What to know
- Who can participate: All years, majors and ages are welcome to on-campus meetings, though individuals must be 21+ to attend off-campus meetings with alcoholic beverages
- Meeting days: Tuesdays
- Meeting time: 5:30-6:30 p.m.
- Meeting location: Hotel and Restaurant Management building. Exact locations vary.
About the club
When the autumn winds blow and the maples turn red, many Flagstaff locals find themselves reaching for their favorite flannel and a nice malty beer. But have you ever wondered what goes into making your favorite seasonal beverage? Well, that’s the NAU Brew Club’s bread and butter—or, more accurately, yeast and sugar.
With the Hotel and Restaurant Management’s state-of-the-art facilities and scheduled tours of local breweries, the club offers hands-on demonstrations of brewery science and encourages its participants to get creative with their suds. At the end of the semester, those of legal drinking age also get to participate in a taste test of their alcoholic homework off campus.
Q&A
William Van Brunt is a senior majoring in hotel and restaurant management. While he started homebrewing as an after-school experiment to see if he could make beer from scratch, he has since stepped into the role of Brew Club president to support and inspire fellow beer connoisseurs.
Tell us a bit about this club’s history. How was it formed? What is your mission statement?
The club is pretty recent. While I don’t know all of its history, I know that it was brought out of dormancy in 2024 by a small group of passionate students. Much of the club’s activity that year involved things like writing the club’s constitution. The club’s mission statement is to promote the art and science of brewing among students of NAU, to foster a community of individuals interested in brewing and to provide opportunities for education, experimentation and the enjoyment of craft brewing.
This year, the club is focused on making our first finished products, including cider, beer and honey wine. We are going to create our own recipes and record our collective knowledge for future classes of NAU students.
How and why did you get involved with NAU Brew Club?
Last year, I met my good friend Hayden in CHM 311-Brewing Process Technology. It is one of the many classes that NAU offers to students about brewing science. The two of us decided to get our own equipment and make our own beer from scratch.
I got super lucky on Facebook Marketplace and ended up scoring around $1,000 worth of equipment for $190. We got our ingredients and a lot of good advice from High Altitude Home Brew Supply, which is Flagstaff’s homebrew supplier. After a few months, we got pretty good at understanding how beer is made, and we would even bring samples into class for our classmates to try.
Toward the end of that semester, I was approached by Devon Randall, who is the Brew Club’s adviser and the assistant professor of practice overseeing NAU’s Brewing and Fermentation Science certificate. She asked me if I would be willing to take over the Brew Club since I had a passion for the craft, and, up until that point, the club had never actually made beer before.
I was reluctant at first, but I agreed to do it because when I was first learning about all of this, I always wanted someone who was willing to teach me in a hands-on way. Many people want to get into brewing, but it is hard because you need a lot of expensive equipment, time, and there’s a lot of stuff you have to learn. I already have all the equipment and a lot of the knowledge. I can teach people in that hands-on way. I want to make it as easy as possible for people to get into it.
Do you have a favorite beverage to brew and drink?
My favorite beverage to brew and drink is beer because it is the one with the most potential for different flavors and possibilities. However, I also love cider because it is delicious, loved by all and is the most fun to make. It’s amazing tasting cider that was pressed from apples you picked and thinking, “Dang, this came from my neighbor’s yard.”
What does NAU Brew Club do throughout the year, both at regular meetings and any other events?
We are the club that makes things.
We are not the beer-drinking club, but we are the beer-making club. We never drink alcohol or have alcohol present at any on-campus meetings, though we do taste what we’ve made at the end of the semester to see how we did. At our meetings, we develop recipes, we learn about how things are made, and then we make them. Our meetings mostly involve learning, brewing and bottling.
Recently, we had our cider meeting, where we hand-pressed apple cider from apples picked in Flagstaff neighborhoods. That was a ton of fun. Some of that apple juice was enjoyed by members, and some of it is currently fermenting to become hard cider.
We also have meetings with other clubs and local businesses. This year, we are going to brew and package Historic Brewing Company’s Blue and Gold IPA, which is the licensed beer of NAU and is made every year for NAU Homecoming. I am also excited to work with the Taste and Toast Society, the Hotel and Restaurant Management student club.
Tell us a bit about the work that goes into brewing! How is it done?
Every fermented food and beverage follows the same basic process: you have something with sugar in it, you put yeast or some type of cultured bacteria in there, and the yeast eats sugar and releases alcohol and carbon dioxide. That’s why bread and Swiss cheese have bubbles, why beer is carbonated and why we have alcoholic drinks.
Brewing involves sanitizing the sugary substance, pitching yeast and allowing it to ferment in a clean and sanitary vessel. Most alcoholic beverages are simple. To make wine, you take grape juice and put yeast in there. To make cider, you take apple juice and put yeast in there. To make mead, you mix honey and water and put yeast in there.
Beer is way more complicated because you don’t start with juice. You start with grain. How do you get sugar out of grain? Who even knew there was sugar in grain? The process has more steps, but there is a lot more room for different flavors and styles because you have more ingredients to work with. Wine can only be as good as the grapes you made it with. Beer has no limit to what it can become.
There are many other things we can do using other equipment. For example, we can calculate the exact alcohol by volume of everything we make using a hydrometer or a refractometer. We will do all of these things in our meetings. Certain things like ginger beer and kombucha can be taken home by members, but our alcoholic beverages are only tasted in special, off-campus meetings.
Tell us about a favorite memory you have from your time in NAU Brew Club.
My favorite memory is from our apple cider meeting. A lot of work went into it. I had to purchase and assemble an apple press and an apple grinder. Since I don’t have a drill, I was using a screwdriver to build the apple press, and I got some pretty bad blisters on my fingers. I also went door-to-door in my neighborhood to ask people if I could pick their apples. I ended up picking about 40 gallons worth of apples and cleaning up a lot of yard space. I hope that becomes a club tradition.
All I could think was, “I really hope at least one person enjoys this meeting.” A few minutes before the meeting, when I was still packing stuff up, my vice president, Jacob Seidberg-Caballero, called me on the phone. He was like, “Dude, where are you? There are people here waiting.” We had a great turnout. I don’t know exactly how many people showed up, but it was somewhere around 30.
My favorite part of all of it was that people were so eager to take command of everything. We had people washing, cutting and grinding apples. We had people passing around cider, and everyone got a turn on the press. Eventually, as I was floating around, people started teaching each other how to make the cider, and we made a lot of it. We even had people help clean up.
My favorite memory will probably always be the way people helped each other learn and how everyone had a good time. The weather was also great that day—a beautiful golden hour.
What advice do you have for someone looking to join NAU Brew Club?
First of all, everyone is welcome. You don’t have to be 21 to join. Whether you’re a freshman or a super senior like me, this club is for anyone who wants to learn more about brewing and, most of all, those who love making a finished product that is good and can be shared with people.
This club is for you if you want to learn but don’t have equipment, don’t know anything but want to start or have made mead once or twice and now want to make Mountain Dew into wine or something insane like that. This is your mad scientist laboratory.
Also, if you have an apple tree of your own or want to try your own recipe, all of our equipment can be checked out. We are a resource for those who want to learn and a community for those who love the craft.
Members can borrow equipment for their own projects, such as the apple press, propane burner, any brewing equipment, fermentation vessels, sanitizing equipment, bottling equipment and bottles, as long as no alcohol is kept on campus. They can also enter their projects into our Brew Book, which has all of the Brew Club’s recipes and knowledge.
My dream for this club is for it to one day be a student organization that makes excellent things each year and that passes on a healthy brewing tradition. I believe we’re well on our way.
Find out more about NAU Brew Club’s upcoming events by following @naubrewclub on Instagram.