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The pair allows the grain to steep, stirring the mixture occasionally with a large spoon. After an hour, they drain the liquid from the cooler back into the converted keg to begin brewing. The runoff, with its deep brown color, looks like liquid bark, but tastes like liquid Frosted Flakes, sweet bordering on cloying.

Curt dips a finger in the steamy wort and licks. “Yummy,” he says. “For not quite knowing what we were doing in the beginning, I think this is going to be a beautiful beer.”

Mitch and Curt and the other brewers, are never without a glass of beer, and with each passing hour the men’s eyes grow glassier. Laughter and conversation spread through the crowd like bubbles in a kettle of boiling liquid. By early afternoon, the yard looks more like a frat party, with guys from the different teams talking, joking and drinking beer. When Mitch and Curt learn about some of the other brewers’ recipes they wonder if their Dunkel will be good enough to win.  Nate Sampson, one of the youngest brewers as well as president of the Cascade Brewers Society, and Rod Surcamp, a 52-year-old who’s been brewing for 20 years, are brewing a Belgium Specialty that uses caramelized raisins. Another team is making a Belgium Dark Strong beer, which will feature the raisins by adding them at the end of the boil, hoping the heat would bring out the flavor and kill off any wild yeast on the outside of the raisins. The third team is brewing an extra hoppy IPA.

Whoooosh. Curt reignites the burner.

“We need to get this to a real vigorous boil,” Mitch says.

Boiling sterilizes the wort, killing off potential contaminants. Hops are added during the boil. The high temperatures release the plant’s flavor and aroma.

As the liquid roils, Curt sprinkles some flowery hops on top, and the plant’s citrusy smell suffuses the air.

Beer was widespread in the Near East by 4,000 BCE, but it wasn’t until roughly five millennia later that hops were used in brewing. Hops were first introduced to brewing by the people of central Europe. The acceptance of hops in beer was very slow and even forbidden in certain areas, one reason being that it changed the taste of the beer from strong and sweet beer to a less full-bodied and somewhat bitter. The great advantage of hopped beer, however, was that it kept better.

The flat, fertile landscape of Oregon’s Willamette Valley is ideal for growing hops. The quick-growing vine was introduced into the rich soils of Polk County in the 1860s. From the late 1800s to the 1940s, Independence, Oregon was known as the hop capital of the world. By 1935, Oregon had 26,000 acres of hops, two-thirds of the U.S. total. But by the 1950s, demand fell as new brewing techniques required fewer hops. Last year Oregon farmers grew 5,000 acres of hops, still enough to make the state the second-largest U.S. producer.

Mitch and Curt boil the wort for an hour and then use a chiller, a coil of copper tube through which is run cold water, to cool the liquid. When the temperature reaches 65 degrees, Mitch siphons the coffee-colored liquid into two five-gallon glass jugs and adds liquid yeast. The pair carry the jugs to their vehicles. When they arrive home, they will store the jugs in a cool dark place and wait a few weeks for the fermentation to finish. They won’t think about the beer or the competition again until the day of the judging.

On a Saturday in late September, the beer judging will culminate the competition. By the time Mitch and Curt’s beer is judged, the Dunkel’s flavor will have mellowed – a beer’s flavor begins to deteriorate as soon as it stops fermenting. Most brews, kept at room temperature, can be expected to keep their good flavor about 3 months. On the day of the judging, Mitch, Curt and their fellow competitors will watch anxiously as two judges sample each of the beers by first holding glasses of the brews up to the light, slowing tilting the hour-glass-shaped vessels from side to side, examining the beer’s color, the size of the bubbles and the way the brown liquid clings to the sides of the glass. Then they will put the glasses up to their noses and inhale the sharp-sweet bouquet of hops and malt. Finally the judges will sip the beer and swirl it around their mouth before swallowing, trying to determine which of the 125 distinct flavors a beer can possess are present.

“Winning becomes less and less important as time goes on,” Curt says. “It used to be our priority, the only true measure of a brewer that there was. But after you win some competitions and you get confirmation, winning’s not nearly as important. The whole Iron Brewer thing is just a lot of fun. We do it more for the camaraderie. As long as the beers are drinkable, everyone will have a good time.”

MICHAEL JAMES WERNER, a freelance writer and graduate student in the Literary Nonfiction Program at the University of Oregon, enjoys a good stout every once in a while.