Homebrewers Celebrate 25th Anniversary—

An Underground Hobby Continues To Gain Respect

By Shannon Hicks

The four basic ingredients for any beer are malt, water, hops, and yeast. How did people know, centuries ago, to combine these four ingredients, which have become what is a favorite drink today for millions of people around the world?

Add in optional ingredients such as fruit, spices, grains other than the standard barley such as wheat, rye, or oats, honey, or sugar, and beer’s varieties are endless. Beer comes in hundreds of colors and tastes, and for a quarter of a century home brewers across Connecticut have been celebrating the diversity that is beer.

Underground Brewers of Connecticut, a club devoted to home-brewing beer, celebrated its 25th anniversary with a party in Newtown last week. Members and former members, some coming in from as far away as New Haven, met in the Alexandria Room of Edmond Town Hall to socialize, share stories, eat dinner, and to drink some good beer.

Mark Tambascio, a co-proprietor of My Place Restaurant of Newtown, helped co-host the event. Mr Tambascio has been home brewing beer for a number of years and like many of the club’s membership, he found out about Underground Brewers through a friend. That friend was Jim Post, the 1993 National Homebrewer of the Year.

“We usually meet once a month at someone’s house, with about 10 to 15 people coming to each meeting,” Mr Tambascio said. “But this is a special event, so we moved it up here,” he said of the decision to have the party in the special occasions room of Newtown’s town hall.

“Good” beer to these folks means almost anything that is not mass-produced. Many of the brews most coveted by the club’s members are based on centuries-old recipes from Belgium, and most members enjoy the challenge of creating their own beer at home.

The group’s full name is Yankee Association of Homebrewers Objecting to Organized Societies, or YAHOOS for short. Beaten only by The Maltose Falcons, a club based in Los Angeles, the YAHOOS are the second-oldest home brewers club in the country.

The groundwork for Underground Brewers was actually laid down in 1968, when Pat and Betty Ann Baker started their home-brew business in Westport. Slowly, word got around among like-minded hobbyists and as the business grew, so did the frequency of people stopping in to the Bakers’ shop for informal talks.

“This was long before home beer making was legalized [in Connecticut], which was 1978 I believe,” Mr Baker said last week. He and his wife drove into Newtown from their current home in New Hampshire to celebrate the organization that grew out of those small meetings in their shop a few decades ago.

“Also, the problem with beer in those days,” continued Mr Baker, who is a master beer judge (and answers to the nickname Judge Wapner), “and you have to remember, 20 years ago the concept that Americans could brew beer did not exist. The problem was, most Americans did not understand or enjoy the joy of beer styles.”

In 1975 Mr Baker decided to organize a group that would formally meet once a month at his shop. This way, people would know when the discussions, debates, and new information would be shared. But in a tradition that continues to this day, Underground Brewers never had a far-reaching agenda.

“The club was never highly organized,” Mr Baker laughed, “even in the early days.” These days, members continue to meet once a month, either at the home of a club member or a common public location, although the meeting locations sometimes remain up in the air until the last possible minute.

The club is about far more than people sitting around a table, drinking and comparing batches of beer. Sharing new ideas and educating fellow members on proper brewing techniques, even doing research into ancient beer-brewing techniques, are also part of being a member of Underground Brewers of Connecticut.

The group takes its beer very seriously, and some members brew special beers during the year for competition. Right now, YAHOOS member John Watson is in the lead of the ongoing competition for New England Homebrewer of the Year.

The competition is broken into a number of individual competitions, with home brewers accumulating points during the year. Mr Watson is in Maine this week for the fourth phase of the competition. A final event in December to be held in Massachusetts “will decide all the marbles,” Mr Watson, who has already won a number of brewing titles, said Thursday night.

There were three beers available for tasting Thursday night as Underground Brewers members began arriving at the Alexandria Room. On tap was Coniston Brewing Co.’s Bluebird Bitter, an award-winning medium-bodied bitter ale from England known for its hoppy aromas and underlying nutty malt character; and two selections from Hartford’s City Steam Brewery (City Steam’s brewmaster, Ron Page, is an Underground member). The first was Innocence Ale, an unfiltered, dry-hopped, and cask-conditioned India Pale Ale, and the second was Czar’s and Girls, an Imperial Stout based on the type of aged porters invented by the British brewers during the 19th century for export to the hard-drinking Baltic and northern European countries. The stout is described by the brewery as “unusually intense.”

Membership of Underground Brewers runs the gamut from people who are just interested in the process of making their own beer to professional brewers like Mr Page or Phil Markowski, who worked with Mr Page for a number of years; Gregg Glaser, a beer judge and a writer for Yankee Brew News and other beer publications; master judges including Jim Link; or Tess Szamatulski, who now runs the shop her husband Mark and his former business partner Mike Sebas created ten years ago, Maltose Express in Monroe, one of the state’s leading home brew supply shops.

For Myriam Bossvyt, who moved from Belgium to Trumbull 18 years ago, the club’s serious approach to beer and its products are a reminder of home.

“I come from a place where we’re supposed to have the best beer in the world,” Ms Bossvyt said. “Many of the men here are home brewing in the Belgian style and they’re doing a great job. Some of these beers would make Belgians very proud.”