Making beer at home can help connoisseurs save money

By Louis McGill Special to the News Sentinel

 In Dennis Collins' homemade brewery, hot water from the left keg recirculates through the grains held in the cooler to extract the malt sugars. The liquid is transferred to the right keg to boil with hops. 

Standing on his back porch on a crisp Saturday morning, Dennis Collins stirs a giant, boiling pot. The scene is reminiscent of an old monster movie, complete with a mad scientist. The steam flowing out has a sweet scent similar to baking bread.
While other Knoxvillians are watching football, Collins, an engineer and member of the Tennessee Valley Homebrewers club, is taking part in an activity older than the pyramids: brewing beer.
For some, brewing beer at home can prove economical. Collins claims to be able to brew two cases of craft-quality beer for under 20 dollars. However, as in any hobby, getting to that point requires some investment.
The pot he stirs is filled with wort, a sugary liquid extracted from malted barley and other grains, which serves as the basic building block of beer. It was extracted from the grains earlier that morning through an elaborate setup that he built involving a modified cooler and a pair of converted kegs.
"Homebrewers are very inventive," Collins said. "They invent wonderful things."
While the hobby languished in obscurity for decades after Prohibition it has been legal in the United States since 1978.
According to John Peed, a member of TVH, it wasn't something that the authorities paid much attention to in the 1970s, though it wasn't, strictly speaking, legal. Back then, Peed recalls a homebrew store near West Town Mall. One day he went in to find a poorly-sealed cellophane bag of hops that had turned brown with age.
"They were basically the only hops in town, so I tried to brew with them," he said. "So things have changed considerably for the better."
Homebrewing is now legal in every state except Alabama and Mississippi, though many
states have certain restrictions on quantity and transportation.
The American Homebrewers Association estimates that nearly a million Americans make their own beer or wine at home at least once a year.
A basic kit costs $65.99 at Fermentation Station on Kingston Pike, according to employee Jim Reeves. It consists of two food-grade plastic buckets, siphoning and bottling equipment, and simple measurement tools. Once you add up the cost of a stainless steel pot, bottles and ingredients, a first-time brewer is pushing 100 dollars.
The cheapest ingredient kit, a can of pre-cooked malt with hops already added, runs just under $20 and can create an OK beer, said Reeves, but beginning homebrewers who are more interested in quality flavor than a cheap drink can pick up a Brewer's Best kit for around $30 at Fermentation Station. Allen Biermakens on Martin Mill Pike has a True Brew kit for about $30.
As hobbies run, brewing is a cheap one. If brewers follow the steps of an ingredient kit correctly, they will end up with roughly five gallons of beer to share with friends and family.
"I have noticed that when the economy goes down, our business goes up," said Reeves.
As the brewer gets deeper into the hobby, both complexity and costs can rise.
"I always tell people it's like that guy who goes and catches three fish in his $30,000 bass boat, with a $1,000 fishing pole, and god knows how much in the tackle box," said Peed.
Instead of bottling the beer, a kegging system can be purchased for a few hundred dollars. Instead of using an ingredient kit, many use their own recipes. Instead of using canned or dried malt extract for their wort, a brewer may decide to upgrade and buy the barley to extract it themselves, a process referred to as "all-grain" brewing.
To do that, a brewer can either build their own system, as Collins did, or purchase one for several hundred dollars. The cost of doing it yourself can vary wildly. A low-tech system can cost a little over a hundred or less, depending on what parts you have on hand. For those wanting more precision and more automation, the costs can skyrocket.
"You can do an awful lot with a basic system," said Peed. "You can probably brew just as good with basic stuff as the fancy stuff, but all the extra complexity does make it easier."
Admittedly, Collins is on the high end of the hobby as far as spending goes. He has spent somewhere around $5,000 on brewing equipment over the years. But that expense pays off in quality and control over the results. "I'll probably die of cirrhosis of the liver before I see any homebrew savings," he said.