Since taking up homebrewing three years ago, Hanii Takahashi has advanced quickly and enthusiastically. She upgraded her setup from a basic kit she bought on Amazon to an all-electric system and four-tap kegerator. Living north of Glendale, California, she then joined her local homebrew club, SoCal Cerveceros. And now, she's in the process of obtaining certifications through the Beer Judge Certification and Cicerone programs.
“Since I started homebrewing, I feel like I’m so much of a cooler person,” Takahashi says. “Most people think that I look like a person who doesn’t know about beer. They say ‘Do you like beer?’ and I say ‘Yes, in fact, I actually brew it.’”
Takahashi is the kind of new, eager homebrewer the hobby could use more of. Membership in the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) has declined to roughly 30,000 people, a -35% drop since its high of 46,000 in 2018. During that time, the COVID-19 pandemic reduced attendance at in-person homebrew club meetings as interest in homebrewing also waned. But it was also a boon to other hands-on, at-home culinary hobbies, such as bread baking, vegetable gardening, and barbecuing. And while many of these hobbies have stuck for Americans post-pandemic, a declining interest in homebrewing is also taking place as beer is more challenged than ever. Historically, homebrewing hasn’t just been a pipeline to the pros, but a recognizable sign of people who are so passionate about a drink they love that they’re willing to make it themselves.
A drip in homebrewing runs parallel an existential question for the industry: What happens when people care less about craft beer?
Julia Herz, the head of the AHA for the past two years, is frank about homebrewing’s need to broaden its appeal. In particular, she cites an imperative to welcome in new, legal-drinking-age beer fans outside of the hobby’s typically older, male demographic.
“One of the biggest things I’m asked from homebrew club leaders is: How do we attract more young people and women to brew? How do we diversify?” Herz says, emphasizing an ongoing theme Bart Watson, chief economist of the Brewers Association, has also been highlighting for months. To grow homebrewing and beer fandom with a new generation, it’s time to start connecting with them as soon as possible.
Under Herz’s leadership, the AHA has committed itself to that: It has altered its mission statement to include language about “empowering an equitable homebrew culture” and “showcasing the fun of fermentation.” To support that, it published a code of conduct that it recommends homebrew clubs adopt. And this year, the AHA held its first boot camp for homebrewing club officers in conjunction with its annual Homebrew Con. The workshops focused on growing and sustaining homebrew club membership with an eye toward diversifying club demographics.
“I think homebrewing suffers from a bit of a stigma from its early years, but if you Google homebrewing today and do an image search, that’s … homebrewing today,” Herz says. “It has nothing to do with gender. It has nothing to do with what your upbringing or background is. It has everything to do with your interest in the reward of brewing a beverage.”
For many, the calculation of homebrewing’s reward has changed. As the availability of professionally brewed craft beer has exploded in recent years, beer fans haven’t needed to homebrew in order to find creative, high-quality beer. It’s led to an inversion in the relationship between homebrewed and commercial beer.
For decades, hobbyist homebrewers turned pro. The AHA historically estimated that 90% of professional brewers had begun as homebrewers. But today, aspiring beer professionals have access to educational programs at colleges all over the country and an even easier time getting into beer as a career: There are roughly 100,000 full- and part-time jobs in the industry, and smaller, pilot brewing systems offer a set of training wheels on which to learn.
Now, it’s often a familiarity with commercial craft beer that is essentially a prerequisite for homebrewing. In 2024, Homebrew Con will for the first time take place in conjunction with the Great American Beer Festival, an acknowledgment of the narrowing gap between hobbyist beer makers and commercial beer drinkers. But converting casual beer fans to homebrewers willing to spend time and money to make their own beer—of variable quality—is an uphill battle.
Money has always been a barrier to homebrewing. The most basic, two-gallon Mr. Beer kit costs about $50, while a starter kit from Austin Homebrewing costs about $100 before factoring in ingredients, bottles, and other supplies. Access to certain recipes and some homebrewing advice also cost money. Once a homebrewer advances to regular batches of all-grain brewing (versus the malt extract kits that many begin with) and has purchased their initial equipment, homebrewing can potentially be cost-effective versus buying commercial beer, but even then one batch requires hours of work. But realistically, most homebrewers both make and buy beer, and few brew their own for purely economic reasons.
This overall picture can make homebrewing even less appealing for some. In fact, cost is the first factor that Sarah Palermo, an accountant who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, cites as a barrier to homebrewing more often. She and her husband, Matt, began brewing regularly in 2020, but find themselves spending more on craft beer now than they did before they started making it themselves. She says that while inflation has raised beer prices, she and her husband are simply purchasing more beer than they used to since they began brewing.
“We’ll buy a $20 bottle of a barrel-aged something we would have never bought years ago,” Palermo says. “We’ve become friends with a lot of our local head brewers so we want to support them and go to the big releases.”
The Palermos are an example of how homebrewing reinforces people’s interest in supporting commercial craft beer, to small breweries’ economic benefit. But homebrewers are more ambivalent when it comes to the strength of the link between drinking craft beer and wanting to make it. Homebrewing— which Herz says is “tied to the DNA of beer”—needs to strengthen that bond in order to grow.
Herz says the link between homebrewing and the rise of U.S. craft beer is inextricable. Still, she adds that there’s a wide gulf between the number of people today who like drinking beer and those who want to brew it themselves.
“I don’t think it’s a complete connect-the-dots,” Herz says. “People tasting craft beer, especially when they’re rewarded with a world-class one, that’s good for homebrewing. If you have a good beer, maybe you're so inspired by it, you want to make it.”
But this relationship is rarely direct. Palermo previously had a casual interest in craft beer thanks to her dad’s affinity for dark beer styles. It wasn’t until she and her now-husband won a Mr. Beer homebrewing kit at a raffle in 2018 that their interest in making beer themselves piqued. (The beer they made on that kit wasn’t very good, she admits.) It took them joining their local homebrew club, the Carboy Junkies, in 2020 to start their homebrewing hobby in earnest. At their wedding earlier this year, they served six homebrewed beers on draft; their coffee porter in particular was a hit. She sees something of a link between drinking craft beer and making it, but believes pro brewers could do more to strengthen that connection in the eyes of beer fans.
“Professional brewers are doing a lot of tours and I don’t know why that doesn’t get more people into [homebrewing],” Palermo says. “They do [public] brew days, but it doesn’t seem like they advocate ‘Hey this is possible at home,’ maybe because they’re trying to sell their own product.”
Scott Joines is the founder of the Carboy Junkies, and he sees a negative correlation between the number of local craft breweries and the number of homebrewers. He says interest in the club declined six to eight years ago as more craft breweries opened in the Birmingham area. As older members of the club have moved away or aged out, fewer new members are replacing them. He says this is because accessing a variety of craft beer styles no longer requires a homebrew kit.
“Most of the younger beer lovers today just like going to local breweries instead of brewing their own beer,” he says. “Brewing is a passion that is a whole lot like work.”
In addition to effort, it’s hard to argue that homebrewing makes economic sense when Birmingham taprooms sell $10 six-packs and national craft IPAs in 19.2oz cans can be found priced at 2-for-$5 at convenience stores.
If commercial beer isn’t a sure gateway to homebrewing, what is? Other homebrewers. Herz says the AHA has found that gifts of homebrew kits and invitations from friends to homebrew are two most common paths for new homebrewers to enter the hobby. (Both were true for Palermo.) Part of the lore of the Mr. Beer kit is the reality that it's launched countless pro careers. It’s why the AHA encourages its members to reach out to friends who might be interested in the hobby. That message was the crux of Herz’s director’s column in the July/August issue of the AHA magazine, Zymurgy, titled “Are We Doing Enough? Inviting All Walks of Life to Homebrew.”
“To get more people to homebrew, we need seasoned homebrewers who inspire others,” she wrote.
That was true for Takahashi. In between her full-time job as a cloud researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and parenting a young child, she became an avid homebrewer during the height of the COVID pandemic. When she saw a friend’s photos of his at-home kegerator setup on Facebook, a lightbulb went off. Tasting her friend’s beer in person only cemented her interest. And it was another friend, Masashiro Kitano, who invited her to join SoCal Cerveceros. After that, she jumped into brewing head first.
“Something hit me: Wow, this is so cool,” Takahashi says. “Even just changing the temperature, that’s science. That made me think brewing beer is actually really fun.”
Herz’s column also noted that homebrewers can act as role models for acquaintances who share aspects of an identity: “We need people who identify with those who mirror our own life experiences and backgrounds.”
It’s this part that may be a challenge for the hobby. Most current homebrewers are white men. And people, especially white people, have friends of predominantly their own race.
According to the Pew Research Center, among adults who identify solely as white, 81% say that all or most of their close friends are white.
Likewise, Pew has found that 66% of adults say most or all of their friends are the same gender as them.
Ask an existing homebrewer to invite a friend to brew with them, and statistically, that friend is likely to be a white man, too.
The Carboy Junkies’ membership reflects this homogeneity: Joines says the club is made up of 80% white males over the age of 35, with the majority of them being older than 50. He says everyone in the club is married; most are affluent; and most have graduate degrees. These demographics didn’t deter the Palermos from joining three years ago. (They say they consider themselves “old souls.”) But Sarah Palermo does feel her gender sometimes prevents her from being fully accepted as a homebrewer by the general public.
“I automatically feel like Matt gets more respect than I do because of his gender. It’s harder for me to have real deep conversations about the science of beer,” she says.
Takahashi says she’s heard “horror stories” about experiences about women and racial minorities being discriminated against as homebrewers, but she hasn’t encountered that. To the contrary, she’s found SoCal Cerveceros—a club founded on expanding representation and inclusivity—to be “very welcoming, so sweet, and so supportive.” She also believes that working in atmospheric science, which she describes as 90% male, prepared her for being one of only a few women in a group.
“Females were always a minority so maybe that’s one reason I didn’t have any issue having so many men … I didn’t have this ‘oh my god’ moment,” she says.
The warm embrace Takahashi found at SoCal Cerveceros may be a product of that club’s unique positioning. Founded in 2015, SoCal Cerveceros has become the largest Latinx-focused homebrew club in the country, one that by its nature attracts a demographic that homebrewing has historically struggled to connect with. That’s also true of homebrew clubs and events like Hop Bombshells, Melanated Mash Makers, Queers Makin’ Beers, and SheBrew. If it’s going to build back its numbers, the AHA needs more clubs like these to roll out the welcome mat for women and people of color.
“As word started to spread of a newly formed Latino homebrew club, brewers expressed how excited they were: Finally, a group with people who looked like them,” Ray Ricky Rivera, the club’s co-founder, wrote in 2022. “For the first time in their homebrewing experience, they felt a sense of belonging, they said, one that was motivated by beer but cemented by shared experiences within this specific community.”
Inviting new people—of all genders, races, and ethnicities—to homebrewing is clearly a priority for the AHA and many homebrew club leaders. And given the relationship between homebrewing and passion for craft beer, it’s also a priority for the professional brewing industry. The open question is whether the existing demographics of the hobby put homebrewers in a position to do the necessary outreach that will meaningfully expand its reach.
For decades, homebrewing was the first step in what would, for many, become a professional brewing career. As the craft beer industry has matured, however, what was once a strong tie has become frayed. Herz says that the futures of the two sides of brewing—hobby and professional—need to be recoupled in order to thrive. She describes homebrewing as a talent development pipeline that’s intrinsically tied to professional beer’s DNA.
“We’re helping remind craft beer that homebrewing is here,” she says. “If we want to diversify who is in beer and get people more in touch with ingredients and process, then homebrewing is the key.”
Annie Johnson, a beer writer, national beer judge, and experienced homebrewer who in 2013 was named the AHA’s homebrewer of the Year, agrees with Herz’s assessment. (Johnson is also a member of the AHA’s Governing Committee.) She splits her time between Seattle and northern California, and says that in both areas, there are far fewer breweries opened by former homebrewers than in years past.
“I'm seeing more homebrewers giving up the hobby in favor of drinking craft beer at their local or regional brewery,” she says. “It doesn't [completely] matter if homebrewing isn't a part of that journey but it would be better if it were. There's a lot more to brewing than just liking the end product, so why not find out if you like the process first?”
Beneath the decoupling of craft beer from its homebrewing roots is a fear that brewery owners today could become alienated from the hands-on art of beer making. Not all homebrewers who opened breweries necessarily had business savvy, but they had a ready answer for the question of why they opened a brewery: to make good beer. Putting in years or decades of making beer at home built a skillset. It’s not the only way to acquire those skills, Johnson notes, but it shows a commitment to learning the fundamentals.
“Some [people] just want to jump into the professional world without education. I find that to be a recipe for disaster as I do with any career,” she says.
Beyond technical skills, there’s a more ephemeral role that homebrewing has played in craft beer’s rise: If nothing else, homebrewers have a demonstrated love for making and drinking the beer itself. Given the difficult economic climate for craft breweries today, those small businesses need loyal customers more than ever. Homebrewers have historically been that fan base. Losing the connection between craft beer and homebrewing has existential implications for the former, not only the latter. Admiration for beer itself should be a centering principle in a tough climate for the industry. Ask Herz why she homebrews, and it’s impossible not to feel her pure passion for the physical act of beer making.
“Homebrewing teaches me about magic,” she says. “We get to play. We put the puzzle of all the ingredients together. … This is about more than drinking beer. This is about sensory exploration and reward.”
Words by Kate Bernot