When I tell people I'm a home-brewer, you
usually get a lot of questions.
"You actually make your own beer? How does
that take? How did you make something that
was this flavorful?"
Boston is one of those cities where there's
a lot of home-brewers.
A lot of people will start with like a five
gallon pot on a dirty kitchen stove in Allston.
As a lot of home-brewers know, it's a slippery
slope--once you make one beer, you're likely
to continue to make beer and your system will
grow, your knowledge will grow and then it
kind of becomes an obsession.
This is something I'm very, very passionate
about.
Not only making beer from the perspective
of being able to taste different things, but
also the challenge.
As a scientist, I think in terms of numbers
and I think in terms of precision. Some of
the problem-solving techniques that I have
as an engineer have been utilized in order
to actually figure out how to incorporate
different flavors into a beer.
As the craft beer segment as a whole grows,
I think interest in home-brewing is growing
as well.
Craft beer is hand-made product. You're going
to have more flavor, more aroma. There's a
little bit more character to the beer than
you would a typical, standard American lager.
Harpoon IPA is what inspired me to learn more
about what's in a beer.
I think home-brewers look at craft beer, go
out an taste it and say: you know what, I
really like that. I wanna see if I can make
that at home.
We ask ourselves, is this something I can
recreate in our own kitchen, with our own
equipment.
And so they'll try and emulate some of the
styles that the craft brewers do.
American brewers are really on the forefront
of reinventing different styles. It's very
experimental, it's very edgy.
BU alum, Garrett Oliver, is one of my heroes--certainly
one of the most respected brew-masters in
the country.
The American craft beer scene is the representative
of beer in the world now, where 20 years ago
we were kind of a laughing stock.
In those days home-brewing was a hobby and
a community that was built on a passion around
beer, but there weren't any craft beers existent
at the time.
Beer: sparkling, golden, pure.
What people often forget is what beer used
to be; an industrialized beer culture which
came with an industrialized food culture,
unfortunately.
In today's brewery laboratories, knowledge
passed down through the centuries is combined
with modern chemistry of food.
The beers that we drank in college were yellow,
they were fizzy and if you were lucky they
didn't have much flavor.
The ones that had a lot of flavor, the flavor
was bad.
Bud, Bud Light, Coors, Coors Light, Miller,
Miller Light--that was kind of it.
I was building a home-brew club and we were
kind of all huddled together, trying to figure
out how we could make the kinds of beers we
liked. And that's how I ended up going into
brewing.
Craft beer has come leaps and bounds from
where it was 20 years ago.
We have over 2000 breweries in the US today
and a lot of those are being started by people
who were home brewers.
Dogfish Head, he was a home-brewer. Founders,
which is in Michigan, home-brewed. Sam Adams,
home-brewer. Brooklyn Brewery, home-brewer.
I started home-brewing when I was 21 and I
don't think I made a good beer until I was
23--I stumbled through the first couple of
years.
Around like two years into it I started to
make pretty consistently good beer, and at
that point I started to share it with more
and more people who were excited about it.
The idea behind Backlash is to grow the craft
beer segment by bringing people over who might
be curious about craft beer but don't really
have a place to call home within the craft
beer community.
We're getting to a point where a large percentage,
especially of young people, have tasted a
craft beer and are interested in craft beer.
And I think that we have a next evolution
to go through where craft beer becomes completely
mainstream.
There's a lot of people like us who are working
tirelessly to redefine the image of American
beer.
Full-flavored, gimmick-free beer--that's what
beer should be.
