Shop Small: Bootleggers of Brandon Brings Winery, Home-Brewing Local

Time’s running out for making a bottle of wine for holiday gift-giving, but only if you expect someone to sip the gift by year’s end.

There’s another option, and one that suits customers’ tastes, according to the owners of , at 650 Oakfield Drive in Brandon.

Recognizing that it takes anywhere from weeks to months to age a bottle of wine, Bootleggers co-owner Darcy Hermida said customers can start the process now, then wrap up a bottle with a note that informs the recipient of the wine that’s yet to come.

“We have a lot of people doing that, gifting a bottle with a little note that says, ‘Please don’t drink this until next year,’ or noting that the wine’s not ready yet, but will be for a person’s anniversary or some other special occasion,” Hermida said.

Add to that the home-brewing beer kits and brewing supplies available, along with an assortment of related knick-knacks, and you’ve got a handle on the generalities of a small business that has grown from 10,000 to 30,000 items of inventory, according to Hermid and her partner, Carole Faessler, who came up with the idea for a small business in Brandon focusing on home brewing.

"It's been a hobby of mine for a long time, 18 years or so, and I got started because store-bought wine was giving me headaches and making me sick," Faessler said. "An older couple taught me how to do it and I've been off and running ever since."

What doesn't make Faessler sick now, she said, is the absence of preservatives.

"In store-bought wine, there has to be a certain amount of preservatives because nobody knows how long it will sit on the shelf or how long somebody will take to drink it," she said. "When you do home brew you don't have to put preservatives in it. A lot of people who can't drink store-bought wine can drink this wine."

The cost of home-brewed wine depends on taste, and can range from around $60 to $200. Available to brew is anything from a value wine to a high-end wine, like Stag's Leap District Merlot, "which you can buy, on sale, for $40 to $50, but we make it here for $6 to $7 a bottle," Faessler said.

"We sell a brewing platform, which is the cost of the rental of equipment and space to brew here, for $40,” Hermida said. “And then it’s an ingredient thing, whatever they want for ingredients, and whether they want to bring clean bottles from home or even reuse store-bought bottles, as long as the labels are scraped and the bottle are clean.”

 Only wine, though, is processed on site, “a very simple process.” Hermida said. “The beer you do at home. The process is an hour, a second process is two hours with cleaning and another process takes about six hours. It depends on what you want to do.”

The Bootleggers Beer Club meets the third Wednesday of the month at O’Brien’s Irish Pub on Lumsden Road in Brandon. Club members “are very knowledgeable and the process is part of their presentation at the night meetings,” Hermida said. “Sometimes they brew at home and invite club members there. They bring in samples to taste so people know what home-brewed beer tastes like.”

In a nutshell?

“It’s like making a cake,” she said. “If you like extra chocolate, you throw a little extra chocolate in there. There’s no control [to brewing beer] outside of what you want to do with it.”

To brew a beer, you need — and Bootleggers stocks — grains and liquid malt extract and dry malt extract. “You use less of some or more of others,” Hermid said.

“Yeast, it’s one of the most important factors in making beer, and we have a variety of hops,” she added. “When you enter the ingredients, at what stage of the brewing, it’s all very scientific.”

 But it’s not rocket science to figure out why Greater Brandon residents should support the shop-small movement exemplified on such days as the Saturday after Thanksgiving, for what has become known as “Shop Small Saturday.”

“Better prices, better customer service, with one- on-one contact, and to give back to the community,” Hermida said.

As for home brewing, “it’s also a fun hobby,” she added. “Both my partner and I enjoy this. We wanted to share this experience with other people.”

And, she added, “sampling is free any time our store is open.”

Also available are fter-hours parties at Bootleggers, from 6-8 p.m. by appointment, aimed for small-group gatherings, such as "bridal parties, Rotarian gatherings, a girls' night out," Faessler said. There is no cost to rent the facility, only a minimum to create three batches of wine.

For information, call: 813-643-9463.

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