A brew hope: Santa Cruz homebrew culture bubbles to life with return of community festival

On Saturday evening, more than 200 people gathered at the Veterans Memorial Building in downtown Santa Cruz to sample eclectic brews like hard cider with prickly pear, traditional absinthe, mead made with blueberries and an herbal beer made with bay laurel, white sage and lemongrass instead of hops. 

A jazz band played a lively tune from the stage while the crowd circulated around an enormous charcuterie board. With a menu and a 10-drink punch card in hand, they could choose from around 40 hard ciders, wines made from grapes and other fruits, beers, spirits, nonalcoholic beverages like kombucha and ginger beer, mead – a wine-like drink made from fermented honey – and even coffee. 

These unusual beverages were all homebrewed, which means they were made at home by amateurs, not professional brewers. Hobbyists from Santa Cruz County and Monterey County, along with paying attendees, came together to share and sample each other’s creations at the DIYine Homebrewing Festival.

Santa Cruz County was once the site of a robust homebrewing scene until it was disrupted by the pandemic, the CZU fire and other challenges. The DIYine festival marks the first major public homebrewing event in the county in more than five years, signaling a revival for a hobby that surged in popularity in the 2010s alongside the rise of craft beer.

But public meetups declined locally after the 2017 closure of Seven Bridges Organic Brewing Supply, a cooperative store on River Street in Santa Cruz that sold home brewing supplies. Around the same time, meetups hosted by the Santa Cruz Fruit Tree Project, a group that organized gleaning of private fruit trees throughout the county, tapered off. Then, COVID-19 made gathering to share homemade brews and hosting events nearly impossible.

DIYine ran for seven years, from 2013 to 2019, at the Museum of Art and History. But the pandemic put an “emotional pause” on the festival and other homebrewing events. Homebrewer Stacey Falls felt like after five years, it was time to revive it. “I’ve been feeling sort of disconnected from the community, and felt like I wanted to have more ways to bring people together,” she said.  

Last year, Falls and fellow homebrewer Scott Joly, who had been involved with DIYine before the pandemic, decided to bring back the beloved event. Falls’ husband, Steve Schnaar, founded Santa Cruz Fruit Tree Project in 2010 and was the original creator of the festival. Schnaar didn’t have time to focus on the event this year, so Falls and Joly stepped up, reestablishing the tasting event from the MAH at the Veterans Memorial Building. 

But Falls and Joly soon discovered that many of their previous homebrewing connections had gone cold. Several people had lost all of their brewing equipment in the CZU Lighting Complex fires that swept through the Santa Cruz Mountains in 2020. Others had moved away, or were no longer focusing on the hobby. 

Several major homebrewing clubs declined to participate over concerns about liability, should someone become sick or be overserved, said Joly, who accepted personal responsibility for the event. That was disappointing to him, because in 10 years of homebrewing, he’s never heard of a single instance of anyone becoming sick from drinking homebrew. “There’s a reason people drank fermented beverages over water for hundreds of years. It’s predominantly safer for a drink to have alcohol in it because it kills diseases and whatnot,” said Joly. “That being said, you can have sensitivities to tannins and yeast.” 

Nevertheless, organizers were able to bring enough participants together through the Santa Cruz Beekeepers Guild – who showed up en force with more than 15 varieties of alcohol brewed from different kinds of honey – and other location connections for the gathering. This year’s event raised $1,200 through proceeds from ticket sales to donate to Urban Works, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit that supports art and recreation.

Duane Shima, owner of Bottoms Up Homebrew Supply in Seaside, got word of the festival and put the call out to his own network, who agreed to bring a selection of beers. “These community-focused events support small businesses, and encourage people to try homebrewing,” he said. “It blows my mind that more people aren’t homebrewing. Beer is so expensive – $8 a pint is insane.”

Inside the Veterans Building, the quality of the beverages overall was impressive. Many of the ciders, meads and wines boasted enticing aromas, well-crafted mouthfeel and complex flavors. And unlike commercial wineries and breweries, which are tethered to the commercial side of production – whether or not someone will actually buy their product – homebrewers are allowed total freedom of expression. Mugwort and yarrow gave one mead an appetizingly bitter, herbal core. A backyard mix of Meyer lemons, Eureka lemons and Bearss limes brewed with elderflower and golden raisins created a lemon wine bursting with sunny citrus. A mind-bending homemade plum wine smelled just like salted plum candy. 

The experience of the brewers themselves ranged from decades to just a couple of years. Beekeeper Debbie Pieracci has made mead from honey and fruit she harvests and grows herself at home for six years, and brought six different flavors to share. Her recipes are inspired by whatever excess fruit she has, from lemons to apricots. At home, she’s working on a blueberry muffin mead, and is planning to add cinnamon and cardamom to mimic the bready character of a muffin. 

Falls, a chemistry teacher at Santa Cruz High School, brought two wines made from zinfandel and cabernet sauvignon grapes that she and Schnaar harvested in the Santa Cruz Mountains and outside of Sacramento, as well as that heady plum port. Over the years, she’s made wine from everything from persimmons and pineapple guavas to rhubarb and raisins – even parsley – from free harvests through the Fruit Tree Project. 

Showing off homebrews is part of the fun of the hobby, said Joly. “Brewing is a task that doesn’t scale difficulty with volume. If you’re making five gallons versus one gallon, you’re putting in the same amount of effort,” he said. “There’s an aspect of, ‘I made this.’”

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