Buckeye Brewcraft - Westerville

Today, I visited Buckeye Brewcraft. Located on North State Street in Westerville, the shop offers a good variety of home brewing equipment and ingredients.

Buckeye Brewcraft also features wine making and home soda making equipment and ingredients as well.

Although I didn't do an extensive comparison, prices seemed competitive with mail order home brewing suppliers, especially when you factor in shipping costs.

Inside the shop, you'll find an array of spices and flavorings for home brewing, such as sweet orange peel, cardamom, and cinnamon sticks. You'll find fruit essences (e.g., blueberry flavoring). You'll find a wide variety of grains, extracts, hops, and yeasts.

They also feature a good supply of brewing and bottling equipment. I saw bottle cappers, brew kettles, mash tuns, wine presses, empty bottles, the FastFerment fermenter, used corny kegs, bottling buckets, hoses, airlocks, caps, and much more.

They offer kits for a variety of beer styles, as well as bulk ingredients. Every grain or extract I've used in home brewing to date was available here... so it could easily serve as my go-to store for brewing ingredients.

There is a yeast chart on the wall depicting the various White Labs yeast strains and the beer styles they're good for. Many yeast and hops varieties were available in their refrigerated section, too.

All of this would probably be "enough" for a typical homebrew shop, but Buckeye Brewcraft goes the extra step of teaching home brewing classes as well. To find out when the classes are scheduled, or when other events are going on at the shop, visit their web site and click the Calendar link.

To encourage home brewers, Buckeye Brewcraft also features home brewing contests. At the time this post was written (Feb. 2015) they were accepting entries for their 2015 IPA contest, which will take place on March 21, 2015. I'm told there will be a Belgian Ale contest in June. I might just have to enter that one.

If you're a Columbus area resident interested in learning to brew your own beer, I would definitely recommend the shop. The staff is knowledgeable and friendly, the selection is good, and they teach as well as sell.

The shop is (at the time of writing) open 7 days a week. Monday through Saturday they're open 10am to 7pm. Sundays they're open from noon to 5pm.

Buckeye Brewcraft

33 N. State Street

Westerville, OH 43081

(614) 440-8854

Spices, brew kettle, bottling equipment

Flavorings, Candi Syrup, Sugars, Fruits

Grains and Malt Extracts

Grains

Refrigerator with yeast, hops, etc. - Yeast chart on wall - Grain bins to right

Seating and homebrew teaching area, bottles for sale

Fermenting, bottling, and large bags of grain

Grain crusher in front, wine and beer making equipment in back

FastFerment in window, corny kegs, soda equipment, and more

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