Beer, the college student drink of choice, may usually accompany weekend parties and Monday Night Football, but for some individuals, it's also be the product of a sophisticated art-as-process that can take place in your average off-campus kitchen.
Seniors Evan Weixel and John Armando and sophomore John Whelan figure themselves regular purveyors of homebrewery, a manual process in which both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages are produced in small quantities for non-commercial distribution. Though often perceived as complex in nature, beer brewing is a simple and, moreover, legal process that any adult with a passion can easily pick up, according to the trio.
"When I got interested in the craft-brewing scene during my freshman year, I did some research, found out that we're at the forefront of this movement and realized that people can brew this stuff in their homes," Whelan said. "People assume that it's very complicated but all that I really needed to learn was a couple books and trial and error. And there so happens to be a huge brewing shop right outside Porter Square on Mass. Ave., [Modern Homebrew Emporium]."
Whelan and Weixel both started brewing beer their freshman year, and the process was as simple as going to a brewery shop and buying a starter kit and other basic materials.
"You can get different qualities for the kits. The one I got was $65, and then I had to buy a really big pot to boil everything in," Weixel said.
According to Weixel, a typical kit usually consists of tubing, siphons and two five-gallon buckets, one for fermenting and the other for the purpose of bottling. Armando paid about $100 for his kit, while Whelan purchased his for $150. The quality of their materials was fine, Weixel said, though he stressed that the quality of the initial kit is not a very important factor in producing the best beer.
While start-up costs may be high, basic raw ingredients for brewing are typically lower, Armando said. Making a batch of 5 gallons costs $30 to $50, he said, and yields around 48 bottles of beer.
"It's less than a dollar per beer, and if you equate it to buying a nicer, premium beer it's cheaper and more fun," Armando said.
From then on, brewing the beer is just a matter of mixing ingredients together — over a longer period of time.
"You boil the extract for about an hour, [and] when the sugar converts to an easier form you can add spice for complexity," Armando said. "You then rapidly cool the beer down; once it's cooled enough you add yeast, then ferment it for 2-3 weeks. After that, you bottle it with simple sugars and compressed carbon dioxide to get carbonation."
As for the bottling process, that takes between two to six weeks, depending on the kind of taste one prefers, he said.
Although the process is slow, the experimentation one can do along the way is usually the bulk of what makes beer brewing fun, Weixel said.
"You can brew two main types of beer: ales and lagers," he said. "Ales use different types of yeast. Between ale yeast, you get fruity yeast, dry yeast or high-alcohol yeast, so there are lots of different things to choose from. Then for malt and barley, you can switch it up too by adding chocolate roasts, different kinds of spices. Basically, there are a lot of different combinations for different flavors."
The result of tasting one's own creation, too, is a satisfaction that one cannot get from anything else, Weixel said.
"I made an Espresso Porter once, and it tasted like something this brewery company Rogue makes [as] its Espresso Porter," Weixel said. "I was very proud of myself."
Whelan felt similarly when he made his first brew.
"My efforts absolutely paid off," he said. "The first batch I made was a pale ale that turned out surprisingly well and I would rather have that than any other pale ale."
For Armando, home-brewed beer is not just a taste of success but a whole different taste altogether.
"The thing with home-brewing is that it is distinct," Armando said. "You can easily spot a homebrew beer over a mass-produced [product]. That said, there are so many beers out there that are incredible, and I'll never stop tasting them, but there's something about home-brewed beer that I go back to."
Armando's housemates, family and a select few parties reap the benefits of his hobby.
"I'd bring them to parties and people would always try to get to taste my new batch," Armando, whose grandfather was also a homebrewer, said. "My family loves it because I've had my grandfather's beer before, and that really brought him back to his homebrewing days."
With the brewing experience under their belt, Weixel and Armando hope that in the future they can turn their home-crafted beers into a commercial success. Armando expressed the desire to one day own a brewery or a vineyard like his grandfather did in Portugal, while Weixel dreams of opening a gastropub, a pub that specializes in serving high-quality food.
Weixel, Armando and Whelan's experience in homebrewing was the result of extensive research into the subject. Armando, a chemical engineering major, emphasized that no experience is necessary to start brewing, but his job at Harpoon Brewery in Boston over the summer and a course in micro cultivation certainly gave him a leg up.
"It sort of indirectly relates to cells and the production of therapeutic drugs," Armando said. "You can relate it to brewing in terms of how you grow yeast — basically the main part of the brewing process."
For starters, however, Armando recommends that students looking to get into home-brewing pick up a copy of "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing" by Charlie Papazian, "He said Beer, She Said Wine: Impassioned Food Pairings to Debate and Enjoy: from Burgers to Brie and Beyond" by Sam Calagione and, for the absolute beginner, "Radical Brewing" by Randy Mosher.
