Brewing Beer is an Art at Outer Richmond Brewing Station

Photo: Philip Liborio Gangi

Eric Brown (left) holds a bucket of items used in the beer brewing class while Rev Jackson holds a beer bottle where the finished product is placed after brewing. Brown and Jackson are two of the owners of the San Francisco Brewcraft.

By Alastair Bland

In San Francisco Brewcraft on Clement Street and 17th Avenue, down the aisle, past the barrels of barley and the boxes of tubes and glass bottles, dwells a heavy, white-bearded man in overalls known in the beer-brewing community as "Griz." He owns the shop, has 40 years of brewing experience behind him and is one of the most reputable beer-brewers in the Bay Area.

San Francisco Brewcraft is the only brewing supplies center in San Francisco, but the lack of competition has not lowered the small store's standards of business. Everything one needs to make beer is available and the wide selection of grains, hops and yeast draws brewers and vintners from around the Bay Area. The store's beer-making kits, which include all the ingredients measured out and ready to go, are hot sellers. They run from $65 to $119 and Griz offers a free seminar each Monday at 6 p.m. for those who have purchased a kit - but anyone can sit in, space permitting.

"People have a tendency to complicate things," Griz says in a gravelly voice to a semi-circle of pupils seated before him. "In beer-making, you're just gonna screw it all up if you do that. This stuff is really pretty easy and once you start doing it a lot, you'll have it down to a science and an art."

The steps can be covered briefly: The barley must be soaked in hot water, the malt and hops boiled and - once the stew has cooled to bath temperature - the yeast is "pitched." Fermentation takes six days or so, after which the beer is siphoned into a glass carboy and sealed with an airlock. Bottling takes place three weeks later and 10 days after that the brew is fully carbonated and ready to drink.

Griz takes as long as two hours at the Monday night class to cover the material. He tells stories, meanders, talks about music, recounts visits to breweries across the world and shares a taste of his latest beer.

"He's a laugh riot," remarked 24-year-old Howard Kahan of San Leandro after a recent Brewcraft seminar. "We all drank raspberry wheat beer and heard him talk and talk. He's a lot more interesting than a website or one of those guides-for-dummies." 

Griz admits to being a less-than-perfect businessman. He offers people who come into his shop tips on how to invigorate fermentation or sanitize equipment without having to buy extra additives and chemicals - even if that causes Brewcraft to lose some business.

"I'm not here to get rich quick," he says. "Brewing is about having fun and I want to make sure other people enjoy it as much as I have."

Griz appreciates that young people are taking to the art of brewing, but he expresses distaste for one aspect of modern culture - the cell phone.

"Turn off the cell phones," he says to his students. "That's my first rule about brewing beer. I know all you young pups have got a cell phone, but brewing is a centering activity - like meditation."

Griz stresses, too, that the point of brewing is not to make beer at a low cost.

"That's what Bud Light is for. But for those of you who need to put a price tag on it, well, fine; you can make good beer at about 80 cents per bottle. But brewing is an art and craft, and reducing it to dollars and cents is not what it's about."

Matt Johnson, 26, a novice brewer from the Sunset District, went away from a Brewcraft seminar in December and proceeded to make five gallons of the best beer he ever tasted.

"You can't buy stuff like that," he said. "It tasted like molasses, really foamy and dark. I tried to follow (Griz's) Pale Ale recipe, but I must have done something wrong. I'll have to ask him about it."

For more information on home brewing, call San Francisco Brewcraft at (415) 751-9338 or go to the website at www.sfbrewcraft.com.