(Editor’s Note: this is the first installment of “So Yeah, Dood…”, a bi-weekly column by Baltimore writer/homebrewer Ryan Boddy.)

So Yeah, D00d…

Tomorrow morning I will br00 approximately 50 gallons of an all Fuggles, American style pale ale. This is act two in my first venture into bulk br00ing and it comes about 3 years into my adventures in homebr00. I br00ed a Kolsch two weeks ago. All this b33r is part of the alcohol that will be served at my wedding. I will begin heating water at about 8 am, milling grain shortly thereafter and mashing once the 55 gallons of water reaches 175î F. The mash will take about 90 minutes and then I’ll sparge over about an hour before boiling the resultant wort and adding hops at various intervals. I should get home about 7 tomorrow evening and half of the 50 gallons will be mine.

So why go to all this effort for something I could go pick up at the local liquor store for far less trouble? Outside of it being a gift for my wedding guests, why would anyone else bother br00ing their own beer?

Not entirely the bottom line: price. I spent maybe $200 on the actual beer and I will have as much beer for that small amount as I could get for $800 for your average middle-of-the-road beer. Given, I also had equipment to buy to facilitate such a large brew but I’ll end up using it all later for wine or large batches of beer.

Beyond that, this beer will taste better than most anything I could tap from a commercial keg or pour from a bottle. With the help of my local homebrew shop owner/Br00club president, I am crafting this specifically with my guests varying degree of experience in mind. Hopefully, philistines and afficonados alike will enjoy what I’ve produced.

Ultimately, the most satisfying part of taking on a task of this proportion lies in consuming these libations with friends, satisfied that few other grooms can say that they produced the ales and meads that their guests imbibed on their wedding day. It’s relatively unique in this age of convenience and mass consumerism.

Still, these particulars don’t entirely afford good reasons for the average drinker to get up early, move bags of grain, sweat through the heat of a boil while stirring, or spend 11 hours total to achieve little more than satisfaction at producing something fine in the end.

So how about these reasons:

It’s healthy. Homebrew contains live yeast, a major source of vitamin B and the very vitamin that drinkers lose while processing alcohol. Homebrew, consumed in similar amounts to your average macrobrew is less likely to leave you with a powerful need for huevos rancheros the following morning.

It’s revolutionary. Buying alcohol from any licensed establishment costs extra money in the form of tax. Malted barley is considered food and thus it isn’t taxed. Beyond that, it’s your right as a twenty-one-year-old in the US to br00 up to 100 gallons of beer in your own home per year. 200 gallons if there is more than one adult in the household. Mind you, I’ve never had the ATF show up to check. (I did a quarter of my total for 2006 in two weeks.) Far be it from me to want to cut the purse-strings of a government whose policies I agree with, but in times like these, the words “Whiskey Rebellion” sound pretty good to me. Add to that the fact that large scale commercial brewers often support the worst of the politicians –think Pete Coors, Augustus Busch and their ilk– and you can see how brewing your own is sticking it to the man in at least some small respect. Vote with your dollar, d00d.

Not a lot of people do it well.Even 73 years after the repeal, Prohibition has its lingering effect on how Americans consume beer. The macro brewers of our age were born in the death throes of the Noble Experiment when the small breweries couldn’t stay in the business without selling product. Br00ing became a rich man’s game aimed at keeping the working man full of sub-par beer. The art of producing unique, small batch beers was lost to most of the country until the late 1970s when former president Carter finally made the br00ing of beers legal for unlicensed, non-merchant br00ers. Still, the advances made in the past thirty or so years haven’t even really begun to scratch the surface. Br00ing our own makes us trailblazers in a lost civilization.

B33r is (probably) the impetus for civilization itself! Anthropologists have recently found archaeological evidence in various locations that suggest that it was the production of b33r, not bread, that got all of us former monkeys to settle down in one place. So no matter what your cultural background may be, br00ing is in your blood.

So yeah, d00d… Drink some watered down swill if you must but at least consider the fact that you could be making what you drink to your own specifications.