Lawrence Brewers Guild

Charlie Papazian, “the Johnny Appleseed of good beer,” as an old friend describes him, “or maybe the Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters and Joey Ramone of beer, overthrowing the status quo,” lives about six miles north of downtown Boulder, Colorado, at the end of a rutted dirt road, in a modest two-story home with views of the Rocky Mountains. He’d fallen in love with the place on sight. The isolated location, the light, the chortling brook in the backyard—perfect. Except for one thing. “You have to understand that I was used to brewing in basements,” he said when I visited him a few months ago. “And this house has no basement! So I had this vision. I’d convert the garage into a single-use facility, the ideal beer-brewing space.”

Papazian installed a glass-walled cooler, plus a custom-built, walk-in fridge with six-inch-thick foam-insulated walls he’d reclaimed from a defunct turkey farm. He left the original workbench and a few lockers and added several sets of shelves to stow the essentials: buckets of malted barley, rice, and yeast cultures, glass carboys for fermenting the beer, serpentine coils of tubing and strainers for trapping the errant grain, and a freezer full of hops.