Back in 2011, I figured there were maybe 100 beers in the world, tops. So, I set out to try every single one. Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong. Every week, I'd grab a new 6-pack to keep up. After a few weeks, I realized that was getting pricey, so I thought, "Hey, my friends and I could just brew our own instead." (Spoiler: also wrong.) Brewing is way more expensive, both in time and effort, than just buying beer.

And just like that, BingenBrew was born, named after Vince's last name. (Wasted Years came later.) Our first attempt? A Bell's Two Hearted clone. We read "How to Brew" by John Palmer, so we had some ideas, but zero actual experience. We jumped right into all-grain with no-brain: pre-crushed grain in cheesecloth, boiling away on the rickety stove in the cheap apartment I shared with a roommate. We cooled the beer in an ice bath in the tub, totally uncovered. We were a shoestring operation. Better equipment and proper sanitization would come later.

That first batch? Absolutely awful. Chris was nice enough to be brutally honest about it, telling us that Miller Lite was honestly better than what we made. But instead of giving up, we got even more into it. We wanted to figure it out. Over the next few years, we kept tinkering with different homemade setups, turning all shapes and sizes of coolers into mashtuns. We even broke out an angle grinder to turn old kegs into keggles. Now we were really cooking with fire! And yeah, we slowly got better.

Eventually, Vince moved out to Colorado for a brewing job at Living The Dream, and Tony wanted to learn the ropes, so he took over where we left off. I was moving every year, so the whole brewing setup got dragged to Tony's garage. We had a ton of good times there! Brewing turned into a full-on social event, with a rotating crew of friends and friends-of-friends dropping in, learning the process, and helping out (while we, of course, crushed way too many beers after being freed up).

When Covid hit, everything came to a screeching halt. After finally buying a home (and not having to move every year), I set up shop in my own garage. That's where this site picks up — about five years into this next chapter. Now, recipes get tracked in Brewfather instead of BeerSmith, we brew on actual equipment (not just a turkey fryer), and sometimes I throw beers into competitions, where strangers let me know everything that's wrong with them on a score sheet. From hoppy IPAs to malty stouts to the occasional whiskey wash, every recipe gets tweaked over time. Some of them even turn out pretty good.

Browse the recipes to see what's brewing, check the brew log to follow along with recent batches, or dig through the competition results to see how the judges felt about it all.