Beverly Wells is a 74-year-old faithful Miller beer drinker, and until recently, the closest she had come to brewing was making homemade coffee liqueur.
But on a recent afternoon, at a small brewery inside a Huntington Beach industrial park at Heil Avenue and Gothard Street, Wells was carefully weighing grains and stirring malts and honey into a copper brewing kettle. In just two hours, she had mixed up a 5-gallon batch of Red Hawk Ale -- twice as potent as Miller in alcohol content with three times the flavor.
"I used to call my grandson a beer snob because he drank all this fancy beer," Wells said. "Now I guess I'm a beer snob too. I guess you never stop learning."
Wells fit right in with the lively crowd at BrewBakers, the Southland's only business establishment where the public can brew beer. As his customers waited for their concoctions to heat up, owner Dennis Midden joked, offered advice and poured samples of the brewery's latest batch.
"The interaction between brewers and Dennis' personality is what makes this place fun," said Bryan Nim of Buena Park, who was bottling six cases of brown ale with his wife, Vicky. "You can tell Dennis is a guy who really loves his job."
It wasn't long ago that Midden had half a dozen local competitors in the brew-on-premise market. As the craft-beer movement exploded in the early 1990s and people began to acquire a taste for stronger, heartier beer, self-brew businesses popped up all over the country. By 2000, there were about 75 in the United States, according to beer industry officials.
Tom Dalldorf, publisher of Celebrator beer magazine, said brew-on-premise locations were particularly attractive to home brewers who tired of making small batches of beer in their garages and then having to clean up after themselves.
"Home brewing can be a messy and smelly undertaking," Dalldorf said. "One sure way to [upset] the old lady was to have a boil-over on the stove with the kettle. It's nice to be able to go into someone else's place, make a mess and have them clean it up."
But while the craft-beer market continues to grow -- by 7% each of the last two years, according to the Colorado-based Brewers Assn. -- brew-on-premise businesses have struggled. Dalldorf estimates only about 15 remain nationwide.
"A lot of people jumped on brew-your-own places as a way of making money," Dalldorf said. "They didn't realize how hands-on it was. You're basically walking people through the process the whole way."
