For the hardcore beer enthusiast/amateur chemist/do-it-yourself aficionado, there is home-brewing. People who are fanatically serious about wine can move to Napa and sell their multi-million start-up companies to finance a hillside vineyard.

For the rest of us, there are personalized, DIY-ish wineries and brewpubs. These operations hit a sweet spot appealing to people of more limited means–and more limited patience–but are nonetheless curious about how alcohol is made (and think it’s cool to say they made their own booze). They also provide fodder for people who want to be able to hold their own when conversations turn to tannins, finish, hops and malts.

The setups at these personalized wineries/brewpubs are all pretty similar. You go in for a tasting, pick the wine or beer you like, start the fermentation process, and then from two to eight weeks later, you bottle your wine or beer and stick a custom label on it. Voila, private-label wine and beer. Start now if you want to gift bottles for the holidays, or in case you anticipate some heavy holiday drinking.

Here’s a run-down on the create-your-own bottle wine and beer shops around Oahu.

Wine the Experience

Celebrating five years last weekend, Wine the Experience is the oldest of the personalized wineries on Oahu. From the very beginning, owner Shannon Ball wanted to treat the shop like a winery, where people could sample wines made on the premises and bring home a few bottles of their favorites. Wine the Experience has got the atmosphere down, except there’s nothing to take home until six to eight weeks later, when the grape juice you bought and sprinkled with a little yeast has finished its fermentation process and turned into wine ready for bottling. Some people make a party out of the bottling experience, bringing in food and friends to bottle, cork, seal and label their wines. Labels can be as sentimental as those that include bride and groom names and a wedding date, or as mischievous as “Humping Felines” or “Pink Assets Rosé.”

This model has worked fairly well for Ball, who has a loyal base of customers who like to start the next batch of wine while bottling a previous batch, ensuring their “coffers are always filled with wines,” Ball says. But he wants to do more. He’d like to be able to sell his wines and offer wine dinners, turning his shop into an urban winery of sorts. For now, in the tangle of liquor licenses, there are no provisions for this kind of thing. A year ago, Ball wrote a piece of legislation that would establish a new winery class of liquor license. It passed, but now he’s playing the waiting game with the liquor commission.

Oeno Winemaking

Oeno was started a little over a year ago by Greg Minarik and Lindsay Patterson, who moved to Hawaii for its “relaxed, slower pace,” a theme that also applies to how they view making wine at the store versus just buying it off the shelf. It is a slower process that requires six to eight weeks of patience, but they think one learns more about wine this way. “You get to taste a wine on its birthday,” Patterson says. “It’s so cool to have that opportunity to do that…to taste the trueness of it.”

As the wines continue to age in the bottle, “everytime you open a bottle, it’s different and changing and maturing,” Minarik says. “You can pick when you want to drink it.”

Like most DIY ventures, making your own never entirely replaces buying ready-made; Oeno just provides a different aspect of wines and a new venue to explore wine’s intricacies. After sampling and making their own bottles, customers tend to be more wine-savvy and “now they can go to the store and make better decisions on wines they buy because they understand what certain things mean,” says Minarik.

Oeno also sells beer kits like a popular Rogue Dead Guy Ale. Of the home brewing kits, Minarik says, “It gets addicting, just like cooking. You get to really play with the ingredients that go in. You really learn what beer’s all about. And there’s the pride of opening that first one.” It’s like liquid ego and courage in one personalized bottle.

Oahu Brewcraft

For Benjamin Brechtel of Oahu Brewcraft, brewing your own is all about customization. He offers seven base beers, all his own recipes, that he’s happy to tweak to customers’ whims. “That way I can offer a genuine, authentic, one-of-a kind recipe that’s not just a re-creation or a kit,” Brechtel says. “Beer in a bottle is what it is. It doesn’t deviate, and you can accept it or deny it. But in this situation, I can offer people something more abstract that they can create according to their own flavor palates.” One of the more unusual requests came from a guy with a penchant for gummy bears, requesting a beer with the aromas of those cute, fruity chews, which Brechtel attempted to achieve by adding gummy bears to the brew at three different stages.

But even if you are unwilling to sacrifice gummy bears to the experimentation cause, you’ll still find Brewcraft’s original beers unique. The Little IPA has the aroma of a traditional IPA without all the bitterness, and then there’s the Scrapyard Stout, more rounded and smoother than traditional stouts.

Brechtel finds that a lot of his customers are military, looking for beers that they’ve tasted in their travels and are unable to find here. In the interest of expanding people’s beer palates, Brechtel also hosts sampling parties of his brews and some beers not found on Oahu’s beer shelves. There’s the Midas Touch, from Dogfish Head Brewery, purportedly made from the oldest known fermented beverage recipe in the world. A cross between wine and mead, it drinks more like a hearty dessert wine than a beer. At his latest tastings, Brechtel also offered the Arrogant Bastard Ale, by San Diego’s Stone Brewing Company, one of the most well-regarded microbreweries in the world.

Quick and dirty wine making

Wine country in the city

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