Brew Crew: DIY Beer from the Brooklyn Brew Shop

Perhaps attracted by the free samples of booze, you may have already visited Brooklyn Brew Shop’s stand at the Brooklyn Flea in Ft. Greene on Saturdays or in Dumbo on Sundays. The shop’s young, entrepreneurial owners -- Erica Shea, 25, and Stephen Valand, 23 -- started selling their DIY beer kits after Erica went home one Thanksgiving and spotted her dad’s home brewing equipment. “I thought it would be a fun winter activity,” she says, “so I dragged it back to my boyfriend’s -- and we’ve been making beer ever since.” It takes some time to make a batch, so she recommends having friends over for a brewing party; then, after the jug “hangs out for a couple weeks while the yeast does the rest of the work,” you can invite everyone over again to sample it. Right now, Brooklyn Brew Shop is working on their new fall recipes, to debut at the beginning of October. There’s a Pumpkin Dubbel -- “you rim the glass in cinnamon and sugar ... it tastes like dessert” -- and “a deadly Belgian triple,” says Stephen. “It’s light but, at 10 percent, highly alcoholic.” If you can’t wait until then to start experimenting, an autumn-worthy chocolate maple porter kit (it comes with everything you need to make
a batch, or you can just opt for the grain, hops, and yeast) is out on their website now.

The brew kit.

“This is called mashing: the grain is basically steeping like oatmeal. That’s how the sugar gets extracted into the water.”

“Right after that, you put the grain into a kitchen strainer and remove the sugary water from the grain. It’s called sparging.”

The finished product.