Ready to Start Homebrewing?

I know quite a few people who want to start homebrewing, but are either intimidated by the process (it’s surprisingly easy) or don’t want to invest in the equipment quite yet. If you live in Massachusetts, I’ve found a great solution. There’s a homebrewing store in Natick, MA called Barleycorn’s where customers can brew on-site using the facility’s equipment and ingredients. If you’ve never brewed before, you can just show up, pick a recipe from a few dozen options, and then they’ll walk you through the entire process.

The brewing session takes a little under two hours, and then they’ll store your beer on site during the fermentation process. Two weeks later, you need to come back to bottle the beer. Barleycorn’s will force carbonate it the night before the bottling session, so there’s no conditioning required – you can drink it the same day it’s bottled.

The concept seems to be fairly unique, with only a dozen or so similar establishments across the country.

As someone who’s been homebrewing beer for about five years, there are two reasons why I love this concept. First, it’s a great way to show friends how to homebrew. It’s a relaxed environment, you don’t need to worry about cleaning up afterwards, and you can brew a few different recipes at the same time, which is next to impossible in a normal kitchen.

But I also liked brewing my own beer at Barleycorn’s. You can brew an original recipe, and each batch is 15 gallons – significantly larger than the standard 5 gallon homebrew batch. So once I refine a recipe to the point where I want to make a larger batch of it, this is the perfect place to do it. And at about $1/beer, it’s not much more expensive than brewing at home (and for some recipes it seems to be even cheaper).

I recently helped to organize a group trip to Barleycorn’s with some classmates from MIT, and we made 4 batches – 60 gallons of beer, or about 600 beers. Each batch came out great, and I’ll definitely bring groups back in the future.

Here’s a picture of three of the batches (in 22oz bottles):

And here’s a close-up of the beer my roommate and I made, “Magellan’s Exploration Ale”:

If you’ve been on the fence about brewing, head over with a few friends and give this a shot before buying the equipment.