LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
During college in Minnesota, Anna Berken dabbled in homebrewing with a crowd of bike-riding punks. She picked up the hobby, moved to Austin to work for a newspaper as a graphic designer, and met Charlie Sweatt. The twosome turned brewing into date night. “It was something that we could do as a new couple that was fun,” Sweatt says.
They re-created favorite beers, including Real Ale’s Firemans #4 Blonde Ale, and found their groove with saisons, witbiers, and the odd Belgian IPA. “Texas was so hot, and we didn’t have sufficient temperature control for our beer,” says Berken. “Saisons and Belgians always turned out well in the high temperatures.”
After moving to Long Beach, California, they began attending Burning Man in 2012, bringing bottles of homebrew to share. Halfway through the week, communal goodwill turned to good grief: The bottles overheated and exploded. Weaponized shards of glass shredded everything. “After that, we realized kegs are the way to go,” Berken says. The following year on the playa, they dragged out their brewing kit, started doing demonstrations, and got married. “In hindsight, it was ridiculous,” says Sweatt. “But it started our tradition.”
Controlling temperature and creating a contaminant-free fermentation require fastidious attention to detail. So imagine, then, that you decide to homebrew in one of America’s most inhospitable environments: northwest Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. A Bible’s worth of plagues—gale-force winds, choking dust storms, triple-digit daytime temperatures, teeth-chattering cold at night—besets this tinder-dry expanse of alkaline flats ringed by barren mountains. The climate is fit for neither man, woman, nor yeast strain. But for one week in late August until Labor Day, Burning Man takes place here, the annual 70,000-person bacchanal of art, oddities, nudity, and, for Berken and Sweatt, plenty of beer and brewing.
For their first Burn brew, they added San Diego Super Yeast, a strain that ferments super-fast, and fermented in the keg. A steady stream of fellow burners relieved the pressure. “Every time we’d push the release valve, a spray of foam would come out of the top,” Berken laughs. “We started getting a little worried.”
They tapped the keg the last day of the festival. “It was like bread beer, like you were eating a meal,” says Sweatt.
“We ended up drinking the whole keg before the burn,” Berken adds. “It wasn’t good, but we drank it.”
One year, the couple and friends attempted an experiment: brew, ferment, and drink the beer in less than a week. So now, each August, the couple packs a vehicle with all the essentials needed to survive seven days in Black Rock City, the temporary enclave’s nickname. Sunscreen, water, and shade structures accompany a jockey box, homebrew-filled kegs, and brewing equipment used for desert demos. “It really becomes performance art,” Sweatt says. “It gives us an opportunity to explain the process, what beer is to us, and how fermentation works.”
“It’s great to see that realization go off in peoples’ minds: Wow, you can brew beer in one of the most inhospitable places?” says Berken. “We’re just out there with a burner, a propane tank, and a pot. People have no idea that there are organisms that turn sugar water into alcohol.”
Berken and Sweatt belong to Orphan Endorphin, one of several organized camps that run pop-up homebrew pubs, and they help organize a Burning Man homebrew-pub crawl. Any Burner is welcome to sample the couple’s kölsch, saisons, and witbiers that slice through the swelter. “I can’t handle an IPA when it’s 100 degrees outside,” says Sweatt.
“We have a motto at our bar: Strange but tasty,” adds Berken. “I like to engage with people and ask them what their tastes are. It makes them realize there are options other than Bud Light.”
In line with Burning Man’s barter-driven economy, customers pay nothing. “We always have so much beer that, for us, it’s nothing to give our beer away,” Sweatt says. Keeping it cold is tougher, though. At night, they store kegs outside to chill down, then bring them into the shade at daybreak when Orphans head to the ice distribution center to grab enough bags (trucked in daily) to fill the jockey box. Maintaining cold, stable temperatures is vital, as is steadily pouring pints; no beer grows warm and foamy in the tap lines.
“We call ourselves lazy brewers,” says Berken. “We like to experiment with things, but we’re not too particular about pH or temperature control. We just stick to recipes that we know will turn out OK.” Don’t mistake their self-professed laziness for carelessness, though. “We’re really good at sanitization. We’ve never had anything we’ve had to pour down the drain because it got contaminated,” Berken says.
They often brew at the festival’s end, toting the wort back home to pitch yeast. (They do a partial mash to save water and cut down on soggy grains.) Back home in Long Beach, the couple’s setup is essentially the same as in the desert: propane burner, beverage cooler, and a big ol’ pot. “You really just need to start out with a good pot,” Sweatt says. They offer proof positive that you don’t need to spend thousands on shiny equipment, provided that you keep everything clean.
“If you put sugar water in a jug, as long as it’s sanitized, it’ll turn into something,” Berken says. “It’s hard to mess up.”
ADVICE
Share your beer. “When you do five gallons at a time, sometimes you’re sick of that recipe after drinking 50 beers of it. You start sharing it a lot more.”