SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA
Emma Christensen is equally at home fermenting a dry-hopped double IPA, blueberry-lavender mead, or kombucha cut with honey and green tea and has worked hard over the last decade to become one of homebrewing’s brightest stars.
She went to college to study physics before majoring in creative writing. That left brain–right brain balance pays dividends on brew days. “You kind of need this analytical side where you’re like, ‘I’m going to make a chocolate porter,’ ” she says. “You research, create your initial recipe, and make it. Then you’re like, ‘OK, that was a pretty good chocolate porter. How can I make it better?’ At the same time, you’re bringing in this creative side like, ‘Well, that was a great chocolate porter, but what if we did a Mexican chocolate porter?’ ”
Christensen fell under brewing’s spell while living in Boston, where she attended the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. Friends invited her over for a brew day, introducing her to a new world. “It was crazy to me that it was possible. I got bit by the bug.”
She and husband, Scott, eventually moved to Columbus, Ohio, where she bought a Mr. Beer kit. “It was disgusting,” she says of her initial batch. “But there was something about the process, that sciencey, alchemy thing that hooked me. I kind of got a glimmer in that first failed experiment that it could be awesome.” The couple brewed together, tension simmering between them like a brew kettle. “Some of the worst arguments we’ve ever had have been about brewing beer.”
Like marriage, the early days of brewing brim with uncertainty. “You read the directions, and it seems clear, but then you get into the kitchen and you’re like, ‘What does that mean? What does rolling boil actually mean? Is this a rolling boil?’ ” Writers write what they know, so she pitched a publisher a memoir about learning to navigate brewing and marriage.
That proposal was shot down, but it started the conversation with a publisher that led to True Brews, the first of her three books to date. Christensen learned valuable lessons while assembling the book and honing its recipes. “If you give people the basic one, two, three, four, five steps to create a fermented beverage, they can do anything. Your strawberry soda might not be the same as my strawberry soda, and your porter might not be the same as my porter, but they’re both still delicious. We both followed the same steps and ended up with something tasty.”
She wrote her follow-up, Brew Better Beer, in an 800-square-foot apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area. She brewed almost daily, hiding beer behind doors, in the bedroom, in cupboards, and even outside. “Because it doesn’t get super-cold in California, I had stuff chilling on our balcony until I could get to it. It was super intense, super hard, and there’s a steep learning curve, but after a while I just felt like I got it. I understood how, if I made this little change, I’d understand exactly what would happen.”
FUN FACT
Homebrewers founded San Francisco’s Black Sands Brewery, a multipurpose venue that offers coffee, cocktails, and house-made beer, plus the ingredients and equipment needed to make them at home, including five-gallon recipes for the beers on tap. Check them out at blacksandsbeer.com.
Brewing, she says, is like studying a foreign language. The best learning technique is immersion. Repetition breeds understanding and confidence. Stumbles become successes. The process becomes second nature. “There are so many parts of the brewing process that are not in our day-to-day life. You don’t know what bubbling is and whether that’s good or bad. We don’t have a context for that, so you have to take a deep breath and learn from the process. You’re not going to know everything going into it.”
ADVICE
“The first time you step into a kitchen to brew your own batch of beer, it’s going to feel stressful and crazy. Just be prepared for that and know that your first batch might not be amazing. Have reasonable expectations. Take your first, second, and third batches as learning experiences and trust that every time you brew you will learn a little more. Some things are going to stop feeling so scary and will feel more natural. It’s a learning process, and you have to let yourself be in that learning process.”
BREWER SPOTLIGHT
Former Army officer Kevin Inglin and his wife, Shea, run San Francisco’s Ferment Drink Repeat, a combination homebrew shop and brewery that pours frequent collaborations with area amateur brewers.
