DRAFT Magazine

I taste a lot of beer. Much of it is world-class, hard to find, and cherished at the highest levels of beer geekdom. I admit: it doesn’t suck. I also get a lot of beers that are less than memorable. I don’t get a lot of “bad” beers, luckily. Still, with all this in mind, there’s nothing that makes me happier than sampling a hand-delivered homebrew, especially one from a new homebrewer. Take, for instance, this scenario.

I was recently asked by a friend of my wife’s to help him set up his son with all the needed equipment to make beer at home. I was happy to help, working with local homebrew shops to piece together a simple — very simple — system to make extract beer. It didn’t take long for the son (who I have never met) to break in his new equipment and make his first-ever homebrew, an amber ale. I was sent an email shortly after the first brew day and it seemed as though father and son had a great time. Weeks later, the beer was bottled and shortly thereafter a couple of bottles were passed from the father to my wife for us to sample.

I finally got to this beer over the weekend and while preparing for the tasting I realized, remembered really, what it was like for new homebrewers to give their handmade beer away. My first homebrew was given only to my closest friends, the people who taught me to brew, and some local pro brewers that I respected. I was antsy to hear what they thought, and I knew the beer wasn’t great. I didn’t need the beer to be great, and didn’t dream it would be. I just wanted it to be good. Much was the same for the maker of the homebrew in front of me. I didn’t expect the beer would blow me away, but I was excited about the possibility that this beer could be good — a beer I would drink on a daily basis.

Without going into detail, let me just say this beer was good. It wasn’t great and there were some small flaws that will be fixed with experience. Still, this beer was good. I told this to the brewer, by email, along with some tasting notes. He read it as though I’d just scored the beer a 95 in DRAFT. He was elated. He wasn’t saddened that I didn’t say it was the best out there — he knew it wasn’t — but he was sure he had a good beer at home and just wanted to know that someone else agreed.

The whole experience caused pause for me. It reminded me that the love of beer isn’t about the love of the best beer. It told me that there can be as much joy in a simple, homemade batch of amber ale as there is in the next fashionable extreme beer. It also encouraged me to go back to some of the beers I loved when I first came to craft beer, beers like Anchor Steam and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Boston Lager and Red Tail Ale by Mendocino. Returning to these has the nostalgia of going back home. These beers are comforting. They’re full of flavor. They’re what beer is supposed to be. None of them knocked my palate for a loop, but all of them were surprisingly thirst quenching.

Sometimes it’s good for us beer geeks to remember where we came from. To return home to the beers that we first loved when we were teething on craft beer. Go back and see if there’s any joy left in the simple pleasure of a cold, well-made craft beer that doesn’t carry 100 IBUs or 10% ABV. If you ever brewed a batch of beer, go back to the first extract recipe you made and try it again (I have half a mind to bring out my old pot and make a batch on my stove top, just for FUN). When you go back, when you retry the beers you once longed for, come back here and let us know what you thought. Was it easy or hard to appreciate a simpler brew? Could you be happy with another, or did you immediately long for something with a bit more flare? Let us know. It’d be fun to compare notes.