Beer that is.

Now they have made craft beer their careers.

When Jon McLellan Jr. was about 15, he got his father a home brewing kit. “I was about 15, and he brewed it, and he fell in love with it. Ever since then it was a father-and-son hobby almost every weekend brewing — making recipes and figuring it out together,” he said.

McLellan is the vice president of Jamestown Brewing Company located at 119 W. Third St., Jamestown.

“We fell in love with it and we decided one day we wanted to open a brewery together. So we had been brewing together and we finally decided to get serious about it about five years ago,” he added.

Southern Tier Brewing Co. Head Brewer Jason Hitchcock, had a different approach. He liked science behind the beer-making process.

Hitchcock graduated from SUNY Geneseo with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry education. He moved to Colorado to teach and began getting interested in craft beer.

“That’s where the craft beer scene was happening, out west. That’s where I started drinking it and I started a little home brewing. After a few batches, that’s when I decided to pursue a career in it,” he said.

In Colorado, he went back to school for making beer. “I got an internship at a craft brewery out west, and work my up there, and STB was hiring a brewer here six years ago. I Started as a shift brewer, then in charge of research and development, then worked my way to head brewer,” he added. “I have always been into the science behind the process. I am interested in the craft of designing it (beer).”

Southern Tier Brewing Co. is pictured at its Stoneman Circle location in Lakewood. P-J photo by Michael Zabrodsky

According to allaboutbeer.com, beer is any alcoholic beverage made by the fermentation of grain, just as wine is any alcoholic beverage made by the fermentation of fruit. In the vast majority of the world’s beers, the grain base is barley.

The brewing process commonly begins with malted barley, or “malt” — barley that has been germinated then roasted. The brewer mills the malt, cracking the grains between rollers to expose more surface area. Then, just as coffee grounds are steeped in hot water to extract their flavors, the malt is heated with water in a large kettle called a “mash tun.” At the end of mashing, the starches in the malt have been broken down into simple sugars, resulting in a sweet liquid known as “wort.”

The brewer, the site said, rinses the malt (“sparging”) and strains it to get the last of the sugars into solution. The used malt is now “spent grain,” useless for beer, but still good for baking, or for animal feed.

The wort is piped into the next large tank in the brewery, the brew kettle. Here, hops, green, cone-like flowers, are added and boiled with the liquid, providing bitterness and aroma.

After boiling, the wort is rapidly cooled until it is at the right temperature to add yeast, the single-celled organisms that do the work of fermentation. The yeast is pitched in to the sweet wort, where it consumes the sugar, releasing alcohol and carbon dioxide in the process.

After a while, the food runs low, and the increasingly alcoholic atmosphere becomes unfriendly: the yeast slow down, or even die. Fermentation is complete. The young beer is transferred to conditioning tanks to age, a process that can go from a few days to several weeks (or, occasionally, years) depending on the style. When the brewer decides the beer ready, the public gets to enjoy this work of art, the site said.

McLellan said that there are only really two different kinds of beers — ales and lagers. “All of the other beers like the porters and pilsners, all fall under one of the two categories,” he said.

McLelland said lager is a cold fermentation and an ale is a warm fermentation. According to beerandbrewing.com, most ales ferment in the 60 to 75 degree range. Lagers generally do their best in the 45 to 55 degree range.

For Hitchcock, craft beer is somewhat manual labor, putting the ideas down on paper, bringing a recipe and seeing it come to fruition through the brewing process. “There is definitely a lot of hands-on small batch brewing here before we make a large batch. We (STB) will do five to 10 test batches before we release something to the public,” Hitchcock said of STB, located at 2072 Stoneman Circle, Lakewood.

McLellan added, “The easiest way for me to define craft beer is whatever the government regulation says it is.” He said craft beers are held to different standards.

“Besides that it’s delicious, I love the social mechanism behind it. Beer seems to bring people together, and generally seem to have that sense of community,” McLellan said.

For more information on these breweries visit stbcbeer.com and jamestownbrewery.com.