There’s nothing like a beer to make things better
One cold, bright Saturday, members of Barley Mob Brewers, a large homebrewing club in Chattanooga, sit around a long table at Hutton & Smith. The ambience is half April-colored sunshine, half cave-cozy. Around the table, beers stand in various states of half-full to half-empty: Hutton & Smith’s Promenade IPA, a couple of Pilsners, a German-style Altbier, and a richly colored Schwarzbier.
Generous with their time, a half dozen folks from Barley Mob have gathered to enjoy a cold one and discuss the joys of home brewing. Chris Arnt, current Barley Mob president, came to brewing as a rugby player for Tulane in the late 1980s. He started drinking craft beers in New Orleans when such drinks were difficult to find, and thought to himself, “How do I get more of these?”
The obvious answer was to brew them himself.
There weren’t a lot of resources at the time, adds Brian Bender, past vice president and current unofficial IT director of Barley Mob. There was the famous Charles Papazian’s Complete Joy of Home Brewing, but nowhere to buy equipment. Early home brewers converted things they found around their house or garage into brew pots, fermenters, siphons and the like.
And while today you can purchase fancy home brewing kits online or in boutique stores, you can still hand-tool what you need.
“Brewing is as expensive or as inexpensive as you want to make it,” Brian says. He goes on to explain that the American Homebrewers Association was one of the earliest groups to support home brewing.
“Barriers started to break down,” he says. “The Homebrewers Association was building teams, hosting panels, funding grants for minorities and women in brewing…it’s starting to open up, and I love seeing that in brewing. There’s more to be brought to the table.”
Meanwhile, Chris Arnt and his wife, Tracy, had started a homebrewing club in Atlanta before moving to Chattanooga. With their kids grown and out of the house, they started looking for the larger brewing community. It was quick to find and embrace them. Barley Mob Brewers, started as a drinking club in 2002, was “working to expand the craft beer scene in Chattanooga,” Chris says. “In those days it was just Big River [serving craft beer]. Now we have a dozen breweries in the area, over a dozen breweries and taprooms.”
“We’re trying to educate people,” adds Martha Gregory, who’s sitting beside her husband Mark Gregory. “We want to teach people that anyone can brew.”
Nowadays, home brewers, even in a small city the size of Chattanooga, have multiple events a year, from street fairs to judged competitions. Barley Mob does charity work too with a bottomless cup event at Mainx24 where proceeds are donated to the Chattanooga Area Food Bank as well as the Chattanooga Breakfast Rotary Club Brew Skies event.
There’s a lot of collaboration between local breweries and home brewers too. Hutton & Smith hosts a home brew competition, with the prize being to have your beer brewed on a large scale by the brewery. While you won’t earn any money, you’ll get your own tap handle to take home plus, of course, the joy of taking friends to a taproom for a drink of your own beer.
“The brewery may set a parameter, such as asking for a farmhouse style or a spiced beer,” Chris explains. “The brewery will taste it and pick the winner and that person will get to brew their beer. What’s super cool is their beer is on tap at that place.”
Brewing clubs judge each other’s competitions, allowing for better feedback and continuous improvement. Together, the state homebrewing associations compile points from local wins and announce a brewer of the year. Barley Mob members dominate recent winners’ lists, with Chattanooga’s Mark Gregory often finishing high and Barley Mob Brewers vying with the Music City Brewers for the state’s best brewing club.
How to Start
My favorite description of a bad beer comes from the intro to one of Caitlin Kiernan’s book: “weasel piss.” And, like a lot of uncrafty people, I’m afraid that if I make beer, it’ll be skunky or just plain icky. But it isn’t hard to start, the Barley Mob folks explain. Just let the brewing community know that you’re starting to brew, and they’ll reach out to help you.
You can begin with a stove, a pot and just $100 worth of equipment, finding instructions online. Your next step: find a brewing club, join the email list or follow the web page, and start learning. You can also visit a club meeting where there will often be food on the grill and a swarm of folks eager to help you get started. Chattanooga’s Barley Mob meets every third Tuesday at rotating locations. They trade equipment and advice and, of course, eat and drink together.
And don’t worry if your beer doesn’t taste quite like anyone else’s. Style guidelines, Chris explains, help define particular types of beer, such as a Pilsner or an Altbier; they don’t take the place of individual taste.
“There are legitimate ‘off’ flavors, but it’s largely subjective,” Brian says. “Our senses are so different.”
That said, everyone wants to improve, and a brewing club is the right place to do that.
“We have people at all levels,” Chris says. “We have an email system in place [where people can turn for help]. For instance, today someone might be brewing and reach out, ‘I thought I had the hops I needed but I don’t have them; anyone got some to spare?’ Or, ‘Could someone taste this and give me some feedback?’”
With help close at hand, it’s easy to feel confident that things will turn out all right and, if they don’t, there will always be a chance to start over again, a little wiser than you were before.
Find Your People
First, Tracy Arnt tells me, there is no one kind of craft beer aficionado. Brewers are lawyers and stay-at-home parents, wealthy professionals and working-class folk, college students and retirees. Some are drawn in because they take an interest in engineering their equipment. Others love the cooking aspect. Some are process-minded and keep a note of every aspect of a batch, resulting in stacks of ledgers with enough information to recreate a specific beer exactly.
Some like to make hand-drawn bottle labels. Others just brew because they like good drinks. Some like the garden-to-glass aspect; for instance, as Martha says, her family grows their own hops and raspberries for their beer. Men brew and women brew; young people and elders brew; people from every heritage brew.
An image of a mug in the hand of a lusty Viking or pint glass on the table in an Irish pub may have some accuracy to it, but it’s woefully incomplete. Brian explains that ancient Egyptians made beer; some enthusiastic brewers have recreated some of their beverages.
However, I do detect one characteristic that sets this hands-on community of beer lovers apart: their solid commitment to fellowship, fun and mutual aid.
“Barley Mob and brewing clubs in general have a kind of funky culture to them,” Tracy says. “We may not agree to anything else, but we like to make beer.”
“If anything unifies us it’s that we are fun-loving,” Brian adds. “You’re in it for the fun of it.”
“That spills into the brewing industry, too,” Chris says. “When new breweries start, it’s not cutthroat competition. The community asks, ‘How can we help you?’”
Martha explains that some local commercial breweries, such as WanderLinger, started out as club members. Similarly, when Hutton & Smith came to town, the owners reached out to Barley Mob for help moving. With gear too, it’s share and share alike.
“Someone might email the group, ‘I need a CO2 tank,’” Martha says. “Mark will say, ‘I’ve got one,’ and someone will show up to get it. They always bring it back.”
“I can’t think of a story where it went wrong,” Brian adds. That in itself might be testimony enough: what’s better than a group of people who share what they have and return what they borrow?
To find home-brewed beer and meet home brewers near you, start with these events:
- Chattabrewga at The Signal on March 14, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
- Big Brew on National Homebrew Day, the first Saturday in May, location to be determined.
Or, you can visit a Barley Mob meeting. They rotate locations, so check in on their website at barleymob.com or their Facebook group at facebook.com/barleymob.