Sidwa - Brew a batch: a beginners guide to home-brewed beer

Join the craft beer phenomenon by learning to brew and bottle your own beer, brewed the way you like it and using only basic home-brewing equipment. Christopher Sidwahead brewer and co-founder of wildly popular craft brewery Batch Brewing Co.walks you through the entire process, from choosing the best ingredients to setting up your home brewery, a full guide to brewing techniques, even how to taste and assess your batch. There is no mistake Christopher hasnt made while brewing at home, so that you dont have to. This lively handbook assumes no prior knowledge and covers all the advice you need to start brewing great beer.

Howdy!

Welcome to home brewing. Whether youve brewed before or are just starting out, Im happy to be part of your discovery of flavour and creativity.

I discovered home brewing by accident. Back in 1998, as a university student in Connecticut, the cheap, flavourless mass-produced beers I was drinking frustrated me. A resurgence in craft beer had seen a rise in small independent American breweries, so I set off to look for something different in my local bottle shop. I walked past the premium imports like Guinness (too thick and dark: wont that fill me up?*) and local offerings like Samuel Adams (too fancy), before stumbling upon cider. It seemed to be good value, was an alternative to what I was drinking, and I figured it would go down a treat with my late-night calzone order.

* No, it wouldnt! The appearance and mouthfeel of Guinness are deceiving. From a technical perspective its very dry, low in alcohol and therefore relatively low in calories. Rookie mistake on my part.

After a few weekends slurping cider, I began to wonder what it would take to turn the apples being sold at roadside stalls into my new boozy beverage of choice. A quick trip to my university library (yes, this was before broadband internet), revealed cider was the drink favoured by early European settlers in my area of Connecticut, but there was no book in the uni library explaining how to make alcoholic cider, so I checked out the bookstore in my local mall. There, in amongst the cookbooks and how to books, was a home-brewing book, and in it was a chapter on cider. So I bought the book and took it home.

Had I been patient enough to glance over more than just its table of contents, I would have saved myself a few bucks and never ventured down one of the most exciting paths of my life. The second paragraph of the cider chapter told me a crucial piece of information, which to this day has kept me from ever making cider: a good cider can take months to mature. Months?! I was a university student. My life at the time was broken down into three-month semesters. I couldnt wait an entire semester for my grog to be ready so I stopped reading and put the book on the shelf.

As Id later discover, the book, Homebrewing for Dummies by Marty Nachel, contained some of the most practical advice a new brewer could ever want. In fact, if there hadnt been so many innovations in brewing in the two decades or so since that books publication, I wouldnt even be writing this one. But with creative boundaries being pushed, technology advancing the way it has, and the ever-rising interest in authentic, flavoursome well-crafted beers, its time for another story.

That book travelled with me after finishing uni, along with an interest in learning how to create something from scratch.

Armed with an economics degree, I fumbled around with a few odd jobs, selling Christmas trees, delivering flowers, valet-parking cars all the while considering what it was I really wanted to do. Thankfully, I was living in a town with a brew pub. On Thursday nights they sold bottles of tasteless macro lager for $1, to pull people in and expose them to their line-up of full-flavoured, house-made beers. Their strategy worked first on me, then on my friends.

Sitting amongst wood-cladded fermenters, listening to the gentle bubbling of fermenting beer, I had my beer epiphany over a pint of their malt-driven, English-style brown ale. The brewer, who was from my neighbourhood, was making a living and raising his family while contributing to our town and giving people something to get excited about. I thought that was pretty cool. But following something as interesting as a career in beer was too big of a gamble for me at the time, so the idea of brewing my own beers was relegated to a hobby.

Conveniently, the owners of the pub ran a small home-brew shop in a room upstairs with all the essentials. I dusted off my old home-brew book, got my first real job with a bank in New York City and spent my first pay cheque on home-brewing equipment.

And so my own home-brew journey began. Id lay down a new batch of beer about once a month, and while I had a few disasters, there werent too many mainly because I had a good brewing book and I followed it to a T. Boring but true!

After a decade of steadily fine-tuning my process, in late 2013 I invested my life savings, alongside my business partner, to launch Batch Brewing Co in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville.

A truckload of other things had also happened in those ten years, including a job transfer to Sydney, Australia. But just two months after moving my partner and our lives across the world, my team in Sydney was made redundant, and I was left running an investment portfolio in Australia by myself. It was a slow, lonely and soulless job, but I enjoyed the challenge. On the plus side, I had plenty of time to brew beer and study the brewing process, digesting every book I could get my hands on.

Home brewing and commercial brewing are two very different animals, and while I was confident in my ability to make small batches in my kitchen, I was not naive enough to believe I could turn a hobby into a viable business. The commercial brewing industry is incredibly competitive and multifaceted, so in my mind brewing would remain a daydream and something to revisit when the banking industry finally had enough of me.

But as fate would have it, I met Andrew Fineran, another American in Sydney, who worked for a major Australian brewer. We found ourselves to have a very similar vision of a brewery that would be unique to Sydney, as well as having complementary skills: he matched my operational, financial and brewing knowledge with an understanding of the concept of brand and marketing that brand Id never even considered.

We brewed batch after batch in his backyard, and despite regular interruptions from his curious toddler, who survived explorations of our boiling kettle with her fingers intact (a future brewer perhaps!), we carved out an idea, and knocked over barriers fine-tuning our flavours, values, personality and finances. What emerged was a business plan, beer prototypes, a truly collaborative partnership and a whole new life and brewing journey for us and our families.