PHIL CLARKE HOME BREWESR GUILD OF NY

Why did you post my email address? feeling sorry yet?

Phil, 41, who has an Andrew Jackson-style pompadour and shoe-gazes nervously as he speaks, may be the Guild's most serious beer enthusiast. An entire room of his Bronx apartment-the "brew room"-is stripped of furniture. In its place is the laboratory of a mad scientist.

In one corner sit half-empty bottles ("growlers") of beer and barley wine the color of motor oil, as well as glbutt fermentors ("carboys") full of mead covered over with Phil's XL shirts to shade them from the sunlight. In another corner is something called a demi-John, a 15-gallon carboy, next to a half-dozen soda-syrup kegs (used for beer, not soda). Along the pink walls are shelves of brewing ingredients: citric acid, specialty grains, corks, tubing, trays, buckets and, Phil's "claim to fame," a homemade "jockey box." (That is, a cooler of beer with tubes running out of it for picnics and tailgates.)

"A lot of homebrewers start building their own equipment," Phil informs me. In all, there are more than 50 gallons of beer in his brew room, enough to keep an entire frat house burping for a month.