Yet another item to add to the list of beer's attributes: It seems to be recession-proof.
"We've had constant growth, every year," says Gary Wilder, owner of Brew Your Own Brew, 2564 N. Campbell Ave.
The store - also known as BYOB - has been in business for 15 years, primarily selling supplies to amateur home-beer brewers. Things have gone well enough that Wilder recently opened a second BYOB, in a Gilbert strip mall, 525 E. Baseline Road.
Wine-making supplies have edged up to between 30 and 40 percent of sales in the last two years, Wilder says. And BYOB also sells kits and supplies for making soft drinks and cheese.
But home-brewed-beer supply sales continue to lead the company's sales. Part of that has come from Internet sales, which Wilder says he drives with $2,300 worth of pay-per-click advertising on Google and MSN in an average month.
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Wilder says he doesn't know what to attribute the relentless growth to, other than a willingness to make an effort to get customers what they want.
Monday afternoon, in the warehouse area in the back of the store, was a stack of home beer-brewing kits, some addressed to Taiwan, some for New York. The $200 kits contain all the equipment needed to brew beer, including enough ingredients for two cases. After the first batch, you just need $30 worth of ingredients for the next two-case batch.
"I know there are some (home-brew) stores closer to them," Wilder says of his online customers.
Employee Patrick Heacock's story may explain some of what drives customers.
"I was a customer," Heacock says, specializing in brewing cider and the ancient fermented honey brew known as mead.
For him, the history of home-brewing was and is part of the attraction.
"There's been a fermented honey brew (mead) in almost every country in the world," Heacock says.
And Wilder keeps things interesting for customers, "cloning" their favorite beers - putting together kits of ingredients that let them duplicate their favorite commercial brews at home.
BYOB now has 70 different kits, some with names that make it easy to figure out what they're cloning -Â such as "Flat Tyre."
One of the great attractions, other than the pleasure of making your own beer, is that there's always a gift you can buy a home-brewer. You can make fine beer, better than anything you'll find in a bar or liquor store, with a fairly simple and cheap bunch of equipment, Wilder says.
But there's always that urge to get some better equipment, or to make larger batches.
The hottest new toys at BYOB, Wilder says, are the stainless steel mini-tanks that look like shrunken versions of the ones in microbreweries. The largest allow one to make up to 42-gallon batches. A lot of beer.
Not a problem, says Wilder. "That's another thing, you find out you have a lot more friends when you're home-brewing."
Contact reporter Dan Sorenson at 573-4185 or dsorenson@azstarnet.com