Tim Matson started making his own beer in the 1970s

I didn’t get serious about making beer until the 70s, but I trace my brewer’s roots back to the 50s when I was at school in the woods of northwest Connecticut. One year, five of us bunked in a small dorm called somewhat ominously, “The Workshop.”
   
Every fall during apple season, the five of us would troop down to the general store at the bottom of the hill and each buy a gallon of cider. The idea was to bring a jug to an ancient tobacco barn where we watched old black-and-white movies every Saturday night. I’m not sure where the idea came for what happened next — maybe one of those Cagney jailhouse pictures where the convicts make hooch with yeast and sugar stolen from the mess hall. Anyway, instead of taking the cider to the movie we got one of the cooks to give us some bread yeast and bagged a bowl of sugar from the dining room. The sugar and the yeast went into the glass cider jugs, which we capped off tight, imagining the swell concoction we’d make. We hid the bottles in the back of the communal closet we all shared. On Saturday night, while we watched bombs exploding in a World War II movie, the bottles in the closet also exploded, saturating all of our suits, ties, button-down shirts and shoes in yeasty semi-alcoholic cider.  
   
The next day, Sunday morning, the entire school had to show up for chapel in three-piece suits for communion. We sniffed our soaked suits, winced and feared the dilemma: if we skipped chapel we’d wind up with hours of chores like washing windows, mopping floors and whatever other horrors the prefects could imagine . . . not to mention possibly going to hell. Courting sacrilege, we donned our suits and went to chapel. It didn’t take long for everyone nearby to snicker, pinch their noses and clear a circle around us.
   
What happened next has always puzzled me. Perhaps it was a sermon of forgiveness from the altar, or the smell of communion wine masking the tweedy cider, but after the service we went back to the dorm, cleaned up and not a word was said. Was closet brewing an unspoken tradition, and we’d passed some magical muster? Whatever it was, looking back I suspect that’s where I caught the brew bug.
    

Except for that explosive batch of cider, I hadn’t made a drop of hooch for almost 20 years when I became a part of the back-to-the-land movement in Vermont in the 70s. At first I was building houses and growing gardens, which can work up a big thirst. There was just enough information out there at the time to encourage me to find a way to make an alternative to the mediocre beers generally available back then. Inspired by a few articles in Mother Earth News and some obscure underground pamphlets, the memory of that boarding-school cider adventure came back. (There was also the taste of a few surviving independent beers like Naragansett Porter to lead me on.)
   
So I bought canned cooking malts (Blue Ribbon, featuring Lovely Lena with the next door face), bread yeast and sugar and saved my Naragansett bottles, which were sturdy enough to rinse out and recap. And when I didn’t have enough bottles I just drank the stuff out of the fermentation crock, usually a big plastic garbage can. The fancy fermenters, hydrometers, roasted barley and Oregon hops came later — there were hops for free growing around abandoned cellar holes all over Vermont. Those old timers knew what they were doing!
    
    Tim Matson is the co-author of Mountain Brew, a guide to homebrewing, which was first published in 1975 and is now back in print.