But if you are beginning to get excited about the art of making beer at home, not only are you getting into “that zymurgy stuff“, you probably know a few major zymurgists as well. Zymurgy, for the trivia buffs, is the art of fermenting that leads to the production of beer.

There is a lot of fun in the hobby of making beer. Not only is it not a difficult process to learn, it’s rewarding to bring out bottles of rich tasting beer for your family and friends that you made yourself.

And since most batches of home made beer produce five gallon brews, you will have plenty of beer for a small fraction of what you would pay for commercial beer.

But there is another level of fun about becoming an amateur brewer and that comes from discovering this whole new world of other brewers who are out there spreading the gospel of home brewing far and wide. The network of people who love to brew their own beer is extensive and well organized.

What is Zymurgy?

Zymurgy is actually an international passion that goes back for thousands of years and reaches into just about every society. So by now as you begin to just discover the huge social world of brew makers, you are going to be amazed at the diversity and size of this culture that has existed right under your all this time.

The first group you should become a part of to become connected to the larger world of home brewing is the American Homebrewers Association. They operate interesting, informative and up to date web sites about home brewing at http://www.beertown.org/ba/index.html.

One of the best things you will discover on the AHA’s web site is a list of upcoming home brewing events all around the country. The odds are that somewhere in your geographic area there is an event being planed to bring home brewing enthusiasts like you together to trade methods, share recipes and generally celebrate this exciting hobby together.

As soon as you get connect to the AHA’s web site, your knowledge of beer making and the amount of information that is available to you will go through the roof. In fact, you will no doubt quickly want to get the AHA’s bimonthly magazine coming your way. Not surprisingly, that magazine is called Zymurgy.

Through Zymurgy magazine and by surfing beertown.org, you will also find out about special days set aside just to celebrate the big community of home beer enthusiasts such as National Homebrew Day held the first Saturday in May.

Congress actually set aside this day to celebrate the love of home brewing. No doubt a few senators and congressmen brew up their own blend at home as well.

Along with publications and festivals, there are regular beers brewing competitions you can keep up to date on through the AHA and through local affiliates as well. These competitions are great fun but you may feel timid about entering your newest beer concoction to be judged.

But it’s all in fun and by striving to make your brew genuine competition quality, it just makes the excitement you already have for home brewing even more fun and engaging between contests.

But perhaps the greatest service the national organization can be to you is to point you to local contacts to help you move along more quickly in developing your love of home brewing. This is the kind of networking you need to find the best local brewing supply shops so you can get stocked up on the grains, malts and hops you will need to make your next big batch of home made beer.

But more importantly, you can connect with the home brewers association in your own community and become part of this very active and fun loving community.

And as you learn the insider tricks and taste their blends, you will move along much more quickly toward making your own beer that will really taste the way you want it to.

So get out there and have some fun with people who love home brewing just like you do. You will never regret it.

Unlike the government, we can’t print up money so anything we can do to cut costs without giving up quality of life is a good move.

And if quality of life includes having a nice tasting brew every so often, well then there is definitely something we can do and maybe you are already starting to do that is not only great fun but a very good cost cutting move for you.

Here are the three great benefits of home brewing:

The great thing about taking up home brewing that you get three great benefits all in one great hobby.

First you get a new passion in your life that will keep you busy and learning a side of beer making that you never knew could be so fascinating.

Second, you inherit an entire society of fascinating people who are zealots for this hobby and life style of home brewing.

And finally, once you get set up with the brewing equipment and learn the “ropes” of beer home brewing, you can make beer that is 100 times better than anything you can get at the liquor store or in a restaurant.

But you can make it for a tiny percentage of what you would pay for retail beer, which is inferior to yours anyway.

The great thing about home brewing that in addition to all these benefits, home brewing really is not difficult to learn how to make great beer right at home. It will take some effort and a bit of study or coaching to learn how to use the equipment and what ingredients to buy and store.

But because the ingredients are easy and abundant to get, you can set up to make literally gallons of beer for a very small investment. So on top of great fun, that’s just sensible economics.

One great way to get some help with home brewing process and make it even more fun is to learn to make beer with a group of friends. You can split the costs and make it even more economical. And each of you can and pool your knowledge, your learning and your talents to make each batch of beer better than the last one.

Because the process of brewing involves several steps, you need that patience and understanding of the brewing process to do it right. And having friends in the brewing process, each one can be watching for steps that need to be taken.

Then when the beer enters the fermentation stage and what you all need is patience not to break into the beer and drink it before its time, you can be a support group to be willing to wait for it because you know how good it will be.

This support group can also be very helpful to be patient if that first batch of beer is not entirely perfect. But you know there are ways to get better. So, by being faithful with your learning, joining with other beer brewing lovers around your town, you can and will get better quickly.

But the other value of working together with good friends is that you can eventually get a feel for how much beer you will make with each batch and how much each of you will use in a period of time.

Then you can time the brewing sessions so you may even have multiple batches in various stages of completion and coming into use at just the right times so you never have to go to the liquor store again. You will have taken control of this one part of your economy by making your own beer so it’s a cost you can control, unlike gasoline.

Part of the function of home brewing contests and being part of your local brewers club is that you get those tips and learn from the old pros at brewing so month by month and year by year, your beer gets better and better.

Here are the things that the real beer making gurus should know:

One important thing that the real beer making gurus know is what great chefs know and that is the quality of beer comes down to the freshness of the ingredients you use. One area you can improve on freshness is with the yeast you use for fermentation.

Dry yeast is simply not as fresh as liquid yeast so that is where one small change can dramatically affect the freshness of your beer.

Use this same approach with the grains, the hops and all the perishable ingredients that you need for a quality home brewed batch of beer.

But just as even if you buy fresh flour for bread, you freeze it to delay it getting stale and use proper refrigeration for all of your brewing ingredients. First of all, only buy the ingredients when the day you are going to brew is very near.

And use as much as you can up in one batch. You will get a natural instinct for how much of each ingredient you need for a single run of brewing and eventually get to where you can buy enough, use it up the next day with little or no left over and in that way always be brewing with absolutely fresh ingredients.

But even then, make some room in your freezer and refrigerator to slow down the aging of the things that make up your beer. Grains and yeast can go in the refrigerator and the rest in the freezer for a short time. Use your ingredients up quickly. Don’t stock pile.

Temperature control is a central issue with all home brewing gurus who seek absolute control over the quality of their product. That first step of brewing which is the boiling of the grains and hops to make up the “wort” is a heat intensive operation.

But once the time of your boiling phase is done, bring the temperature of the wort down very quickly. By dropping the temperature from boiling to cooler temperature at a very fast pace, you will reduce the contaminations in your beer and your final product will have a vastly better clarity which is a sign of a great beer.

This is one little trick of the trade that may take some effort and maybe even specialized equipment like an immersion chiller for your wort but it will be worth it in the quality of beer that results.

Keeping the temperature of your finished beer constantly under control during fermentation is also a central issue with beer making gurus to make sure their beer is of the highest quality. If you are a devoted home brewer and want to buy a refrigerator just to devote to fermentation, which would be the best situation because you could carefully control the temperature.

But there are other methods many home brewers use to assure their fermenting beer says at a steady temperature. You can select the best spot in the house where the beer will remain relatively cool all day.

Then wrap the fermenter up using wet towels and then put a fan on the wrapped beer. This uses the humidity of the water and the coolness that comes from the fan to keep the beer in the best possible environment to create truly great tasting beer.

From shopping for new equipment and ingredients, to cleaning and preparation to boiling the wort to cooling and preparing for fermentation, it’s a fun process. And that is what you want from a great hobby.

But once you have used all of your skills (so far) to make great worth that is ready to ferment and age, storing and waiting for that process to finish seems to take forever. If this is one of your first batches or if you tried a new grain or hops, you are eager to see how good the beer will taste.

And you are eager to serve ice cold home made beer to friends and family. But you also know that if you break in and interrupt the process too soon, the beer you drink will be unsatisfactory and not nearly as rich and flavorful as how it will be when the aging process is done. So you wait, sometimes impatiently.

Process of fermentation:

One way to continue enjoying the “fun part” of home brewing is to have fresh batches of beer in production each week. If you went that route, you would eventually end up with a lot of beer in various stages of fermentation and aging and you would have to date and mark the storage bottles so you know which beer is ready to use and which needs more time to reach maturity.

And when you consider that an average minimum size of a home beer brewing cycle results in five gallons of beer, which can mean you will have a lot of finished beer around unless you have a big audience of beer drinkers to help you drink up the stuff.

The time between when beer is bottled after the brewing process is complete until it is ready to taste can be anywhere from six weeks to six months if you include both fermentation and aging. The actual aging process is pretty fascinating and understanding it helps you develop patience for nature to take its course.

During fermentation, the yeast will work to change the structure of the sugar that was part of the brewing process. As the fermentation continues, carbon dioxide is created and this gives your beer that bubbly quality that is a big part of the appeal of the beverage.

Fermentation also pushes sediments from the yeast and proteins and these sediments would hurt the taste of your beer if the cycle were interrupted. It’s worth it to let the process naturally cure the beer so these unwanted byproducts naturally work their way out of the finished product.

It does take a lot of patience to be a brewer, even a home brewer because allowing the aging process to produce perfect beer may take over a month or even longer. But this waiting is just as much a part of making great beer as the boiling and fermenting so you have to nurture the patient side of yourself to get a great outcome.

Part of your preparation for brewing is preparing a place for your beer to be housed in optimum conditions for fermentation to work its magic. As opposed to perhaps your impression before you became a home brewer, you will not store the beer in the refrigerator during this phase because colder temperatures actually stop the fermentation process. That is why you keep milk in there.

Instead plan to set up a “fermentation room” that will stay at a constant cool temperature between 65 and 75 degrees any time of the year. This should be a room where you can achieve some temperature control so the beer stays in a stable environment to reach a perfect flavor.

FermeIt is also a room you won’t feel the need to go to and interrupt the fermentation process. You can draw some of the beer out as early as 4 weeks from the start of fermentation. But for the best possible taste for your beer, you should give fermentation process two to four months for adequate aging.

And even if that beer is good, it’s easy to start to suspect that you could do as well making beer and that your beer would be perfectly fresh and would cost a lot less than ten dollars a glass to

Enjoy this flavor all the time. When that thought crossed your mind, the home brewer in you is born.

The community of beer lovers is very large as documented in the huge beer sales that stay consistent around the world. That is why it is almost a shame and a crime when beer is mass produced and bad beer is sold so widely. It’s a crime because it is so easy to make really good beer with use of beer making kits.

Using a good beer making kit:

If you have that desire to enjoy the finest of this ancient recipe and maybe crossing the line to want to be a maker of great beer, you will find that getting started on this great hobby with use of beer making kit is far easier than you may have thought.

And yes while you will have to learn a few things about the process of making beer, it will be more fun than any class you took in high school for sure because you are learning to make something you love and you get to drink your final exam!

Unlike school though, once you get down the basic process of home brewing, the variety of “right answers” to how to make a great beer with beer making kits are diverse and fun to play with. You can try different grains, hops and yeast combinations.

You can adjust when each ingredient is added and learn how to balance the bitter flavor with the hops flavor to give you a deep rich blend or a light beer and all using the same beer making kit and much the same ingredients.

So, with that enticement to the fun and endless variety you can find in a hobby of home brewing, it’s just a matter of getting started with the use of good beer making kit.

It’s very easy to fall under the influence of “beer purists” who will advocate very expensive and complicated beer making kits and using exotic ingredients to make a beer of very high quality and taste.

If you make it a practice to socialize at the home brewing retailer or at home brewing clubs or web sites, it’s easy to pick up that side of the home brewing community that is very particular and advanced in the craft of home brewing.

But it is important to remember that just starting out that you are not a home brewing purist yet! And its best not to try to be one because starting out, it is best to let others help you, get some very basic beer making kit so you can learn the craft of home brewing and develop your skills easily and without so much pressure.

If you spend thousands on very elaborate and hard to operate beer making kit too soon, you will be frustrated and if the outcome is not just right, you will be disappointed. So cut yourself some slack and buy just the basics and just learn to make a very down to earth starter batch of beer with good beer making kit.

If it is drinkable at all after you step through the process a few times, you are doing great. And you have all the time in the world to learn your craft and grow until you can afford to be a “beer purist” and be fussy and particular too.

So don’t be ashamed to buy a basic beer making kit at the beer retailer store or online to get you started. Beer making kits come with all you need in equipment and supplies to step through making your first few batches of beer.

It’s important you give yourself the time to use starter beer making kits to learn your basic skills. Then once you have the basics, it will be great fun to buy different types of grains, hops and yeasts and experiment to refine your skills. That is a natural way to learn and away to become along time beer making enthusiasts and enjoy this wonderful hobby for many years to come.

The process of making beer at home isn’t really a mystery. That is one of the reasons that making beer at home has become so popular.

Because you can get set up for making beer at home with a relatively low investment in equipment and ingredients, it’s easy to get started on making beer of your own.

And when you finish that first batch of making beer and it is stored away to be sampled in a few weeks, the excitement that you soon will be drinking your own beer is a unique feeling and one you want to repeat often.

Once you have confirmed that you can indeed make beer, the next question comes up is – can you make good beer? When you tasted that first batch of making beer, you were pretty excited because it really was beer. But you may have noticed some aspects of the beer you would like to improve.

The beer may have been too bitter or have too strong a hops flavor. The clarity of the beer may have been imperfect or you could see stuff floating around in your beer.

But these flaws are acceptable at first because they drive you to want to become a better beer maker. You want your beer to be so flavorful and enjoyable to drink that your guests say it is as good as or better than store bought beer and that it even lives up to the quality at the local beer pub.

Here are the tricks of the trade for making beer:

That’s a tall order but part of the fun of making beer at home is to strive for those goals. To get there, some of the tricks that the old pros of home brewing know will help a lot. Some of their wisdom can help you move from a rookie beer maker into the ranks of people and actually know what they are doing.

Most recipes for making beer at home call for making a batch of five gallons of beer. That’s a lot of beer. So, sometimes home brewers try to cut the batch to make less beer. It’s done with good intent. It’s hard to store five gallons of beer.

And if you don’t drink your own beer up pretty fast (or give it away), the beer can go stale or bad, which is hard to see watch happen to “your” beer. But old pros tell us don’t cut the batch and go ahead and make beer up five gallons at a time. You need that quantity to get the full value out of the process of making beer.

And it’s hard to adjust the recipes for a smaller batch, which means that there is a good chance you will end up with a beer that does not have the right balance of malt, hops and yeast. The outcome can be a beer that is difficult or impossible to drink and it all gets thrown out. Better to make five gallons of good beer than three gallons of undrinkable brew.

The more you study and learn about making beer, the better you will become at home brewing. Don’t just go from the instructions that come with the beer brewing equipment. Sink your teeth into learning all you can. Making beer will benefit from the homework you do. And you will have more fun too in making beer.

Just as it’s not advisable to cut the size of any batch of home made beer you produce, also avoid cutting corners in terms of time or clean up. Sometimes it seems that boiling the beer in progress, which is called the “wort” for an hour to an hour and a half, seems like a lot.

But the long boiling time helps the ingredients mesh in just the right way. It also boils off bad elements of the mixture that you don’t want in the beer and it brings out the flavors of the malt, the grains and the hops so you are getting the best of those ingredients.

Finally, don’t be worried about being too fussy about cleanliness. Keeping your boiling pots and fermentation tanks absolutely clean and sterile assures that nothing will get into the beer except that pure wort that you so carefully brewed. So, go ahead and be fussy. The beer you make will be better if you are.

That instinct may come from watching an “old pro” at home brewing working his or her own elaborate set up to make some great beer.

So, naturally when you start learning how to brew beer at home yourself, you want to strive for the best, which is to make beer as good as the old pros make. But the instinct to over commit should be resisted.

The home brewing industry is a big one and it has gotten much more able to support new recruits to this exciting hobby and passion to get you just what you need when you need it.

And if you go out and spend a fortune on home brewing kit that is just not right for you starting out, not only can you get frustrated but if your love of home brewing doesn’t “stick”, you can end up feeling badly about such a huge investment.

So, as is true of a lot of hobbies, its best to start out slow, use some very basic “starter home brewing kits” and get a few batches of beer under your belt and grow from there.

Things you need to know about home brewing kit:

That is where getting started with a home brewing kit is a good move. In that way, with one purchase, you can bring home the basic home brewing kit you need, the supplies for your first few batches of beer and, probably most importantly, some instructions on how to get started making beer.

You can find a pretty wide variety of beer making home brewing kits to choose from just to get started. And because the diversity of the types of starter home brewing kits that are out there, its good to know what you want as you start shopping the web sites, catalogs or at the local beer brewing retailer.

As with everything else, you can find low priced options when you are buying a beer home brewing kit and other kits that have a lot more accessories and supplies to offer.

The things to look for in the way of equipment in your very first home brewing kits are sanitizers and bottles as well as containers for fermentation once the brewing process gets underway.

Keep in mind that once the beer is in production, you will be moving it from container to container and you will have the opportunity to step in and remove unwanted residue from the last step.

So, various siphons and strainers can really help you as the master brewer of this batch of beer to purify your brew as it moves from the boiling pot to the fermentation containers.

So don’t just buy the first home brewing kit you see. Take some time and evaluate what each one has to offer to determine if the more expensive ones come with a more in depth assortment of supplies, which can keep you from having to run out and supplement the home brewing kit fairly early in your beer making career.

Those home brewing kits might cost a bit more but compared to buying each of those items one by one, it’s usually a very good deal.

In addition to the assortment of brewing tools and accessories, look at the physical size of the home brewing kit you get. The best size for any batch of beer is a minimum of five gallons. Brewing in that quantity gives the wort a sufficient room to brew well.

So, make sure you read the fine print that the pots and storage containers you are getting with your home brewing kit will allow you to make batches that fit your expectations. But also keep in mind storage issues as you don’t want home brewing kit so large, it’s hard to keep it all handy for your next brew.

And it is true that the brewing and fermenting process has some steps that must be followed with some discipline if you wish to enjoy a great home made beer.

Here are some great things about home brewing:

one of the reasons that home brewing is such a passion to many people who enjoy this way of making beer is that there as so many varieties of recipes and styles of making home brewing.

You can easily get a feel for what a huge variety there is in ways to brew beer and in recipes for ingredients when you visit your local beer supplies retailer, go to home brewing web sites or sit in at home brewing club meetings in town.

And the great thing about the social side of the home brewing culture is that you will come home with a notebook full of ideas of things you can try on upcoming batches of beer.

The odds about home brewing are you will have months of ideas to try out and you may never run out of new approaches, blends and recipes to try to make your home made beer interesting and tasty for yourself, your family and your friends.

For that first time home brewing recruit, one of the best ways to help him have the fun of making beer at home without so much investment and mess that will come in due time is to go with a home brewing kit or machine.

Beer making machines literally take all of the thinking and planning and risk out of trying out home brewing to see if you want to make the investment in a full set up.

The machine comes with a full set of ingredients for one batch of beer and the equipment is automated so the novice home brewer can make the beer and move it through the fermentation and aging process and know the fun of having real home made beer a few weeks later.

Similarly kits simply the process of buying and using the equipment and ingredients to get started in home brewing. Unlike the beer making machine, which is used once and discarded, the beer maker’s kit gives you the basic equipment which will be the beginning of your collection of the tools of a beer maker to be used over and over many times.

But the kit provides the ingredients and the instructions to make the process of learning to make your own beer easy and fun to learn.

Even for seasoned home beer makers, there are variations on the home brewing method that will give you more flexibility and range of choices that will affect how unique your beer will be.

But each may have a greater investment of work and effort to use effectively so it’s worth getting familiar with them in advance so you know your investment of time and effort and what you might expect with a new brewing method.

Probably the most common brewing method most amateur brewer’s use and the one that is taught in most home brewing guides is the extract method.

And even though it is well known, because you are truly brewing beer yourself as opposed to using a kit or a machine, you can alter the consistencies and flavors of your beer and get a wonderful brew each time you use this approach.

You can settle on the extract method for a long time or perhaps use it exclusively for your brewing career and get great beers with it every time.

But if you want a greater challenge and the possibility for even more unique beers as a result, you can explore the Mini-Mash method and the Full Mash Brew stylesof home brewing.

Each is more complex and takes longer to finish the brewing process. But they also give you a lot of flexibility and even more ability to make your own beer unique and distinctive.

It’s up to you where to start in your beer home brewing hobby and the paths you take. You can explore new approaches through networking with other brewers. But you will never get bored brewing beer at home because the variety of methods and ingredients are virtually limitless.

But when it comes to beer, just about anyone, even people who are not involved in home brewing can list the ingredients as hops, malt, and grains.

So, as part of our quest to become more familiar with all of the aspects of beer making, it’s a good idea to explore more deeply what exactly the malt in beer is all about.

What exactly the malt in beer is all about?

When you hear the word “malt” in regards to the brewing of beer, the reference is actually to malted barley. Malt is the outcome of the process of malting, which starts with pure barley grain, the same grain you might use to make muffins or barley soup. That is a good way to ground the concept of malting to something very familiar.

But even then the term “malted barley” is not specific enough. Malting gets right to the heart of how beer is made because the core ingredients of beer are what results when the sugars from malted barley are fermented. Those sugars are scientifically named maltose, hence malt.

So, the malt used to make beer is the outcome of fermenting the sugars from malted barley whereas the candy or desert form of malt is those sugars themselves, unfermented. That makes good trivia for the new home brewers club meeting.

But what makes brewers malt so useful in beers is that there are a wide variety of types of maltose sugars that result from the fermentation. And each of these can be brewed into a very unique beer.

How malt is produced can make for even more interesting trivia. And it gives you insight into how the malts you use in your home brewing come to be. The process of malting barley begins with jump starting the germination process that is nature’s way of preparing the barley plants to grow from seeds into sprouts.

The barley is soaked and then they are drained fairly soon so the seeds will be stimulated to begin to germinate. The part of the germination process that is interesting to brewers happens when certain enzymes are released by germination.

These enzymes are powerful chemicals that convert the stored sugars and starches in the seeds which become food to power the germination and growth of the plant. But it is those enzymes that the brewer is looking to capture.

Objective of malting:

The entire objective of malting is to activate those enzymes in seeds and release them so the brewer can capture them for the brewing process. So, as soon as the germinationprocess starts, the grain is quickly dried so the enzymes are captured in that raw state to be processed into malted barley.

Once the brewer has the malted barley in the condition we just went through, that malt is saturated in hot water. This stimulates and activates the enzymes and puts them to work again. Under the controlled conditions of the brewing process, the enzymes do their job of converting the starches in the barley to sugars.

And as those sugars go directly from conversion to be boiled with hops and then combined into fermented yeast, the result is this little thing we call — beer.

Now this is all good information but most of us who are making beer at the amateur level. For our purposes, malt extract that is sold by your home brewing supplier is a great way to have all of that skilled preparation at your disposal without you having to do all the work.

By buying the malt in extract form, it is ready to go into your boiling water and join the home brewing process in full swing. As you add the malt, those enzymes will kick in and the chemical reactions needed to create great tasting beer will be well underway.

Maybe there will come a time when you will get more involved in the more complicated procedures of brewing or at least visit a brewery where the malting process is underway.

But since our love of home brewing is about learning all we can about how beer is made by making it ourselves, getting a feel or the malting process is both educational and fascinating as well.

Before that one pivotal moment, you may have never even thought about beer being made at all.

The origin of beer was the liquor store or the market and that was that.

But when you realized that not only does beer go through a fascinating transformation from grains, hops and malts to this delicious brew you enjoy but that you can make your own beer if you want to, that is when the idea of becoming a home brewer started to become a reality in your mind.

For others that moment of realization that home brewing could be a whole new world may have happened when you first were exposed to “real” beer, as the home brewing enthusiasts call it.

That is when you sampled a brew that was not made by one of the big retail beer makers like Budweiser, Coors or Miller and you discovered what beer tasted like when it came directly from the brewing process to your glass.

That may also be the day you found out what an amazing diversity of beer types, textures and flavors there were. And for many when you realize that you can find a diversity of beers that is almost as extensive as in the wine world that it is often very difficult to go back to boring old pasteurized beer again.

So if you are about to “make the leap” to become a home brewer yourself, you are about to step into a rich and full world that is full of history, culture, tradition and new friends and associates. You won’t just take up the hobby of brewing beer; you will “become” a home brewer, which is a unique kind of individual indeed.

What is home brewing?

It isn’t hard to “define” home brewing because the term is self explanatory except to go on to say that it is entirely possible for you to make high quality beer right in your own home with a small investment in equipment, the base ingredients that are readily available as well and the love and patience it will take to learn the process.

But the process is not difficult, which explains why home brewing is a passion and a hobby that is growing in popularity more and more every year. You might be surprised who you know who has a love of home brewing beer because it is not just the hard core beer drinker you might know.

Because home brewing beer is as much about the art and the craft of making a quality beverage, home brewers come from every walk of life there is from bartenders to ministers and from college professors to librarians.

The heart of home brewing is the fun, the excitement and the fulfillment creating your own batch of delicious beer can bring. But what transforms home brewing hobbyists to life long makers of beer is the challenge of always finding new blends, new methods and new ways to make their beer even more flavorful than the last batch.

Be forewarned that a zeal for becoming better and better at home brewing can be habit forming. But if you get hooked, you will meet thousands of others in your town and around the country and the world who have the same addiction as you.

It’s a wonderful addiction that you will never regret catching because home brewing can provide decades of fun and enjoyment making your own blends of beer. But home brewing provides something else just as good, which is really great tasting beer. So enjoy.