Area home brewers serious about the craft

story and photos by Roy Hill

Members of the River Valley Ale Raisers homebrew club are serious about having a good time.

According to the club’s organizing document, River Valley Ale Raisers was formed Jan. 1, 2009, and its aims are education for home brewers, growth of the homebrew hobby, participation in homebrew competitions, and the encouragement of “trash talkin’” with other homebrew clubs inside Arkansas.

The club has 29 paid members, and meets the first Tuesday of every month at the Pinnacle Landscape and Garden Center at 4100 Planters Road in south Fort Smith.

While a Landscape and Garden Center may at first seem a strange choice for a homebrew club meeting, the store offers an extensive collection of wine and homebrew equipment and ingredients.

“We started selling wine and brew supplies in October of 2007,” said Garden Center owner Jim Taylor. “We like hosting the meetings because it gives people a chance to learn more about the art of brewing.”

Steve Arnold serves as president of the Ale Raisers. He’s been homebrewing for a decade, and refined his skill and craft enough to earn several awards at competitions before becoming club president.

“I started homebrewing in Dallas, 10 years ago,” Arnold said. “I’ve won more than a dozen medals. I’m the most proud of my third-place finish at the Bluebonnet Festival in Dallas. That’s the largest single-site homebrew competition in America.”

Arnold’s prize-winning beer at the Bluebonnet was a Belgian Christmas beer. Arnold also took first place in the Houston Dixie Cup competition with a Belgian saison, which he described as “a blonde Belgian ale.”

Even though the Ale Raisers are a very new club, they’ve already seen one member find success at the Bluebonnet Festival.

Scott Archer of Fort Smith also took a third-place finish at the big competition with a Belgian double, a style of ale with high alcohol content. Archer is new to homebrewing, and was surprised with his success.

“I thought it was going to be a lot like chemistry,” Archer said. “It’s more like following a recipe. I was in shock when my beer made it down to the finals. I thought it didn’t have a chance.”

Archer’s discovery that home brewing can be more simple than it sounds is common. Club member Lucas Stolz started brewing in California eight years ago, and tells a similar tale.

“Lots of people don’t try because they think it’s hard. But making a beer is about as easy as making macaroni and cheese,” Stolz said. “If you can do that, you can make beer.”

Stolz said making your own beer has several rewards for the home brewer.

“It’s quality you can’t buy at the store,” said Stolz. “There are limits on craft beer. Because of the Arkansas laws, you can’t buy them all here, but you can make beers a lot like them. Also, the beer you make is fresher than any beer you buy.”

At the August meeting, the club discussed plans for strong showings at state and regional competitions. The club will submit several entries to the homebrew competition at the Arkansas State Fair in Little Rock, and hopes to have entries in the Bluebonnet Festival in Dallas.

Hosting homebrew competitions in Fort Smith is a long-term goal of the club, but it is first trying to get people certified as official judges through the Beer Judge Certification Program connected with the American Homebrewers Association.

“We’ve got a study group meeting to take the BJCP exams,” club member Jed Reinhard said. “We’re looking for folks interested in becoming certified beer judges.”

Becoming a BJCP judge is more involved than merely knowing what kind of beer you may like.

“The exam is very tough,” Reinhard explained. “To make apprentice, you have to score 60 percent. To become a certified judge, you have to score 70 percent and have experience.”

Club president Arnold echoed the stringency of the BJCP requirements.

“It’s sort of like getting your Masters degree in brewing,” Arnold said. “You have to be able to accurately identify the style characteristics of more than 30 styles of beer without being told what style you’re sampling.”

The serious part of the August meeting was a mini-seminar on judging samples of American Pale Ale made by Ale Raiser club members. The members present were placed into a group of three or four, and handed an official beer score sheet along with a full page of characteristics typical of American Pale Ales as set forth by the AHA .

The students were then walked through the procedure of judging the beer, beginning with the sound of the escaping gas when the bottle top was popped to appearance, flavor and mouthfeel.

On the score sheet were 17 different descriptor definitions for smell, arranged alphabetically from “Acetaldehyde–Green apple-like aroma” down to “Yeasty–A bready sulfury or yeast-like aroma.” There were similar guidelines for taste and mouthfeel, and the students scored their sample beer, and compared their opinions to see how close the scores were.

Your reporter had a personal stake in the beer judging portion of the night as I took a couple of my own homebrews to the club meeting. They were from my second, six-gallon batch of homebrew, a Nut Brown Ale made out of a kit purchased at the Garden Center three weeks prior, and put into recycled commercial bottles that I cleaned and sterilized.

Late into the beer-judging seminar, I nervously popped the tops off a couple of my own homebrews, and offered them up for tasting. The beer was poured out into small plastic cups, and passed around. The judges sniffed the beer, and held the cups up to the light to examine the color. To my great relief, nobody wretched when they tasted it, and several of the judges nodded at me appreciatively as they sniffed and sipped.

“This is a good brown ale,” said club president Steve Arnold.

I had reason to worry.

One of the metal pots used to clean the bottles had at one time contained used deep-fry oil. And about 10% of the beers I bottled in that batch developed the very nasty aftertaste of old catfish grease. Arnold laughed when I told him about the greasy fishy beers, and what caused it.

“That’s homebrew,” he said. “We all learn from our mistakes and we all make mistakes.”

Those interested in entering the homebrew hobby can join the club for $25 for an individual, or $35 for a household membership. The dues include beer tasting at the meetings, and a discount on beer-making supplies at the Pinnacle Garden Center.