Dressed in a thick pair of rubber boots and surrounded by gleaming equipment and yards of hose at Dry Dock Brewing Co., Kevin DeLang is living a home-brewer’s dream.
DeLang, 33, started cooking up beer in small batches at home 12 years ago when he got a brewing kit for his 21st birthday. Today, he owns the Brew Hut, a brewing-supply store, and makes about 220 gallons of brew at a time at Dry Dock, the Aurora company he co-owns with Kevin Kellogg.
DeLang’s success is the byproduct of a rapidly growing hobby whose practitioners routinely dream of going pro. About 800 home-brewers are expected in Denver for the National Homebrewers Conference, which runs Thursday through Saturday at the Four Points by Sheraton Denver Southeast.
“There have been many seminars at past home-brewers conferences about what it takes to go pro, to make that leap. In many cases it is a fantasy or a pipe dream or maybe one of those retirement goals,” said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association, a Boulder-based trade group.
There are an estimated 350,000 active home-brewers in the U.S. – about 1,600 in Colorado – according to the Brewers Association. They spend more than $70 million annually on everything from equipment to grains and yeast, Gatza said.
Most, like Bob Kauffman, a postal worker and co-chair for this year’s conference, brew beer in 5- or 10-gallon batches. Kauffman, 52, began brewing in 1989 to save money on a product he enjoys.
“Everybody that home-brews and has some success with it thinks about what it would be like to sell your beer,” he said. “I have got 23 years in the post office, and it would be hard for me financially to walk away from that, but would I rather brew beer for a living than work for the post office? Any day.”
Many have made the leap. There are more than 1,400 craft brewers with operations ranging from small brewpubs to regional craft breweries in the U.S., and more than a few started by making beer at home, said Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association.
Many of the brew masters at pubs and breweries are home-brewers who worked their way through the ranks, said Steve Headstream, general manager of the Brew Hut. “You get hired for grunt work, you work on the bottling line, schlepping wet grains. It is basically heavy lifting.”
The founders of Colorado microbreweries such as Left Hand, Boulder, New Belgium and others were home- brewers before turning pro, Gatza said.
As was Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, who founded Denver brewpub Wynkoop Brewing Co. with the late Russell Schehrer, the 1985 American Homebrewers Association Homebrewer of the Year.
“When Russell agreed to come on board, suddenly we had credibility, we weren’t just a couple of home- brewers. We were brewers who knew something,” Hickenlooper said.
In the mid-1990s, when many of the state’s microbrewers were getting started, Gatza was co-owner of a supply store called What’s Brewin’.
Dick Doore and Eric Wallace, who later formed Longmont’s Left Hand Brewing Co., were customers. They were also home-brewers on a mission, Gatza said.
“I knew they were up to something because they were buying the same batch of ingredients every week,” he recalled. “Most of the time, home- brewers come in one week doing a stout, and the next week they’re doing a pale ale, but these guys were pretty much getting the same base malt and making a slight tweak. So it was ‘OK, they are trying to dial something in here.’ It was an indication they were trying for commercial success.”
Making the leap to professional craft brewer requires an entrepreneurial streak and financing. The brewing equipment itself can cost in excess of $100,000, Gatza said.
Dry Dock’s DeLang spent about $120,000 to open his brewery and tasting room in an Aurora strip mall. He bought used equipment from some of Colorado’s rapidly expanding craft breweries for about $30,000.
“It is a small setup, and we are looking to expand, so the next capital investment will be much larger,” he said.
Dry Dock also supplies beer to five nearby restaurants.
The ingredients that DeLang and other commercial brewers use are readily available to home-brewers, and home-brewers can make a product as tasty as most commercial brews.
Brewing-supply shops sell prepackaged kits for a variety of beers, and there are numerous varieties of yeast, malted barley and other grains.
Home-brewing has come a long way since 1971, when Hickenlooper, who was working at an alternative school in rural Maine, made his first jug.
“In those days, you used Fleisch mann’s Yeast and Gold Medal malt extract, and neither of them were made for beer,” he said. “So the quality wasn’t quite what home-brewers make today.”
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
