PREFACE

In hindsight, it wasn’t the smartest move to go on a beer tour by bike. It was 2008, and I felt bulletproof, no hangovers hitting like heavyweight right hooks, no toddler bouncing on my chest at 6 a.m. and making me rue last night’s last call.

So Sean’s and Clarissa’s idea held real appeal. Sean White was president of the New York City Homebrewers Guild. We’d known each other since my undergrad days at Ohio University, a lifelong friendship cemented over longnecks of Schlitz. Like me, Sean had ended up in Brooklyn, where beer further infused both of our lives. I chronicled the lush life for Imbibe, Gourmet, New York magazine, Time Out, and outlets now relegated to history’s recycling bin. Sean fell hard for homebrewing. His cramped apartment became a laboratory for Belgian tripels, witbiers, and other creations I readily consumed from his kegerator.

His beers were very good, the kind of good that led him, after a handful of hops and jumps, back to Athens, Ohio, to open Little Fish Brewing. But first, his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Clarissa, offered this brain flash: Wouldn’t it be great to bike to homebrewers’ homes across Brooklyn?

Yes, yes it would.

Sean arranged an itinerary. A dozen-odd folks signed on. We pedaled. We drank. We pedaled more. We drank more. Total strangers invited us into their homes, triggering the spine-tingling thrill of peeking into personal spaces. We saw proof positive that square footage posed no obstacle to making great beer. Who needed a garage or a backyard? These brewers were golden as long as they had a working stove and a closet.

When pedaling proved too much of a challenge, we swapped wheels for feet to finish the tour. At the end, I headed home happy, buzzed on good vibes. The homebrew tour had succeeded because of its unique mixture of voyeurism, inebriation, and education. That terrific triple threat lingered in my bones.

The following fall, New York City Beer Week organizers asked me to put together a tour. I devised several. The first featured my favorite scary dive bars. I had been a bar columnist for years, and dives fascinated me—namely why they frightened people. I wanted to show that scary-looking dives were actually the friendliest bars around, like sheep in wolves’ clothing.

The second excursion was a homebrew tour. Taking inspiration from the bike tour with Sean and Clarissa, I thought it would be a blast to provide a looksee into the world of amateur brewers to discover what makes them tick and to show how limited space could serve as the crucible for the next great beer trend. The four-point tour included a barbecue pit stop and lasted nearly seven hours, leaving me drained and—let’s be honest—fairly buzzed.

“When’s the next tour?” people asked at the end.

Next tour? That was it!

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the tour had legs. I created another tour, then another, tapping into New York City’s groundswell of brewing talent. We visited the Upper East Side apartment of Rich Buceta, who later founded SingleCut, then Basil Lee and Kevin Stafford in Brooklyn, years before they launched Finback.

My guidelines: three breweries per tour, four hours total, never the same tour twice. My tours went to all five boroughs by subway, bus, foot, and, on one memorable stop to Roosevelt Island, by tram. Attendees arrived, timid and tittering, but beer soon lubricated the wheels of conversation, and the last stop often devolved into an impromptu house party. Tour-takers congregated in the kitchen and toasted. Strangers departed as fast friends.

I took the tours on the road to Portland, Maine, and Chicago, discovering dynamic amateur beer scenes wherever I traveled, which sparked the creation of this book. Homebrew World provides an all-­access pass to some of the world’s best homebrewers. Japanese law forbids brewing batches above 1% ABV, so what do homebrewers there do? It’s against the law to homebrew at all in Thailand, yet the scene there is thriving. How do Thai homebrewers skirt the law? What challenges face brewers in the Nevada desert? Costa Rica? Israel? It turns out that they all have a lot in common. Languages and cultures differ, yes. Access to hops, grains, and yeast strains fluctuates from country to country, true, but every homebrewer speaks the lingo of creativity. Homebrewing is a delicious act of drinking disobedience, refuting the fermented status quo in order to fashion new flavors and take beer in unexpected new directions, just gallons at a time.

So let’s punch your drinking passport and get started.

FUN FACT

Many homebrewers have graduated from my tours and events to become professional brewers or open their own breweries:

Anthony Accardi and Rob Kolb, Transmitter Brewing, Long Island City, NYC

Tony Bellis, Zack Kinney, and Pete Lengyel, Kings County Brewers Collective, Brooklyn, NYC

Bill Boguski and Craig Dilger, Foulmouthed Brewing, South Portland, Maine

Rich Buceta, SingleCut Beersmiths, Astoria, NYC

Jon Conner, Conner Fields Brewing, Grants Pass, Oregon

Chris Cuzme, Fifth Hammer Brewing, Long Island City, NYC

Eric Feldman and Marshall Thompson, Braven Brewing, Brooklyn, NYC (contract brewing)

Philip Gardner, Sean Torres, and Patrick Wade, Kills Boro Brewing, Staten Island, NYC

Basil Lee and Kevin Stafford, Finback Brewery, Glendale, NYC

Katarina Martinez, Lineup Brewing, Brooklyn, NYC

BJ Pichman, Forbidden Root Restaurant & Brewery, Chicago, Illinois

Jason Sahler, Strong Rope Brewery, Brooklyn, NYC

Merlin Ward, Wartega Brewing, Brooklyn, NYC