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Today’s event has attracted the club’s most accomplished homebrewers. Curt was crowned national homebrewer of the year in 2002 and has won several other national awards for his beers. For five of the past six years, Mitch has been named homebrewer of the year by one of the nation’s oldest and largest homebrew clubs.

“If you’ve never brewed before you probably don’t want to make this your first time,” says Denny Conn, one of the event’s organizers and a national figure himself in the homebrewing scene. “But if you’ve brewed for a while … you see that pile of ingredients sitting there and things start happening in your head. Your taste imagination kicks in and you start envisioning the possibilities.”

Curt and Mitch seem overwhelmed by the possibilities.

“So hoppy or non hoppy?” Curt asks. “IPA would be nice.”

“We could make a slight Dunkel, almost like a Cream Ale,” Mitch says.

“Yeah but we could make those at home.”

“How bout a chocolate cream ale?” Mitch says. “A chocolate Imperial Cream Ale.”

“A chocolate Imperial Cream Ale? Huh?” Curt says, sipping from a glass of amber-colored IPA.   

“Well, I’m just saying why should we do what everybody else does and make a real hoppy thing?”

“Well are you going to hop it up or not? Yes or no? That’d be the question,” Curt says. “We sound like an old married couple trying to decide what to make for dinner.”

Like a cook, a brewer can manipulate the flavor and aroma by varying ingredients, spices, cooking time and temperature. But when it comes down to it, beer is a fermented beverage made from cereal grain, mostly barley. Hot water is mixed with crushed barley in a large container known as a mash tun. The mixture is allowed to settle for an hour while natural enzymes break starches in the barley down into sugars. The resulting sweet liquid, called wort, is strained, leaving the spent grain behind. It is then pumped into a brew kettle and boiled. Hops are added during the boil. The hops, the flowers from a climbing vine, are used like spices and add a bitter flavor, balancing the barley malt’s natural sweetness. Hops also add aroma – which can be spicy, earthy, or floral – to the beer. After the wort is boiled, it is cooled and then transferred to a fermenting vessel – homebrewers typically use a giant glass jug known as a carboy. Finally yeast is added to the mixture to consume the sugars and create alcohol through fermentation.

Today, lager beers account for 93 percent of world beer production. The formula, which originated in Plzen, Bohemia in 1842, produces hoppy, aromatic, and pleasantly bitter beers with a soft malt flavor. All golden lagers are offspring of the original pilsner. The style has given rise to the many mass market beers that beer geeks consider pale and undistinguished beers.  Some call the lager approach the “most abused beer style in the world.” Brewing behemoths such as Miller, Anheuser Busch and Coors, which produce millions of gallons of flavorless golden lagers each year, are among the biggest offenders.

Mitch and Curt have an affinity for lager derivatives such as Schwarzbiers and Dunkels. Mitch, a 54-year-old graphic artist has been brewing for more than a decade, writes a regular column for a regional brewing magazine and publishes a beer-related comic strip as well. Homebrewers are often asked which came first, their hobby or their love of beer. For Mitch it started with a love of suds, a love so deep that he once painted a picture of a hand holding a beer and then pedaled it to local brewpubs. “To me, making beer is like taking the day off. It’s almost like going to church.” Curt, a 42-year-old who owns a homebrewing store in Corvallis, has been making his own beer for 15 years.  Both have elaborate homebrewing setups. Mitch recently built a wooden brewing shed in his backyard with space for up to three 10-gallon brew kettles. Curt’s system is almost fully automated and can churn out nearly five times as much beer in a session. In a typical year, both make more than 200 gallons of beer.

The equipment they are using in today’s competition is rudimentary by comparison: a propane tank and burner to heat the water, a 50-quart blue and white plastic cooler in which to mix the hot water and grain, and a silver beer keg with the top cut away serving as the brew kettle.

After much deliberation, Mitch and Curt decide to make a low-hop, high-malt Dunkel beer. The beer will take a couple weeks to ferment, but the finished brew, if made properly, will taste moderately sweet with hints of caramel, chocolate or toast, and have a firm mouthfeel, Mitch says.

After using a grinder to crush the barley, Mitch dumps the grain into the cooler, while the jazz styling of Dan Hicks plays on a nearby CD player. Curt kneels on the grass and lights a propane burner placed under the keg, now filled with water. Whoosh. Nearby propane burners whoosh to life as well and soon the backyard, with its four propane burners hissing away, sounds like a sonata of snakes. After 20 minutes of heating, the water reaches the desired 155-degree water temperature. Mitch turns a valve at the base of the converted keg, allowing water to flow through a thin vinyl tube and into the cooler filled with grain. The mingling of hot water and grain creates a bready, malty smell similar to a bowl of Grape Nuts cereal.

“It smells like heaven,” Mitch turns to Curt. “That’s one of the reasons this is so enjoyable.”

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