Oregon is renowned for its microbrews, but they come at a price: about $8 for a six-pack. Orlo Flock, a self-proclaimed beer snob who came from the Prineville, Ore., desert to Eugene eight years ago for the reputation of its beers, saves money by brewing his own.
“The price is obviously the easiest one,” he said, on his reasons for homebrewing. “I like having a lot of beer on hand and I like to experiment. Why would you cook at home as opposed to going out for dinner?”
Flock, who has been homebrewing for years, co-founded Gnarly Barley Brewing four months ago. He and his business partner, Michael Allen, will bring their supplies to your house – or let you come to one of their houses if your kitchen isn’t suitable – and teach you how to brew beer, assisting you in your first five gallons.
The legality of homebrewing varies from state-to-state. In Oregon, like many states, the beer can’t exceed an alcohol content of 14 percent or a quantity of 100 gallons per 21-year-old person per household per calendar year. Homebrewing is not legal in Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma and Utah.
The GBB class, which includes supplies and offers four different packages ranging in price from $131 to $306, is about four hours and pretty informal.
“The thing about beer brewing is that it’s not an exact science. I mean, people have been brewing beer for thousands of years in hovels in England and Germany,” Flock said. “Think of it as extremely complex tea, so to speak.”
After boiling about two gallons of water, different ingredients are periodically added: barley, which gives beer its color and flavor, depending on how heavily the grains have been roasted; wort, syrupy, sugary malt extract; and hops, the flower cones that give beer its smell.
There are also optional ingredients, such as beer salts, which can complement highly sulfuric water, and Irish moss.
“Irish moss makes your beer cleaner,” Flock explained. “It chemically forces air bubbles and yeast to stop connecting with sediments in the wort. Therefore, gravity lets it settle to the bottom easier.”
When the batch is finished “cooking,” yeast, which ferments the wort’s sugars to create alcohol, and water are added, and then it is put in a carboy to ferment for about two weeks.
“The first beer that you make is horrible; it’s not necessarily drinkable, but it’s a really exciting thing to do and I would definitely recommend doing it,” said University senior Tristan Coolen, who started homebrewing about three years ago. “There was thick sediment at the bottom of it. It was incredibly sharp, incredibly off. We kind of choked down half the bottle and poured out the rest. But when we made it, it was wonderful; it was the best feeling ever.”
Coolen and his friends got a homebrewing kit from Valley Vintner & Brewer, located at Willamette Street and West 17th Avenue. Valley Vintner – and Home Fermenter Center, located at 123 Monroe St. – caters to a variety of customers, with start-up kits and individual ingredients for those who are more experienced.
University alumnus Michael Zarkesh, one of the store’s managers, said the best thing about homebrewing is “absolute control. You get to make the exact beer that you want to drink whenever you want to drink it. The more understanding, time and effort, and thought goes into it, the more you appreciate the finished product.”
Flock added, “If you start brewing beer, you become a very big critic of beer, mainly because you know what the different ingredients are, and you figure out why you like different beers.”
For beers he doesn’t make himself, Flock particularly likes Believer from the local Ninkasi Brewery.
Through homebrewing, both Flock and Zarkesh have experimented, making beer flavored with shiitake mushrooms, roasted green chili peppers, huckleberries, raspberries, vanilla beans, licorice and wormwood.
Coolen hasn’t done much experimenting himself, but he’s tried beers that friends have made.
“One of my brewmates made a chicken beer which is essentially made out of the essence of chicken,” he said. “You take chicken and you just kind of baste it in red wine. You leave it there for a few days and use it as kind of like a hop. It’s a special taste all its own. I personally thought it tasted like sprouts. It was worth trying, but never again.”
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