Butler Winery shares beer brewing secrets

Butler Winery manager Amy Butler entered The Venue Fine Arts & Gifts to demonstrate her hobby of brewing beer.

Her demonstration Tuesday, filled with information on home brewing, brought in several Bloomington residents interested in making their own beer.

Butler Winery supplies brewing materials at their in-town shop located by CVS Pharmacy on 15th Street and College Avenue. It also sells supplies for making wine at home and offers wine tastings.

The kit starts at $50, but the hobby is “neat and rewarding,” Butler said. “A lot of people brew, and it turns into a little community where you can compare and learn from others.”

A brewer from her own kitchen, Butler said sometimes a batch goes wrong.

“I had some wild yeast that made it taste like Band-Aids,” she said.

Butler said the uncertainty of the two-to-four week process is the exciting part
of brewing.

She has made 12 batches and worked for the winery for 13 years.

Make yourself seem beer-savvy:

“It’s as easy as a cake mix,” Butler said.

There are four main ingredients: malt, hops, yeast and water, all of which can be found at Butler Winery. The winery offers more than 50 varieties of malt and hops.

When tasting beer, use “malty” to indicate a heavy taste in your mouth. Malt is what gives beer its sugary taste; and since many of these sugars are not fermentable, the taste will leave some heaviness on your tongue.

Use “hoppy” to show your knowledge of the bitterness in a beer. Hops provide the scent in a beer and come in citrus smells, herbs and florals.

If a beer tastes “yeasty” to your informed mouth, it’s a new beer. The beer hasn’t had time to fully ferment.

If that happens, you can say, “This will taste good in a few weeks after it ferments and the sugar settles out.”