| During a recent interview on National Public Radio, noted beer writer Michael Jackson called homebrewers the shock troops of the beer revolution.
Those who don't homebrew probably find the hobby a little hard to understand. It's easier when you spend a few hours in the presence of dedicated brewers, preferably over a kettle of boiling wort.
That several major events are coming up in the next few weeks -- the first round of the National Homebrew Competition, the Masters Championship of Amateur Brewing and the American Homebrewers Association Big Brew -- gave us an excuse to assemble several participants to talk about things both serious and fun.
This was a virtual roundtable, with three participants answering questions via email and two others discussing most of the same subjects after judging beers at the Bay Area Mashers World Cup of Beer 2001 competition in Oakland, Calif.
Contributing by email were:
Andy Anderson - Andy is a naval architect employed by the US Navy doing ship
design studies on future aircraft carriers. However, his real passion is
brewing as evidenced by the fact that he has been the Washington, D.C., Brewer
of the Year for the past two years. He says that nothing's finer than the
feeling you get when returning home from work, opening the door to the
house, and being overwhelmed by CO2 from 30 gallons of beer merrily
fermenting away in your kitchen.
Ray Daniels - Ray Editor-in-chief of Zymurgy
and The New Brewer, founder of the Real Ale Festival and author of several
books on brewing including Designing Great Beers and the recently released
Smoked Beers.
Lynne O'Connor - Lynne is the owner St. Patrick's of Texas Brewers Supply, a 10-year-old retail homebrew and winemaking supply with customers in 70
countries. She is a second generation Texas Czech who founded the American
chapter of the Campaign to Protect Czech Brewing Heritage (now defunct) and
has written several articles on Czech brewing.
Contributing after a hard morning of judging beer were Bay Area residents Sean Quinlan, a Michigan native who started homebrewing in Tennessee, and Dan Juliano, who moved recently from Champaign-Urbana, Ill., where he was active in B.U.Z.Z. (the Boneyard Union of Zymurgical Zealots).
The round table: Part 1
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