You might not think the craft beer brewers leading the fight against national brands in the name of sophisticated palates and better brews would be all that jazzed to see home brewing taking off like wildfire.
With less than 10 per cent of the overall beer market collectively shared among them, Vancouvers craft brewers are still scrambling to muscle in on market share, only to have scads of brew hobbyists scurry in behind them to pump out their own artisanal concoctions with the zeal of prohibition-era bootleggers.
But theres not a shred of hostility in the backyard of a nondescript bungalow in Southeast Vancouver on a recent, and thankfully sunny, spring day when I got a crash-course in homebrewing courtesy of a surprisingly harmonious crew assembled from the Vancouver Homebrewers Association (VanBrewers) and Vancouver Craft Beer Week (VCBW).
A lot of brewers start out as home brewers, says Chris Bjerrisgaard, marketing director of VCBW and marketing consultant for Surreys Central City Brewing Co., makers of Red Racer beer.
After the resounding success of last years inaugural fest, VCBW has tripled in size for its triumphant return with the sophomore event launching tomorrow and running to May 14. With a whopping 70 venues on tap to host events, selling beer fest in this town is about as hard as hawking Canucks tickets during the playoffs. But this year, VCBW organizers arent content to merely satisfy the appetites of casual beer drinkers. Theyve launched a full-scale educational assault geared at turning event-goers into craft brew connoisseurs who will apply the same locavore logic to their ales, lagers and lambics that is already de rigueur for produce, meat, wine and pretty much everything else under Vancouvers ethical-consumption ethos. And that starts with showcasing the connection between homebrewing and other DIY-centred activities like VCBWs Special Beer and Bread Baking Course on May 6, the How To Brew seminar May 10 and the Russells Golden Stag Awards May 11, which will see the winners of the annual VanBrewers homebrew competition announced and more than a dozen fresh casks tapped.
Most brewers encourage homebrewers because its kind of like the proving grounds for whos the next really good brewer you could poach and maybe give them a job to start making your beers for you in the future. Its kind of the first step, says Bjerrisgaard, with VanBrewer founders Graham With and Katy Wright nodding in agreement.
The couple in their late-20s founded VanBrewers about a year and a half ago after their four-year obsession with homebrewing came to a head (no pun intended). Our friends got really sick of us talking about homebrew, Wright says, standing in her backyard where she and With are prepping to brew a custom batch of blonde ale and a stack of ribs has been in the smoker for hours. The solution was simple enough: They made new friends through their club, which now has more than 50 members, plus they adopted a satellite group of beer enthusiasts such as Bjerrisgaard, VCBW president Paul Kamon and a host of other players in the local beer biz like Central Citys Gary Lohin, and Storm Brewings James Walton who drop by throughout the day.
It started off cause we were broke students, explains With between turns grinding malted barely and adding it to a retrofitted keg full of 65-degree water. Neophyte brewers can get set up with basic equipment for about $100, he says, and when all is said and done the tally for your brew comes out to around 50 cents a bottle. With and Wright also grow their own hops in the summer, enough for about one annual batch of beer, and compost their waste to complete the homebrew cycle of life. But saving money or being sustainable are peripheral motivators for their all out obsession. You get more interested in it, says With. It stops being about being cheap cheap and more about I want to make this beer because you cant get it in B.C. some weird obscure beer.
Central Citys Lohin and Storms Walton offer much the same reasons for getting into homebrewing before establishing themselves on a commercial scale.
I couldnt find anything like what I was brewing, so naturally I thought I was doing it wrong, says Walton with a heavy laugh. But eventually I learned that I just was making ales and you can only really buy lagers. Of course, when Walton made his first brew at 15 with instructions out of an encyclopedia, the margin of error was pretty wide. I made a really horrible tasting beer, it was black and acrid, he remembers of his first time.
For Central Citys Gary Lohin, the homebrew connection is still close to his heart. I just couldnt find a beer I wanted to drink, he says, thinking back on his start. With homebrewing, the experimentation level is a little higher... you can try something here and then you can scale it up a little. Thats where my roots are, thats how I learned to experiment.
Lohin has no beef with homebrewers like Wright and With, whose hooch he eagerly inspects as it ferments in the yard. They regularly visit his brewery to show off their beers and often come away with some feedback and maybe a bit of free yeast. Nor does Lohin see much competition in his fellow microbrewers, who are excitedly chatting in the yard and trying each others beer.
The struggle for craft beer brewers is more about elbowing further into a market that has been dominated by national corporations whose array of identical lagers has left beer drinkers will dull palates and low expectations. Craft brewers have made major inroads in foodie circles, where conscientious eaters are requesting beer to match the calibre of their food, he says. When you spend $25 on an entrée, who wants a Molson Canadian to go along with it?
But the same is not true at most liquor stores, which Lohin and VCBW organizers are eyeing as the next front in the battle of the brews. The reality is we have less than 10 per cent of the market... but its 10 per cent with a bullet, maybe. Were going forward.
One of the groups this years VCBW is hoping that bullet will penetrate is the East Van hispter crowd with events like Beerlesque at Main Streets Hyde on May 9. At $12 a ticket, the beer-meets-burlesque evening is one Bjerrisgaard has tailored to convince the flannel set to put down their Pabst Blue Ribbon in favour of a better, local brew.
The Main Street crowd drink a lot of Pabst Blue Ribbon because its cool, but [we will] show them a really good beer and say how about you drink this instead. And itll still have that edge factor because none of your friends are drinking it, but you actually get a good taste out of it as well, he says.
Put another way, drinking craft beer, or brewing your own, is a better way to truly stick it to the man. We dont put millions of dollars into marketing campaigns to convince you that cold is a flavour profile versus a temperature, he says.
And while Bjerrisgaard harbours no fantasies about every East Van basement suite suddenly giving rise to a homebrew outfit, he is convinced that anyone can benefit from a little behind-the-scenes edification about Canadas most popular beverage.
We buy a lot of beer, so go buy it from someone you can meet.
