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Every year at Beau’s Oktoberfest, a handful of home-brew recipes are chosen by Beau’s to be brewed in commercial batches and are released to the LCBO.

Competitors vie for that honour by entering the annual competition, run by a growing group of Ottawa homebrewers called the Members of Barleyment (MOB), but held at Oktoberfest.

This year, Rancourt, who only began brewing at home about two years ago, is pushing things a little harder with his half-dozen beers vying for the prize.

“I’d really like to get to brew something (commercially),” he says. “I think that’d be great.”

Rancourt said that less than 16 months after getting into his hobby, he went from brewing zero to 1,200 litres of beer at home. Until fairly recently, when he doubled the sized of his batches, he brewed at least weekly, and sometimes more frequently. One year he brewed 60 20-litre batches. A 20-litre batch of beer is equivalent to around 54 standard-sized bottles.

Basically, he is brewing enough beer to supply a small pub.

With a swimming pool and a love for hosting live music in his basement, Rancourt says it’s not hard to get rid of all that beer. He always has people popping in for free pints and keeps six taps of his creations flowing.

He fell hard for brewing after his second child was born. Rancourt found that there wasn’t much he could do as a hobby while he bounced between helping to raise a newborn and keeping up with the never-ending energy level of a toddler.