Head Dog”.

Hello everyone! My name is Ed Morgan and I write a little craft beer blog called The Dogs of Beer. I’ve been writing for almost two years now, focusing mainly on the craft beer scene in and around the state of Delaware but at the end of the day, I’ll write about anything that strikes a chord with me. I’m aided in this endeavor by my girlfriend’s dog Gryphon (AKA “Big Head Dog”), who serves as photo and layout editor. Say hello to Oliver’s readers, Gryph.

When Oliver asked me to write a guest post for his blog, I have to admit that I was a little hesitant. After all, if you’re a regular here at Literature and Libation you know that above all else, this is a blog about writing, and that Oliver is a writer. I, however count among my literary achievements such things as believing that over the past year I’ve used semi-colons properly no less than 5 times. However, I’m sure that Oliver would counsel me that taking oneself out of one’s writing “comfort zone” is what all writers should do on occasion, and when he suggested I write a post about writers and drinking, I have to admit I was pretty keen on the idea.

I’m well aware that alcohol has long been a muse for artistic people. The love affair between the once banned Absinthe and the creative likes of Vincent Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is well documented. Many rock musicians have turned to alcohol thinking that it will heighten their creativity, sadly sometimes with deadly consequences. But musicians and artists are not unique when it comes to turning to alcohol. Writers too have had a fondness for drink and one of the things I’ve always found interesting in my travels and in my reading are the establishments themselves that have been made famous by association.

For instance, the Eagle & Child in Oxford, England, for all intents and purposes might have been nothing more than an unassuming local English pub, if it had not become famous for hosting the “Inklings;” a literary group that met every Tuesday morning in the Rabbit Room. The group was run by two Oxford locals: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Pete’s Tavern, in New York City, can lay claim to being a regular haunt for writer William Sydney Porter who, under the pen name O. Henry, wrote some of America’s most endearing stories including The Ransom of Red Chief and The Gift of the Magi. The tavern embraces this by advertising itself as “The Tavern O’Henry Made Famous”, and still maintains “The O’Henry Table”. While statements that The Gift of the Magi was written in the tavern are suspect, O’Henry did use the tavern (named Healy’s when O’Henry lived in NYC) as an inspiration for Kenealy’s Tavern that appears in his story, The Lost Blend.

And of course any Jimmy Buffett fan is familiar with Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, Florida, a popular haunt for Ernest Hemingway. The bar (which now sits on Duval Street after owner Joe Russell moved it there after refusing to pay a rent increase from $3 a week to $4) originally sat at the location now occupied by Captain Tony’s Saloon and was Hemingway’s preferred drinking stop when he lived in Key West. At the time however, the name of the bar was The Silver Slipper, which Hemingway hated, claiming it wasn’t “manly” enough. He badgered Russell to change it and Sloppy Joe’s was born.

Yes, the association between writers and their favorite watering holes can be pretty strong. So strong in fact, that cities like London, Dublin, and New York have literary tours that allow you to walk around and visit some of the establishments that writers have held so dear. But sadly, some bars, taverns and pubs have become associated with writers for the gravest of reasons.

When ever I go to NYC and step into The White Horse Tavern, I’m reminded of Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas, author of such classics as Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight and, And Death Shall Have No Dominion. Although his death in November of 1953 was largely due to complications of pneumonia, the use of alcohol has always been cited as a contributing factor. It doesn’t help quell these claims when only 6 days earlier, Thomas was seen stumbling out of the White Horse loudly claiming, “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record!” Years later in her autobiography, Dylan’s wife Caitlin would write, “But ours was a drink story, not a love story, just like millions of others. Our one and only true love was drink”

One can no longer walk into the Harbour Lights Bar in Dublin, Ireland but if you could, it probably would be practically impossible not to get a lesson on Irish writer Brendan Behan. Writer of Borstal Boy, an autobiographical account of Behan’s days in a Borstal prison due to his involvement in the IRA, and Hold Your Hour and Have Another, Behan may not be a household name to people outside the writing world. But he was an important figure in Ireland, and well known for his drinking. He’s credited with being the writer to first describe himself as “a drinker with a writing problem” and is the subject of The Pogues’ song Streams of Whiskey. One night, Behan collapsed while drinking at the Harbour Lights Bar and died later at MeathHospital from what’s been called “complications due to alcoholism and diabetes.”

I had been to the Fell’s Point, Baltimore, institution The Horse You Rode In On for a few drinks and some great live music on many occasions before I learned of it’s connection to the great Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s exploits are legendary and probably well known by those who read Oliver’s blog. But some of the greatest mysteries left to us by the father of the modern detective story are the details surrounding his death. Poe was discovered, delirious, on the streets of Baltimore on Oct 3, 1849, in clothes that weren’t his and never regained enough awareness to say what happened to him before dying on Oct 7. People have argued many theories on the cause of his death; include delirium tremens, syphilis, tuberculosis, cooping, and even rabies. But what everyone does agree on is that the bar, “The Horse” was the last place he was seen before being discovered on the 3rd.

I’m sure one of the reasons Oliver asked me to write this post was to share my own personal thoughts on writing and drinking. Let’s start out by saying that the chances of me ever making a bar famous by dropping dead in it are very slim, however since I do write a beer blog, it’s easy to assume that for me the two go hand in hand. Well, that’s not quite true. When I’m writing a beer review I do like to be drinking the beer I’m reviewing. This gives me the ability to think about and capture what I’m experiencing in real time and make sure I’m not leaving out any important details that might be forgotten later.

However, what I’ve learned is that drinking and writing is a slippery slope for me, just like drinking and playing music. When I was playing in pick up bands there was an amount of alcohol that would calm the stage jitters and make me play with confidence. And then there was the amount of alcohol that turned my fretboard finesse into the inept clawing of a cloven ox. And what I found to be true back then is that the difference between those two amounts of alcohol was very small.

So in writing, a few beers are nice to relax the mind and get the creative juices flowing, but it doesn’t take much more to cause me to turn out 700 words that look like I typed it with my face on a keyboard where the Z, G, and P keys are stuck. Of course some would suggest that it’s not all bad, that at least the basic framework is there and all I need to do is clean it up later when I’m more lucid. But you writers out there know that poorly written paragraphs are like “fix-it-up” houses. Some you can do something with it, and then with others it’s best to just bulldoze the whole thing and start from scratch. And since I do that enough when I’m sober, I chose to put the keyboard down whenever I feel that familiar buzz taking over my brain.

I guess you could say that when it comes to writing, alcohol is my muse, but not necessarily always my friend.

I’d like to thank Oliver for allowing me to guest post on his blog. To show my appreciation, knowing that Oliver is a cat person, I’d like to share a couple pictures my girlfriend and I recently took at the Ernest Hemingway house in Key West, Florida. Hemingway was a well known lover of polydactyl cats and his house, now a museum, plays home to 45 decedents of his cat, Snowball. The cats have the full run of the estate, as shown by this picture of one of the cats calmly lying on a bed that visitors are not allowed to touch.

Ah Gryphon, the cat picture please?

Yeah, that’s not the picture I took. What’s your problem?

I know we have an unspoken “no cat rule” at the Dogs of Beer, but we’re doing a guest post for Oliver and I think he’d like to see some of the photos I took of the Hemingway cats. So could you just put up the picture I took of the cat relaxing on the bed, please?

Ok, this isn’t funny. You’re embarrassing me. Please put the picture up or you and I are going to have a major problem. I’d keep in mind that you’re still young enough for me to have you neutered. Last chance fur ball, put up the picture!

Thank you. Now was that so hard? The cats have four full time attendants and receive a vet visit every Wednesday. And as you can see by the happy expression on this cat, they really appreciate how well they’re taken care of.

I hate you.

How to Homebrew: Back to Basics

January 14, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

In honor of my first batch of all-grain beer, this week on LitLib is all about homebrewing!

I fell into my homebrewing hobby as a side effect of growing up in a household that consumed and appreciated a lot of alcohol. My dad used to make what I can only call “odd” wine: carrot, rhubarb, banana, and other things you won’t find at the local liquor store. Our basement was a menagerie of white buckets, glass carboys, empty green wine bottles, and a utility sink over flowing with sodium metabisulfite and thick bristled white brushes.

I learned how to brew the same way a kid learns how to use a Q-tip; through a lot of painful trial-and-error. One of my first batches ended up at about 2% alcohol because I added four gallons of water to a single gallon of actual brew. An early batch of English style pale ale had the delicious added flavor of rotten-eggs sulfur because I did the entire main boil with the lid on the pot. I never made anything undrinkable, but I certainly made a lot of beer only its brewer could love.

As my brewing skills slowly evolve, I spend a lot of time poking through homebrewing forums, looking up recipes, learning about proper yeast pitching temperatures, sometimes even stumbling upon a some unexpected pictures of pimped out kegerators. This has given me a pretty broad knowledge of various homebrewing techniques, but I still have yet to find a single, succinct overview of the very basics of brewing.

So I decided to make my own.

In addition to this guide, I am happy to answer any and all questions about the basics of homebrewing in the comments below!

What is homebrewing?

Without sounding dense, homebrewing is brewing that is done at home, without commercial equipment. It usually means brewing on a significantly smaller scale (5-10 gallons as opposed to say, 7,000,000 gallons) with significantly less control and consistency in the final product. It encompasses beer, wine, cider, and any sub-genre therein, but does not include distillation, as that is illegal and should be left to those few (with even fewer teeth) in the Appalachian foothills.

Despite popular belief, homebrewing is pretty safe. There are some minor threats that come from over-filling or over-sugaring, but for the most part, it’s a low risk, high reward hobby. In a poor attempt at humor, Buffalo Wild Wings lampooned home brewers with a less than flattering commercial. The truth is that most homebrew, even the poorly sanitized or drank-too-early, isn’t going to send you to the ER with GI issues.

And if you don’t believe me, believe science! Yeast eats sugar and poops out carbon dioxide and alcohol, which has the added bonus of sterilizing the liquid. Alcohol disrupts the natural equilibrium of water outside of any bacteria cells, killing them as osmosis forcefully pushes water out of the cells to reestablish the balance. Thermodynamics are awesome. The only obvious health concern is mold, which aside from being visible and gross, usually makes the beer so foul tasting that not even the most self-destructive frat boy could stomach enough to make him sick.

So you want to be a home brewer?

First, ask yourself why.

If the answer is to save money on your alcohol, you need a new/better business model. While the ingredients-per-gallon cost is pretty cheap, you have to factor in equipment and opportunity cost. In the long run, you’re not going to save yourself an extraordinary amount of money by making it yourself.

If the answer is to impress your friends, I hope you’re patient. An ale takes on average 3-4 weeks to be ready to drink, where a lager takes 6-8 weeks. Wine of almost any variant takes even longer. Your first few batches won’t likely win any contests either, so it’ll be a while before your friends start greeting you as “Brewmaster.”

If the answer is for fun and because you’re so stubborn you have to try to do everything yourself, then you’re at least temperamentally ready to fire up your boil pot.

What do you mean you don’t understand these words?

Veteran home brewers like to throw around a lot of jargon and hardly ever qualify any of it. It’s like they expect us to figure these things out, as if there were some kind of widely available, magical book that contained definitions of things.

This is list of the things I had to discover on my own, but it is not nearly exhaustive:

Wort (beer) – a mixture of grain sugars and waters that will be fermentted into beer
Must (wine) – the same as wort, but with different sugars, including fruit pulp
Yeast – eukaryotic microorganisms that are obsessed with eating sugar and produce alcohol as a biproduct
Sugar – alcohol is formed in beer and wine based on the amount of added sugars, which are introduced to the brew bia fruit, grain, honey, or other sources
Sparge (beer) – the process of removing sugars from cracked grain using very hot water to create wort
Fermentation – the process of yeast converting sugars into alcohol
Primary fermentation – the initial conversion of the sugar into alcohol after yeast is first introduced to the worst/must
Secondary fermentation – the secondary conversion that removes extra sediment and allows time for the brew to settle/clear/mellow
Priming – adding extra sugar after secondary fermentation to promote carbonation in bottles/kegs/growlers (only applicable if you want to carbonate your beverage)

What will you need?

Before I get into the actual equipment that is necessary, I’m going to point out a few things you should have that often get overlooked by early brewers:

Experience drinking what it is you’re brewing (know, at least roughly, why you like certain styles and what they’re made of)
Basic cooking skills (if you can’t boil water without scalding yourself or manage temperatures on the fly, you’re going to struggle to brew anything)
Upper body strength (seriously, a gallon of liquid weighs about eight pounds, so a five gallon batch will weigh 40+)
Patience, commitment, and persistence (a full brew can take most of a day, and can’t really be hurried)

As for the gear (you can buy all of this stuff online, but be a good member of the community and pick it up at a local homebrew store, if reasonable):

A stove (like the one you usually make pancakes on)
A sink (like the one you usually leave dirty dishes in)
Towels (and not your wife’s good towels; don’t even look at them)
Your ingredients (this is going to vary wildly per type of brew and recipe, think of it as the “food” part of your recipe)

1 x brew boil pot w/lid (large aluminum or stainless steel, 5.5 gallons at minimum)
1 x plastic brew pail (these are the infamous “white buckets” used for primary fermentation – 5.5-6 gallon)
1 x lid for your brew pail (if you seal it, they will brew)
1 x air lock w/rubber bung (there are several styles of air locks, but any will work)
1 x glass carboy (this is for your secondary; the brew will sit and clarify in this)
1 x big metal spoon (for all the stirrin’ you’s gonna be doin’)
1 x container of a no-rinse sanitizer (never use soap, try not to use bleach)
1 x large thermometer (or just get an infrared temperature gun already)
1 x auto-siphon (this will save you a ton of headaches and sticky spill spots on your kitchen floor)
6 x gallons of water (distilled, spring, anything clear and tasty)

You’ll also need bottles, growlers, or a keg for your finished brew, but that’s up to you (as I won’t be including bottling in this overview).

You’ve got all the stuff, now what?

This is a high-level, technical overview of the steps involved in brewing almost anything. Some specialty brews requires steps other than these, but that’s what a recipe is for!

Boil/sanitize your wort/must without the lid on the pot – If you’re brewing beer, you’ll want to bring your wort to a rolling boil in your brew pot. If you’re making a fruit based wine, you don’t need to achieve a full boil just raise the internal temperature to ~175 degrees.
Add any other ingredients – like hops, spices, etc. – while the pre-brew is still hot.
Put the lid on your pot and rapidly cool down the liquid using an ice bath or something similar.
Pour your cooled wort into your primary fermentation vessel.
Stir the wort vigorously to oxygenate the brew, then add your yeast.
Seal your bucket and wait for primary fermentation to finish (the bubbles in your airlock should slow down considerably)
Siphon the brew into your secondary vessel, avoiding any of the settled sediment.
Allow your brew to settle/clarify as per the recipe.
Bottle/keg your brew.
Enjoy!

Clicky for biggy.