Brewing beer at home isn't easy — it takes years of tinkering and trying different combinations to get the taste just right.

Just ask Tom Nolan, a homebrewer for the past 12 years.

"My early endeavors were mediocre compared to where I am right now," he said. "It's like anything else. You do it a while and you understand the nuances, develop a little bit of a craft."

Nolan knows what he's talking about. He won the inaugural Pro-Am competition last weekend at the American Beer Festival here, with a homebrew concoction he calls Baltic Porter.

He got his start in 1994, when he met a homebrewer in Seattle. He never did like the Budweisers or Coors of the beer world, so he quickly latched onto homebrewing, relishing the chance to create his own brews.

Nolan figures the first 150 or so batches he made were drinkable, not great. But as his mind started to wrap itself around the process, he started making better beer. And he caught a wave of homebrewing popularity that has helped a microbrew craze sweep the country.

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GREAT BEER ERA

Homebrewing started in earnest in this country in 1978, when Congress passed a bill repealing a Prohibition-era law that made it illegal to brew small amounts of beer at home. President Jimmy Carter signed it into law in 1979 and later that year nuclear engineer Charlie Papazian founded the Association of Brewers.

Once locked into American-style lagers or expensive imports, beer connoisseurs were thrilled to have options, to make beer the way they liked it. Those early days of homebrewing became the foundation for the microbrew craze that swept the country in the 1980s, creating the Great Beer Era.

Now there are more than 1,400 breweries in the United States and close to 1.5 million people who have tried homebrewing at least once. The flavors are unlimited, thanks to the homebrewing pioneers.

"I think the appeal is that people want to do things locally, they want to do things themselves and have that control over it," said Gary Glass, director of the American Homebrewers Association, which has more than 11,000 members.

"It's the same thing that we're seeing with food. People want to buy things locally and are just more interested in flavor. Homebrewing is a way to have the ultimate control by making it yourself. You can make things in styles that don't even exist."

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GETTING STARTED

Homebrewing isn't as difficult as it might seem. All you need to get started is a stock pot, a plastic bucket and some five-gallon glass bottles.

The process isn't particularly complex, either. Here's a rundown, albeit rudimentary:

-- Take a variety of malted barleys, which provide the beer's sweetness, mix them into a mash and add hot water, which converts the starch into sugar.

-- Pull the sugar water out, mix in hops, which provide the bitterness, aroma and flavor, and boil.

-- Add more water into a fermenter to cool it down, then mix in yeast, which eats the sugar and makes alcohol.

-- It takes about two weeks for the beer to ferment and another two to three more weeks in bottles before the beer is ready.

The flavor depends on what kind of malts, hops and yeasts are used, and when each ingredient is added to the batch.

It's a simple process that can get complicated depending how much the brewer tinkers with the process. Use darker malts and you'll get a porter and lighter malts produce pilsners, with all kinds of flavors in between. Use ale yeast and the beer will be more fruity, while lager yeast gives the beer a crisp flavor.

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A HOMEBREW KING

Nolan first made his Baltic Porter in 2004, and it earned top monthly honors a year later at a meeting of the Wort Hawgs Brew Crew in Winston-Salem, N.C., his home town.

Foothills Brewing, which hosts the Wort Hawgs' meetings, then picked Baltic Porter for the national contest and agreed to make it on a larger scale. The brew wasn't exactly what Nolan created -- there are just too many variables in brewing -- but it was close enough and ended up earning Nolan a gold medal, not to mention a year's supply of yeast and 150 pounds of malted grain from Greece.

"It's a little bit of a challenge stepping up a recipe because it doesn't necessarily translate," said Jamie Bartholomaus, brewmaster at Foothills Brewing. "Five percent of 10 gallons might not give you the same characteristics 500 gallons gives. You've got to mess with it a little bit, but it worked out."

It's hard for even homebrewers to duplicate a batch, because the slightest change can affect the taste. Not that they care.

"The commercial brewing science is about making the beer the same again and again," Nolan said. "That's tedious brewmastery. ... The variability of homebrewing is actually fun, it's the fun part of the hobby."

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John Marshall is asap's sports writer.

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