Homebrewed: Lynchburg brewers share trade tips, taste tests

They meet in the basement on a cold Tuesday night in January - a subterranean gathering of men and beer.
It's not an ordinary basement filled with musty furniture and half-finished home improvement projects, but a beer-lover's fantasy: a basement turned pub, with a handmade bar, three kegs, three taps and assorted pint glasses.
The sign on the wall reads "Fleck's Brewpub, Est. 2005. Only the finest handcrafted beers served here."
Fleck would be Jeff Fleck, tonight's host and president of the Hill City Homebrewers.
The club began about nine years ago as an informal gathering.
"In the late '90s, you couldn't buy a decent beer in Lynchburg," Fleck says. "That is what brought us together."
"An exotic beer in Lynchburg was a Heineken from the Kroger," chimes in Chuck Story.
Dismayed by the lack of decent beer in the area, these men (and a few women) decided to make their own. The group, which is affiliated with the American Homebrewers Association, meets once a month to sample each other's brews, trade tips and diagnose problems with beers gone bad.
The members share more than just a love for malted barley and hops. It's a social outlet, a time to tell stories, laugh and drink some good brew.
"We leave our daytime worries at the door, come together and talk about beer," Fleck says.
Nine men showed up for this meeting in Forest; many more are on the club's e-mail list. Of those nine, six are engineers, which makes sense since brewing is a process-intensive endeavor. One is a software manager at Tyco, one works for Genworth Financial and the outlier is David Johnson, a graphic artist.
Each brought a batch of beer for the group to taste. Some months, all the members must bring in a specific style of beer. Tonight anything goes. There are Heffeviesens, porters, stouts, IPAs and even meads.
"Each of us has a very distinct flavor," Jeff says, an "IPA guy" who relishes the bitter taste of hops.
The meeting is stiff at first, but once the beer starts flowing everyone seems to relax.
They pass around a bottle of Raspberry Heffeviesen by Paul Goodjohn, a homebrewer for 24 years, who admits it's a "bizarre combination."
The tasting ritual begins. It goes something like this: pour beer; swirl beer in glass; tilt glass to nose; take a whiff; taste the beer. There are a few moments of silence until Johnson breaks the ice.
"I didn't spit it on the floor yet," he says with a laugh.
"A little hot on the end but nothing wrong with it," says Fleck.
The ritual continues for 18 brews. Most are praised; there are few bad apples in the bunch.
The tastings are broken up by storytelling, non-sequiturs and sporadic bursts of laughter. The men talk process and ingredients. They spin stories about their brewing debacles.
Goodjohn, a jokester with a British accent, describes his theory on the three levels of homebrewing. Level one is to brew a beer that "doesn't make you go blind" (i.e. it's drinkable). Level two is to create beer that's just as good as commercial beer, and level three brewers can make beer that is better than what you get in the store.
Almost every brewer has a disaster story of a beer gone bad.
"You aren't really a brewer until you've screwed one up royally," says Story.
The most common mistake during brewing is "overboiling." When temperatures get too hot, the liquid boils over the pot and can flood the floor.
Using dirty equipment is the second biggest brewing hazard. Without proper sterilization, bacteria on the equipment can infect the beer, causing it to taste like "fire," "a box of Band-Aids" or worse, Fleck says.
Paul recalls pouring out a bad batch into his garden, weeping for the gallons of beer gone to waste. To compound the tragedy, it ended up killing his broadleaf plums.
The barrier to entry for homebrewing is relatively low. With about $100 worth of equipment, an aspiring homebrewer can make a 5-gallon batch of beer on the kitchen stove in about two hours. In a matter of weeks, the beer will have fermented and be ready to drink.
Each homebrewer develops an individual style and traditions for crafting beer.
David Johnson brews in his unfinished basement on Friday nights in the winter, and on the back deck when it's warm. He blasts progressive rock on the stereo and often invites friends over while he works.
Since he is a graphic designer, he creates stylized labels for his beer. Right now, his theme is "classic silver screen," so buxom starlets grace his bottles.
Johnson recently completed his 122nd batch. He remembers his first one, a Saison, like it was yesterday.
"I was sniffing at it like it was poison," he recalls. "Then I tried it, and you know what, it was not half bad."
Story, one of the newest brewers in the group, is on his 25th batch. He started two years ago.
A low-tech brewer, Story boils his beer in a five-gallon stainless steal pot on his kitchen stove, and cools the pot in his bathtub.
"I like that I can make what I really like to drink," he says. "I can create something almost artistically that not a lot of people can or want to."
Creating beer that satisfies a personal palate is what drives most homebrewers to create. Sharing it with others makes the effort even more rewarding.
That's where the monthly homebrewing meetings come in.
Two hours into the tasting in Fleck's basement, the bar and tables are scattered with empty and half-empty bottles. Over the course of the night, each person ends up drinking one or two beers.
The last brew is mead, drink of the Vikings. Jerome Snyder, an engineer, and brewer for 12 years, has a soft spot for this potent, honey-based beverage.
He presents his pineapple mead. The ritual repeats: tilt, sniff, taste.
"It's a little dry," someone says.
"It's like moonshine,"
"That could probably run a car."
The men burst into laughter. With the mead gone, it's closing time at Fleck's Pub.