Member Profiles is a series featuring members of the CHA, and sharing their story about how they got into homebrewing. If you’d like to share your story or know someone with an interesting homebrew story, send an email to kathy@canadahomebrews.ca.
I’ve been homebrewing for 4 years now. A friend of mine was brewing and was talking about it often. So I got on Youtube and watched a ton of homebrewing videos and decided it was time for me to try. I ordered my starter kit and never looked back.
My first ever batch was a simple blond ale, nothing to fancy. Back then, it was an extract kit. Nowadays, I still brew…but I’ve migrated the recipes to all-grain.
I started [out] like a lot of homebrewers—small batches on the stovetop with my trusty plastic bucket fermenter. I quickly switched to all-grain and took the brewing outside for five gallon batches. I still do one gallon test batches for fun and I’m on the verge of buying a Robobrew so I can brew all year long without worrying about the weather.
I don’t really have a favorite style that I like to brew but I really enjoy stout because of the smell. My breakfast stout is a beer I love to brew and that get lots of people that don’t stouts into that kind of beer.
If I can give only one tip it would be this—never throw a beer away, even if the brew day was bad, fermentation never took [off] or any other bad thing you could think of. My best beer cost me a kitchen sink and the brewing went so wrong I never thought it would be any good. Turns out it was the best beer I’d ever brewed and ended up having only a gallon of that test batch which I’m still trying to replicate to this day
We have a small club here but it’s not structured. We do not have many
people in our area, but we are looking into expanding to other cities to make it a little bigger and maybe getting a couple of cities together to have more people.
I like homebrewing because I like the process of creation. Even though I’m not the most experienced homebrewer, I always strive to try new things to one-up my game every time while keeping the process fun. I also like the community factor. Even though I’m in a small town, the internet as made it way easier for people like me to have a brewday alone and still make it interactive 🙂
Yan is the Quebec regional rep, and you can reach him at yan@canadahomebrews.ca
The Canadian Homebrewers Association is a non-profit dedicated to promoting and advancing the hobby of homebrewing in Canada. Established in 2018, it currently has more than 330 members across most of Canada's provinces and territories.