WESTSIDE COVER STORY : BOTTOM’SUP : A Growing Number of Beer Connoisseurs Opt to Brew Their Own Recipes at Home

With his eyes closed, Ed Alderette slowly sniffed the amber concoction half-filling his glass, sipped, swished the liquid in his mouth and swallowed.

Uttering a slight “ah” and smacking his lips, he opened his eyes like a man waking from a dream.

“Some of these beers are so beautiful,” he said.

He got no argument from a dozen fellow aficionados during a recent tasting at a home in Santa Monica. It was their love of beer that brought them together for the event, which is much like a traditional wine tasting: bread and crackers to cleanse the palate, buckets for dumping the dregs of beers already tasted, pitchers of water to wash out the glasses.

They call themselves the Maltose Falcons. When they say a beer is good, they ought to know.

They brew their own.

Home brewing is a pastime that has grown in popularity in recent years. On the Westside, its practitioners include scientists and engineers, teachers and college students, chefs, doctors, lawyers and others.

Local interest was stimulated by the opening last year of the Culver City Home Brewing Supply Co. The shop’s owners, Steve La Brie and Fred Waltman, offer free classes and beer tastings on Thursday nights.

Their store is the meeting place for a new group, the Pacific Gravity Homebrewers Club, which started in March. The name is a takeoff on the chemical measurement of specific gravity, something that brewers use to test the levels of sugar and alcohol in their brew.

Los Ponchos, a Mexican restaurant in Westwood, just began offering monthly home-brewing demonstrations. And two new brew pubs, bars that serve beer made on the premises--usually by home-brewers-turned-professionals--are scheduled to open in Westwood before the end of the summer.

Some home brewers do it for fun, others brew to save money and still others are able to make a living at it. But all are passionate about their beer.

“I’d rather pay $9 for a pitcher of good beer than 99 cents for a bad one,” said David Stark, a recent graduate from the University of Southern California with a master’s degree in safety and health.

Stark is one of more than 23,000 members of the American Homebrewers Assn., an organization that started in 1978. The number of entries in its national home-brew competition reached 3,060 last year, compared to 530 in 1984.

The explosion in home brewing has tracked the love affair of beer connoisseurs with “craft-brewed” beers--those produced in micro-breweries, regional breweries, brew pubs and specialty breweries. America’s production of craft beer increased 50% in 1994 over 1993, according to the Institute for Brewing Studies, a trade group in Boulder, Colo.

Still, the 2.5 million barrels of craft beer produced last year were but a drop in the keg compared to the nearly 200 million barrels quaffed by consumers of mass-produced brew.

As for the home brewers, they’d rather make their own.

For one thing, it’s less expensive, with start-up costs of about $100 and additional costs of about $30 for each batch of 50 or so bottles. Then there’s the art of it.

“You’ve got people who drive [a] Mercedes who make beer,” said Steve Casselman, a computer engineer who brews together with his wife, Maribeth Raines, an assistant professor of radiation oncology at UCLA. “It has nothing to do with the money for them. It’s all about the craft.”

Whatever their reason, some brewers admit that they have turned into beer snobs--they would rather drink nothing than drink a Bud.

For Waltman, his refined taste in beer has taken some of the simple pleasures out of life--like going to Dodger Stadium, where, he says, the only beers on tap are the watery commercial kind.

“When you’ve had the real thing, the unreal thing isn’t as good,” he said. “Like when you’ve had good coffee . . . do you drink Folgers anymore?”

Home brewers generally start by reading books on their hobby, then further their education through trial, error and lots of talk.

At the recent tasting in Santa Monica, home-brew fans spent the evening discussing the intricacies of taste and appearance. They had words for any flaws--too buttery, too starchy, too bitter. Scientific terms abound: enzymes that break down starches into sugars, yeasts that ferment the beer to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide.

“How good you are depends on how well you pick up on chemistry, math and working with equipment,” said Tom Burnes, who majored in physics in college and is now a professional brewer.

Some home brewers who have little science background say their beer would be better if they knew more about it.

“I wish I had gotten my bachelor’s [degree] in science instead of in literature,” said Daniel Aviles, the 26-year-old president of the Pacific Gravity Homebrewers Club.

The interest in homemade beer has grown steadily since 1978, when then-President Carter legalized the practice. But home brewing has a long and honored tradition. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson brewed their own.

Nowadays, most states permit home brewing, but federal law limits the amounts: 100 gallons a year for households with one adult and 200 gallons for households with two adults.

Home brewers generally cook up five gallons at a time, although hard-core brewers make more. But whether it’s five gallons or 45, the four key ingredients for most beer recipes are malted barley, water, hops and yeast.

The addition of flavored grains and different varieties of hops, along with the manipulation of brewing temperatures, is what gives beers their distinctive taste and color.

There are two ways to go about it.

The most time-consuming but least expensive method is called “all-grain”--the equivalent of baking from scratch. Brewers who make all-grain beer steep malt barley in water to make their own malt extract. The process can take up to nine hours.

Experienced brewers say all-grain brewing allows them to control the flavor and body of the final product.

Beginners--and those who have little time and equipment--use bags or cans of commercial malt extract.

Beyond the science of it, brewers say, the challenge is to emulate the taste of craft-brewed beers they enjoy. But some are more daring--chili, chocolate and Christmas spice are among the varieties that some have tried.

Sometimes the labels on the bottles are even more creative than the contents.

James Mulvenon, a UCLA graduate student in political science, decorated his homemade Russian Imperial Stout with a computer-generated image of Rasputin, the mystic and healer who dominated the czarist court.

“I like making the label almost as much as the beer,” Mulvenon said.

Although beer makers tend not to drink while they brew, beer making, like beer drinking, is often a social event.

“When I brew, I never have a shortage of people coming out of the woodwork,” said La Brie.

Raines and her husband were married in February at the Anchor Brewing Co., a regional brewery in San Francisco. The wedding cake was decorated with beer bottles and, of course, Anchor Steam lager flowed freely.

At home, beer-making comes first. Seven refrigerators are filled with beer, most of it home-brewed. The dining room table is lined with glass flasks containing different types of yeast, labeled and ready to go into the mix.

In their back yard, they have rigged up a 45-gallon brewing system that, at first glance, looks like a giant outdoor barbecue. Two 60-gallon pots are perched atop two burners taken from a dismantled commercial water heating system.

And Raines, who runs the monthly Westside beer tastings of the Maltose Falcons, has developed a do-it-yourself yeast-culturing kit available through a brewing catalogue. She is trying to develop a micro-brewed quality beer with low (1% to 1.5%) alcohol content.

A handful of home brewers are able to market their own products. It is more common for home brewers to cook up large batches for sale by micro-breweries and brew pubs.

One such professional is Burnes, 31, who started brewing as a hobby three years ago while working in space physics at UCLA. He discovered that he liked brewing more and, a year ago, gave up his job to make beer for the Southern California Brewing Co. in Torrance.

“My parents don’t know I did it,” Burnes said. “They still think I’m doing something in physics.”

He has since left the Southern California Brewing Co. to head up brewing operations for the Sunset Beach Brewing Co. in Huntington Beach.

Burnes’ job is the envy of his home-brewing peers.

“It’s addicting,” said La Brie. “Once you start, you get hooked and you just want to brew more and better every chance you get. There’s a mystique about beer-making that grabs you and you can’t get away from it.”