There isn’t a beer drinker out there who hasn’t had to suffer through a few nights – or eight semesters – of tasteless malted water passed off as beer. The solution is simple. Get rich or do what Jeff Irvin did: Become a brewmaster and make your own beer.

When Pulse called Olde Main Brewing Company, 316 Main St., to get a sense of what the bar was all about, it made us an offer we couldn’t refuse – come down to the bar, meet the brewmaster, take a tour and have some beer.

That last one sealed the deal.

A phone call later we were on our way to meet the personable resident beer fanatic of Olde Main, who came with us through the tour. Irvin introduced himself and gave us the lowdown on his road to brewer’s bliss.

“I have an undergraduate degree in biology from Iowa State University I got in December of ’99. I didn’t really know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew I loved beer. So then I went down [to] the University of California-Davis and I graduated from the Master Brewers Program down there and it was fantastic,” said Irvin. “We since opened [Olde Main] in October 2004, and it’s been a love relationship with beer ever since, that’s for sure.”

Brewing may have the occasional downside, but getting to determine the recipes for an entire beer menu doesn’t seem too bad to Irvin. He said the brewery has five main beers on tap, including Long Face, an amber ale; ‘Clone Ale, an American pale ale; To Be Named Later, a stout ale; The Dinkey, a wheat ale; and Off KIL Ter, a Scottish ale – which Irvin brews while wearing a kilt.

“It’s fantastic, listen to bagpipe music [and] my assistant Big John just rolls his eyes. Bagpipe music in the morning, I’ve got the kilt on and I’m ready to go for the day,” Irvin said. “They all came from my brain and what I learned at school – certainly the beer has gotten better over time. The best thing about this job is all the nerdy science that goes into the beer, and there really is, but there is still kind of an art form to it.”

With introductions out of the way and beers in hand, Irvin took us on a whirlwind tour of his facilities and gave a crash course on the magic of beer-making.

Step 1: Barley – it’s not just for breakfast anymore

First, Irvin took us into Olde Main’s mill room in order to familiarize us with beer’s core ingredients.

“There’s basically four main ingredients in beer: There’s barley malt or malted barley, yeast, hops and water, which is very important – 92 percent of beer, give or take, is water,” he said.

In addition to being one of the key sources of flavor in beer, barley can serve as an excellent source of nutrition for brewers working on empty stomachs. The kernels are heated in a kiln before they reach Irvin, and different levels of kilning will produce different flavors.

“What you’ll be getting in your hand right now is little bits of malted barley,” Irvin said as he handed us the kernels. “Feel free to snack on the stuff: It’s brewer’s breakfast right here. If you take one of these kernels and bite it, see that white stuff on the inside? Those are the carbohydrates inside that I manipulate as a brewer to actually make the beer itself.”

Much in the way Irvin bit open the barley kernel, he and his assistant use the mill to break the barley open so that it’s ready to begin the lengthy transformation into one of beer’s key ingredients.

“We take that kernel and run it through this mill and we break it open. We kind of crack it in half like an egg,” Irvin said.

Step 2: Mashing it up

The barley is then funneled into a large vat called a “mash tun.” Irvin and his assistant combine the barley with preheated water to begin the process that will eventually turn the barley and water into a mixture known to brewers as “wort.”

“We’re actually heating up the water for the brewing process the night before, and then we pump that over in the morning into the hot liquor tank,” Irvin said.

In brewing, liquor is the term for water. “We’re combining that colder, room-temperature grain down there with hot water that’s been heated up to about 170 degrees, and we’re shooting for a temperature of 149 and 155 degrees Fahrenheit. It sits in there for about an hour. Now at this point, it looks like a big soupy bowl of oatmeal or Malt-O-Meal. The smells are fantastic,” Irvin said.

Step 3: Hop on in

The solution made from the barley and water is pumped into another vessel known as the “kettle,” where it is heated to a boil. Once the mixture is brought to a boil, Irvin and his assistant add hops.

“The earlier you add a hop, the more bitterness and more flavor you’re going to extract out of that. The later you add a hop, the more aroma,” Irvin said. “So we boil for an hour, and not only are we extracting that bitterness from the hops, but we’re also boiling off sugar, so we’re concentrating those sugars.”

Irvin said boiling the mixture can be one of the trickiest parts of the entire process. Not only does the brewer want to ensure a high-quality batch of beer, he also wants to avoid any potential brushes with the law.

“At this point is basically where we determine how much alcohol will be in the beer. We can’t brew anything over 5 percent. The state won’t allow us – they consider that a liquor. So I have to have a certain amount of sugars there for the yeast to eat and then all the sugars will be gone,” Irvin said. “Certainly I can brew beer much, much stronger than 5 percent and so one of the things I have to do is watch and be real careful about how long we boil.”

Step 4: Rest in yeast

Now the beer is ready to be stirred – or “whirlpooled” – to help it cool off and remove any excess vegetative matter that may have come from the addition of ingredients during the boiling process. After the 30-minute “whirlpooling” process, the mixture is run through a heat exchanger so it will be cool enough to have yeast added.

“What happens is we run that hot wort through one way, and cold water through the other way and you can drop the temperature down about 208 degrees, all the way down to 60 degrees if need be. The reason we do that is we want to add yeast,” Irvin said. “If we add yeast at 208 degrees, it’d instantly kill it and we’d get no effective use out of it whatsoever. So as we run it through that heat exchanger we bottom-feed.”

Irvin indicated three vessels called fermenters. “We bottom-fill those and we add yeast in line on the way and let that stuff start fermenting up.”

Step 5: Aged to perfection

At this point, the beer is ready to be stored in large containers and aged to perfection.

Irvin said different types of beer require different lengths of aging, but supply and demand don’t always allow him the luxury of aging a batch for as long as he would prefer.

“There’s basically two types of beer at this point. There are ales and there’s lagers. Now these ales we have here, they ferment at a much higher temperature, at around 72 degrees. They eat up that sugar very, very quickly. Their metabolism is very, very high. We can usually ferment those beers in two to five [days], that whole quantity of 465 gallons,” Irvin said.

“I like to have two weeks to let that beer sit and age, but it doesn’t necessarily happen because we sell a lot of beer quite fast.

“Now with a lager, conversely – lager is the German word for storage – you ferment that beer at a much colder temperature. It takes actually three weeks for that beer to ferment, and then you lager, or store, that beer for an additional amount of time of four to six weeks.”