Club for sharing hops and dreams

Local homebrewers bring creativity and camaraderie to the process

Fred Sterner (left) discusses cider making at a Boston Wort Processors meeting in Medford. (Aram boghosian for the boston globe)

MEDFORD - Kris Butler stands in front of a meeting of about 20 people and moves efficiently through her agenda. She isn't fazed that everyone in the crowd is passing around bottles and drinking beer. In fact, that's part of the point here. This is a gathering of the Boston Wort Processors, the Boston-area homebrewing club. The slim, dark-haired lawyer has been the club's president for the past year.

The Wort Processors (wort is what brewers call the sweet unfermented liquid that results from combining hot water and grain) meet monthly at a member's home to learn about and taste different styles, discuss techniques and recipes, and share their brews. It's part instruction session, part party. This gathering is held in the backyard of Ron Senykoff on a sunny Sunday recently. Butler brings up agenda items - yeast report, Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day - but there's also a soft hum of explanation and commentary as one member's barleywine (a flavorful beer with an alcohol content approaching wine's) and another's IPA are passed around. Phrases like "decoction mash" and "Cascade" float on the breeze. The first is a method of converting the starch in grain to sugar, the second a variety of hops.

The club has been around for 25 years and has about 50 members. Some brew often, says Butler, some only brew once in a while. Some, like club vice president Alastair Hewitt, have elaborate brewing setups that take up a basement. Others, like Butler, who lives in a South End loft, brew on their stovetop. (The basics of homebrewing can be as simple as cooking a pot of soup: Water, grain, concentrated wort, and hops are boiled, yeast is added, and the liquid is put in a vessel to ferment.) They got started brewing for myriad reasons, but they all seem to like the challenge of making a good (even a great) beer themselves. And they joined the Wort Processors because they enjoy the camaraderie of sharing what they've made and getting feedback on it.

Hewitt, a soft-spoken Englishman who works as a software developer, discovered he had hop vines growing in the garden of the Wakefield house he and his soon-to-be wife bought almost 10 years ago. "I thought I'd better do something with them," he says. Hewitt took best in show at the Topsfield Fair competition sponsored by the North Shore homebrewing club in 2006 and 2007.

Butler fell in love with the wide range of flavors and styles of craft brews when she lived in Eugene, Ore., in the late 1990s. She started homebrewing in 2000 when she moved to a small town in Virginia where the nearest craft beer store was 2 1/2 hours away. She still brews because she can make things that aren't commercially available, like a lemongrass IPA. Butler says there is art as well as science in the brewing process, and one of the nice things about the club is that members whose forte is finding inspired ingredients to add to their brews can consult with the technically savvy and vice versa.

The club president shares her knowledge of and enthusiasm for brewing with people outside the club, too. She is senior program manager for career development at her downtown firm, Holland & Knight, where each year she leads a session on craft beer appreciation and a session on how to homebrew for the firm's summer associates. She writes a newsletter, Boston Beer News, which she sends to the firm's partners, associates, some clients, and other brewers. The firm is so supportive, Butler says, that this year it offered its conference floor for the homebrew competition the Wort Processors host.

Just as some home cooks make food as good as a professional chef's, some homebrewers make great beer. Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Co., which makes Sam Adams, says "The best homebrewers are right up there with professional brewers." To showcase talented homebrewers, the company runs two competitions each year: the LongShot competition and the Patriot Homebrew competition. Winners of LongShot, which began in 1995, have their recipe brewed, bottled, and distributed by Sam Adams. The winner of the Patriot Homebrew competition has his or her recipe brewed by Sam and served at the Sam Adams brewpub at Gillette Stadium during New England Patriots games.

"A lot of the creativity in brewing comes from homebrewers," Koch explains. "Homebrewers have developed styles [like American IPA] that have become very popular in craft brewing."

In Medford, the Worts are tasting hard cider. Members sip a light-gold liquid made by Fred Sterner and Mary Anne McQuillan using fruit from their home orchard in Freetown. The two explain the cider-making process and pass around slices of the apple varieties the drink was made from. "Making cider is even easier than making beer," says McQuillan, who compares the difference between buying beer and brewing your own to the difference between buying spaghetti sauce and making it from scratch. "You can buy a can and heat it up or you can grow your own tomatoes and basil."

As the afternoon winds down, Butler reminds members that the club's yearly election of officers is coming up. The members don't miss a beat.

"I will bring hope to the hopeless," one jokes.

"As long as you bring beer to the beerless," someone quips.

Boston Wort Processors are at www.wort.org.