As an upstanding member of the Brews Brothers club, Jim Hinken takes his beer-making seriously. In the 25 years he's been brewing, he's put together a nicer setup than you'd need to start your own garage-style microbrewery.

Mad scientist? No, home brewer. Hinken is part of a quiet network of people who like to literally cook their own beer. Not satisfied with simply heading to the corner bar for a cold one, these folks engage in a complicated ritual that, when it goes well, produces gallons and gallons of the good stuff.

It should probably not be surprising that in this land of microbreweries so many people have started making the ultimate microbrew. Done right, home brews taste better than the mass-produced stuff. Plus they're cooler, cheaper and more fulfilling.

"It would probably be analogous to somebody who grows their own food in their garden," Hinken says. "There's that type of satisfaction."

The interest in home brewing has spawned several area clubs. There's the Cascade Brewers Guild, the Impaling Alers and the Brews Brothers, of which Hinken is a member and past president. The "Brothers" meet once a month to taste each other's work.

Hinken has been brewing beer at home for 25 years and figures his current setup for beer production — which is a bit nicer than a novice home brewer needs — cost him about $800. That may seem pricey, but consider this: Hinken says it now costs him only $20 to make the equivalent of 80 pints. That's 25 cents a pint, better than even the best happy-hour price.

The process of making beer at home is not for those with minimal patience or bad language skills. It takes about a week to make a single batch, and moving through the various steps requires learning a new vernacular filled with words that sound like they were dreamed up by drunks: barming, mashing, pitching, carboy, wort.

The basic ingredients in beer are water, yeast, barley and hops. How you balance the barley and hops, how you heat the whole mixture, and what else you add (people have been known to throw in everything from Irish moss to blueberries) determines the taste.

"The whole process goes like this," says Avery Bishop, one of Hinken's cohorts in the Brews Brothers, sounding as if he is going to explain something very simple. "You take barley, and you heat it up. And when you heat it, it starts to sprout. And as it does that, that converts the starch into maltose, this simple sugar. But then you continue to heat it. And that kills the germination so that it's no longer a live seed. But now you've got the maltose . . . "
 

	TO BREW YOUR OWN Some good Web sites on home-brewing clubs and making beer: Cascade Brewers Guild: www.cascadebrewersguild.org/ Impaling Alers: www.geocities.com/impalingalers/ Brews Brothers: www.brewsbrothers.org/ American Homebrewers Association: www.beertown.org/AHA/

Lost? Bishop has just described "barming," the process by which a grain (barley) is made into a sugary malt. Malt is important to beer because malt + yeast + fermentation = alcohol. "That's all alcohol is — a byproduct of the yeast eating the sugar," Hinken says.

Alcohol. Now we've got your attention again. Alcohol is the point of this exercise, right? Keep that destination in mind as we move from the land of barming. What comes next, basically, is a boiling of the fruits of the barm. (That is, a maltose and water mixture known as the "wort.") After the wort boils for a while, the petals of a bitter, green flower are added. This flower comes from the hop vine, and the petals are known as hops.

At this point, Bishop notes, "It smells wonderful. People say it smells like a brewery and I say, 'Yeah, that's the point.' "

A steamy blend of floral bitterness and sticky sweetness is wafting through the air. Next step is to cool the wort, put it in a big glass container known as a "carboy," and "pitch" some yeast in. Then you let the whole thing sit for a good long while as the yeast eats the sugar, producing alcohol along with lots of carbon dioxide bubbles.

After a certain waiting period — some say a week, some two weeks, some three months — you are ready to pour a beer.

Of course, the actual process involves precise measurements, proper timing, sanitary equipment and lots of attention. There are pitfalls: It's easy for home brew to get infected, which doesn't make it dangerous to drink but does make it taste really bad. And there are limits: the law prohibits you from producing more than 200 gallons a year at home. But if you can follow directions, which are easy to find on the Web or through a club, you can make beer.

"Brewing is no different than a form of cooking," Hinken says. "Give 'em a recipe and they can do it." Is it necessary to have a degree in biochemistry, as Hinken, an employee at Puget Sound Blood Center, does? "It doesn't help the brewing process at all," he says. "It just helps my understanding of it."

His understanding has taken him a long way from the first beer he ever made, a Porter. ("It was terrible," he says.) Now he's a certified Beer Judge (yes, there is such a thing) and the winner of two home-brewing competitions.

Hinken does it all for the simple pleasure of being able to enjoy a beer made with his own hands.

"Not only the enjoyment of beer," he adds, as if recalling the trouble it takes to make one. "But the enjoyment of the process of making beer."

Eli Sanders is a free-lance writer based in Seattle. Barry Wong is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.