Suburban Brewing

November 7th is the American Homebrewers Association annual “Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day”. Many local brewshop will be hosting various events around this beer holiday as I’d like to call it 

This is a great opportunity to share our hobby with friends, neighbors and relatives.

If your shop is organizing an event on the 7th please let me know and I’ll add it to this post.

On Thursday during my lunch break I drove to  the newly opened Aristan Homebrew shop in Downingtown, PA.  As many of you may know it was pouring most of yesterday and I expected my ride from Malvern to Downingtown to be a slow one. Fortunately that was not the case and I made it in about 20 minutes. Upon walking into the shop I was impressed how well it was organized and stocked. I had a short list of items to pick up and found most of them rather quickly. Mike has the largest yeast selection I’ve ever seen. He has two refrigerators with one of them dedicated to White Labs strains while the other one housed smack packs and other varieties.  Since I exclusively use White Labs yeast seeing such a large selection made me very happy. I picked up Cry Havoc and Burton Ale yeast both of which were very competitively priced, actually they were the cheapest yeast as compared to 2 other local brew shops. I also purchased 4 bags of PBW as I can never keep enough of it on hand, I think I’ll need to get an 8 pound bucket of it soon and I purchased two carboy handles. In terms of malts  Mike has a very nice selection of specialty grains and extracts. I was surprised that for a brand new shop he even had MO on hand. For those who don’t have their own grain crusher there is one at the shop, and yes it is powered by a drill so you can crush your malt right on the spot or ask Mike to do it for you ahead of time.

As stated earlier the store is very well stocked, even though Mike mentioned there is more stuff on the way. I really like that everything is organized so nicely and without clutter. I do like the fact that he is open until 7pm during the week so those of us who work late can still make it in time to pick some last minute items before brewing. I am an equal opportunity type of guy so I will surely frequent this shop along with two other ones that are in my area. Overall I’m very happy to see another LHBS opening and would highly recommend Arisan Homebrew to anyone living in its vicinity.

Artisinal Homebrew
128 E Lancaster Avenue,
Downingtown, PA 19355

610-873-HOPS (4677)

Store Hours:
Tuesday – Friday:   11:00 am to 7:00 pm
Saturday:           10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Sunday:             12:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Monday:             Closed

Looks like the newest homebrewing shop in the area is set to open this Thursday as reported by Bryan Kolesar earlier today. The name of the shop is Artisan Homebrew and they’re located at 128 East Lincoln Highway, Downingtown, PA.

I’ll be stopping over there on the opening day probably around noon-ish to scope it out!