Brewing's coming home

If someone says they brew their own beer in their garage, what crosses your mind? If you drew a caricature would it involve a bearded, bulging stereotype, sitting in a shed with buckets and bottles and a speech bubble declaring it only costs tuppence a pint? Well, home-brewing has seen big changes in recent years, changes which are having an effect on the beers we see and drink in pubs and bars.

The people behind BrewDog started at home. As founder James Watt says, "there's no better way to bedazzle friends than with an IPA that you brewed just for them." For James Farran, now at Summer Wine Brewery, it was the enthusiastic feedback he received from friends that made him decide to go professional. James Kemp at Thornbridge Brewery brewed at home for 20 years before making the step up, and many new independent British breweries have made the move from dwelling house to brewhouse, including Kernel and Redemption, two recently opened London breweries.

Home-brewers continue to influence the thriving craft beer scene in the USA. There are a number of major annual competitions and there's a National Homebrewer's Conference (this year attracting over 1,200 attendees), which also has a high-profile competition. Sam Calagione from Dogfish Head, Ken Grossman from Sierra Nevada and Garrett Oliver from Brooklyn Brewery are among those amateurs who went pro. Home-brewer Erik Myers is currently asking for online investors for a new brewery in North Carolina, and Richard Brewer-Hay, an Englishman living in San Francisco, has converted space beneath his house into the Elizabeth Street Brewery where he serves his own beer - it's an underground pub in the same spirit of conviviality and quality as an underground restaurant.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, a competition organised jointly between Brew Wharf and online retailers Beermerchants came to a head last weekend. The objective was to find some of the best of British home-brewing, the prize a chance to brew using a full professional kit.

There are typically three ways to go with home-brewing, each allowing the brewer increasing levels of choice and control over the finished product: kit brewing (just add water, stir in yeast), extract brewing (boil water and malt concentrate, add your own hops and yeast) and all grain brewing (brewing from scratch). Moving from kit or extract to all grain is one of the landmark transitions of a home-brewer – it's the equivalent of going from cubes to homemade stock in cooking.

Around the judges' table were three professional brewers who also have extensive home-brewing experience. Phil Lowry, the competition organiser and the brewer at Brew Wharf, started in his garage. Pete Brissenden of Hogsback Brewery still brews at home in his spare time to experiment with new ideas and recipes. Evin O'Riordain, who set up the Kernel Brewery under the arches of Tower Bridge earlier this year and is already winning awards, tells a familiar story: "I went to America and tried some fantastic beers but when I came home I couldn't find anything like it, so I decided to make my own."

The two crates of beers for judging were all brewed on simple, low-volume home kits (up to 30 pints a batch) following the all grain method. The beers ranged from a brown ale loaded with American hops to porters, pale ales, bitters, a Belgian dubbel and some American-style IPAs. What was most clearly evident was that the beers are pushing in different directions away from standard flavours - the brewers are using varieties of hops that many professional breweries haven't added to their arsenals and speciality grains to get the base for their beer just right.

The results were astonishingly good, undoubtedly equal to or better than the output of a professional brewhouse. The winner was a unanimous decision and Mark Charlwood, a 25-year-old homebrewing beer blogger will now get to brew his superb 5.6% best bitter in the Brew Wharf brewery. This will be a far cry from the equipment he's been using which, he says, is "cobbled together from bits and pieces I've found and adapted - part creative thinking, part inspired by things other home-brewers have done," and includes a Thomas the Tank Engine plastic plate.

While it's still true that making your own beer can be a great money-saving option (after the initial outlay on equipment - from as little as £40 - you only need to buy ingredients, all of which are cheap and easily obtainable from homebrewing stores), the small scale of Mark's brewing means that it'd be cheaper to buy beer than make his own, but that's not his goal.

Amateur brewers are making some of the finest, most imaginative beers money can't buy. Many don't do it for cheap beer; they do it for better beer, the beer they want to drink, and groups like Irish Craft Brewer and London Amateur Brewers add a social element. What seems to define the new generation of home-turned-pro brewers is that they are pushing the boundaries and trying new things, forging the future of brewing - amateur beers deserve serious attention.

If you brew your own beer (or make wine, for that matter) why and what do you brew? If you favour consumption over production, would you willingly drink beer brewed by an amateur, or is there a stigma attached to it still?