As rain and hail dropped from the gray skies Saturday, 14 people huddled around two propane cookers under an overhang of the granary at Ardenwood Historic Farm.
And while their breaths were visible in the chilly air, they weren’t gathering for warmth but to brew beer.
The farm, operated by the East Bay Regional Park District, hosts many weekend activities oriented toward families. But once a year over the past 17 years, naturalist Ira Bletz has held a three-part workshop for adults only, focused on the finer points of homebrewing.
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Bletz not only shows participants how to make beer and with what, but he also explains the histories of different beer varieties, brewing methods and the role local farms played in past brewing ecosystems.
The class includes a little sampling of Bletz’ own brews.
“It’s a lot of fun,” Bletz said this week. “It combines local agricultural history with a hobby people can take home and pretty easily get into.”
The 14 people who had gathered around two steaming pots of boiling wort last weekend savored the sweet smell of malt extract that hung in the air as they made honey wheat and a red ale.
Will Lopez-Wagner, of Mountain View, signed up for the workshop to learn what mistakes he may have made in past attempts at brewing.
“I tried to make beer on a couple occasions, and it all turned out horribly,” he said. “So I’m hoping this helps.”
“I think it’s wonderful,” 70-year-old Norm Hodgson of Fremont said about the brewing workshop, adding he took the course last year for the first time.
“In fact that’s why I’m here again, just to pick up on the finer points of how to brew at home, and to understand the brewing process…so when I go out and taste beer, I have a little bit more understanding of what to ask and what to look for.”
From roughly the 1860s to the 1890s, Ardenwood operated primarily as a grain farm under the ownership George and Clara Patterson. Bletz said the oats and wheat grown there were shipped to San Francisco to be sold, then often transported to Europe.
But much of the barley grown on the Patterson farm was sold around the Bay Area to local breweries.
“Today with the craft beer revolution, we think that brewpubs are a new thing, and they’re not,” Bletz said, noting the Bay Area was full of homebrewers more than 150 years ago.
Small breweries that made and sold beer on their own sites came next, but many disappeared between the prohibition and the 1980s.
Hodgson said the brewing process is “exciting.”
“You actually get to do it. You have a coach, you have a beer coach who’s helping you go through the process,” he said. “That’s really great to have that experience.”
The group will reconvene two more Saturdays to transfer the beer for secondary fermentation and then bottling before taking it home, where it should be ready to enjoy just a few weeks later.
Members of the public can visit the farm in the summer months to help harvest and transfer grains still grown there as part of the history programs. After the late 1890s, the farm primarily began growing row crop vegetables.
Ardenwood currently operates as a working farm, modeled after the methods of the 1870s to the 1930s, Bletz said.