Brewing Buddies: The Joy of Homebrewing

Home Brooklyn Life Brewing Buddies: The Joy of Homebrewing

Dylan Mabin waited impatiently in the living room of his cozy apartment near the Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street subway stop. At 5:30 p.m., 25 people he had never met were expected to come to his home and drink his beer. Mabin was sure his visitors would be late. They’d been drinking since 1 p.m. and already made two of three stops on their tour of Brooklyn home breweries. They couldn’t have been sober, either, but Mabin and his friend and fellow brewer, Andrew Said Thomas, didn’t care. They were getting antsy for their guests to arrive so they could show off their beer. After all, they had won competitions.

“The one commonality is people like beer, and they like to know how to brew beer,” Mabin says. “As much as we call them competitions, a lot of it is affirmation that you’re doing it correctly.”

Mabin, who has a slight beer gut and a reddish-orange beard, and Thomas, who sports colorful tattoos on his exposed, lanky arms, met at a party a few years ago through a mutual friend of Mabin’s girlfriend. The two got lost in conversation, each happy to find a fellow beer nerd. They looked up to find that the party had ended, so they grabbed another pint and got back into it. After the party, the two stayed in touch and kicked around the idea of home brewing. Mabin, who’s 29 years old and specializes in geographic information system technology, started making beer in college from kits. His job helps support his brewing. His shelves are littered with books about food and beer, from Julia Child’s My Life in France to the simple, instructional text The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Thomas, 29 and an associate producer at HBO, had never brewed. Mabin, whose jovial laugh and warm presence make any guest feel at home, decided one day to make the dream a reality: he bought the basic brewing equipment and called Thomas to tell him about their new hobby, and that he now owed him $200.

Mabin and Thomas realized they didn’t need a lot of equipment to make beer they wanted to drink: one or two massive steel pots, some five-gallon paint buckets to store the fermenting, a fridge to keep the kegs cool, a few other knick-knacks. Their first beer was good, not great, but the novice brewers were seduced. Today, they experiment with styles and ingredients and rarely repeat the same recipe. Mabin and Thomas have “brew days” on the weekends at Mabin’s apartment that has a distinctly country cottage kitchen feel and invite friends to join, including Bill Ryder, a fellow home brewer.

“The thing that hooks you is that you’ll create this beer that’s better than any beer you’ve ever had commercially,” Ryder says. “Because you made it.”

Thomas’s love for beer is rooted in history and a connection with places he’s visited and places he wishes he’d known. In a recent brew, for example, he added a few vanilla beans he’d picked up in South Africa. He’s a treasure trove of information about beer processes and talked energetically about a three-year blend of Lambic-style sour beers, a beer specific to Belgium. He pulled the lid off a paint bucket filled to the brim with a fermenting Lambic beer and stuck his nose close to smell the sweetish sour aroma. Process entrances Mabin as well, but he’s passionate about food and drink because his father was a restaurant manager, and he grew up surrounded by people who loved to drink and be merry.

“We were making beer because it was cool,” Mabin says. His appreciation for beer and its place in history grew after he moved up to New York City and began tasting different styles. “The history of it became this fascinating side to go along with the complexity of the flavors. What about the original region it was brewed in that allowed it to happen?” Both Mabin and Thomas have full time jobs and devote many of their weekends to brewing and beer tasting.

At the Boston Brewing Company, in Boston, MA, some of the employees who make Samuel Adams beer during the day go home to craft their own beers at night. Tour manager Seth Adams started brewing in college, like Mabin, after his roommate brought home a starter kit and suggested they give it a try. “When we tasted the recipe, it wasn’t bad,” Adams says. “It wasn’t the best beer in the world, but it was enough to keep me interested.”

The magic of home brewing, as Adams describes it, is in the infinite possibilities for recipes, styles and, frankly, curious results. If one recipe with pine needles doesn’t work— an ingredient Adams tried once that yielded a beer he described as “interesting” —then another with sage might, or tomatoes, another Adams experiment.

Adams threw parties to share his beer in college. He also kept a customized fridge — outfitted with a hole so the door could stay closed while people poured beer — out back that was always stocked with a keg of his homemade beer. Even though he doesn’t often repeat the same recipes, Adams wants feedback on his beers. “I personally always solicit honest feedback, even if it’s bad,” Adams says. The criticism doesn’t faze him. “I want to know if I’m doing a good job at what I’m working hard at.”

That excitement about making a successful first batch of beer is shared by Steve Hindy, the founder of Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg, who was mesmerized by home brewing while he was reporting for The Associated Press and hanging out with American diplomats in the Middle East. The diplomats, who’d been traveling in Saudi Arabia where alcohol is prohibited, were stationed in Egypt and craving a good drink. They wouldn’t settle for what passed as beer there; they wanted something with craft and with artistry, and so they brewed their own. They made it look simple, and Hindy was hooked.

His first experience home brewing back in the States was a disaster, though. Half the bottles broke when Hindy tried to cap them. “Our kitchen was a mess,” he says. “My wife was horrified. We had to keep the kids out of the kitchen because there was glass everywhere. So that first brew didn’t work out too well.” But Hindy persisted, and his home brews quickly became popular in his building and even at Newsday, where he then worked.

The biggest problem Hindy faced with those first batches of beer was battling his own impatience. He found the temptation to peek inside the barrel and test out his creation to be overwhelming. “One of the problems you have home brewing is you tend to be so eager to taste the beer,” Hindy says. “You sometimes serve it before it it’s really smoothed out, so it doesn’t ferment out. It doesn’t taste great.”

The 25-person beer tour that came knocking on Mabin’s front door wasn’t unprecedented. Mabin was used to hosting parties for a couple dozen people. Whenever he and Thomas brew a batch of beer too robust or overpowering to finish themselves, they share it with friends. At Mabin and his girlfriend’s housewarming party in March, 40 people crammed into their roughly 900-square-foot apartment. In a small pantry off his kitchen, a place most people would stash dried macaroni and pudding cups, Mabin set up his beer gear. Somehow, 12 people packed together into the already-crowded brew pantry.

“It’s kind of never ending,” Thomas says, as the group recounted the housewarming, a crawfish boil they hosted in the summer and other recent beer parties. “My girlfriend kind of rolls her eyes, cause we have stuff all the time. It’s a meetup. It’s somebody’s party. It’s a very tight knit community.”

Just after 6 p.m., Mabin opened the door of his apartment to let in his guests. Beer tourist Blake Baumgarten, a burly, bald-headed man out from Sacramento to visit friends, likened the home brew tour to wine tasting, but without the pretense. He preferred drinking craft beers in the cramped quarters of New York City, which he described as “down-to-earth,” to sipping wine in the wide open vineyards of California. There was no pretension in home brewing; at the second stop on the tour, the brewers had walked around barefoot pouring beer for the tourists. Home brewing is about making good beer, a feat so simple even novice brewers can do it, like Hindy when he first came back from Egypt. “I don’t understand why the actual multimillion dollar brewing companies can’t make good beer,” Baumgarten says.

Guests sampled four of Mabin and Thomas’s brews, a variety of styles ranging from a light Belgian wheat to a robust English porter. A few of them mingled with their newfound beer friends or pulled up chairs around the mahogany coffee table in the living room. Mabin and his girlfriend played the perfect hosts. She had baked homemade shortbread and they had set the table with pita corners and hummus that Mabin had made. Guests picked at the snacks, but were more interested in the beer and returned to the brew closet to sample different varieties. A family that had come on the beer tour laughed loudly and a little drunkenly as they filed out of Mabin’s apartment saying: “A family that drinks together stays together.”

Soon, most of the party left or went down the street to a bar called Pacific Standard. A few stragglers remained, coming back to Mabin and Thomas’s kegs for a second, third and fourth taste, particularly of the duo’s porter-style brew. It seemed they’d found some new fans of their beer. Since the guests arrived, the brewroom door had been open and they had filed in to check out the modest brewing equipment and to refill their glasses. On a whole most people seemed to like the beer, but Baumgarten had let slip earlier that he’d preferred the first two stops. By that point in the night though, the tour had ended and neither Mabin nor Thomas would have been offended. They were just happy to share.

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