Bringing their wort to the boil for their American Pale Ale is Upper Hutt Leader reporter Blake Crayton-Brown, left, and manager Grant Davidson.

Quaffing craft beer has quickly become a favourite for more and more Wellingtonians but how much more satisfying are those hoppy sips when you make it yourself.

Tapping into the Kiwi DIY mentality and people's thirst for knowledge about craft beer is The Occasional Brewer, set up by Peter Leniston in Wellington's Victoria St last year.

He doesn't knock home brewing but reckons the system of mash tuns, counterflow chillers, fermenters and 65-degree water on tap he has tailored and refined is a hell of a lot easier than juggling probably the wrong-sized pots at home and a chilly bin with a hose drilled into the side - never mind the girlfriend/wife moaning about the mess.

Some make fantastic home brews, but Leniston says for most of us what we could produce at home with malt extract vs using his all-grain kit is like "a TV dinner vs cooking from scratch.

"And I think what we do here pushes the same buttons...that desire to create something yourself."

His offsider at the Occasional Bewer, Eugene Black, has a pharmacology degree and has been home brewing for four years. But he says getting a batch to fermenting stage at his home takes him at least seven hours. Down at the Victoria St HQ, the groups that come in to have a go are knocking off their brew in under half that time.

Leniston's background is in policy analysis, which has been useful divining the intricacies of the Customs and Excise Act to make sure what he was doing was lawful.

Leniston thought students would be his main customers. Being able to put together 40 litres of pilsner, blonde ale, Amarillo IPA, Scotch Ale or one of the other eight or nine styles on offer for $150 makes cost-effective drinking for parties and barbecues.

"It's craft beer for the price of Tui," Leniston says.

But professionals dominante his clientele - engineers, accountants, lawyers, IT people. Corporates use it for team building. Others shout Dad or a mate as a way of celebrating a birthday.

It's not just a male thing. The Occasional Brewer's mash tuns have been stirred by members of the Pink Boot Society, the international women's brewing group.

"Women are smart brewers," Leniston says. "It's a bit of a generalisation but they seem to feel more comfortable asking questions, often quite sophisticated questions."

The list of detailed instructions for the ales, hefes and APAs at the Occasional Brewer run to two pages and can look daunting. But as Eugene notes the process is reasonably intuitive for the practically minded, and he and Leniston are always hovering in the background to jump in with a reminder it's time to recirculate the wort or add the hops.

It's heaven for chemistry nerds. For example, they can debate the physics of using negatively charged particles of copper Irish moss (seaweed) to attract positively charged proteins in the trub, then creating a mini whirlpool by stirring with a spoon to lump it all together in the bottom of the tun. But most are happy to know it's just a fining process that will result in a less cloudy-looking beer.

Leniston says it's pretty hard to make a fatal error in the process, though he is a demon for hygiene when it comes to bottling. And anyway, seeming errors aren't always so.

He remembers one guy who waltzed in with a bundle of kawakawa and other ingredients he wanted to add. He really looked like he knew his stuff so they left him to get on with it.

"Halfway through it became apparent he had no idea what he was doing. He was pretty dispirited but we had a bit of a play with it and got something in the fermenter. I told him if it didn't work out, he could do another brew on me."

A few weeks after bottling he came back and popped one of the tops.

"Sure enough it was different but not too bad."

There happened to be a real enthusiastic brewer there at the same time and he wanted to take the whole 40 litres off him. He reckoned it was a beautiful sour beer, the best he'd tried.

"There can be an element of luck with these things."

The most painful part of the process is waiting out the two or three weeks between fermenting, bottling and carbonation. Leniston fields plenty of questions about the latter process - essentially along the lines of 'what makes the beer fizzy?' His explanations are typical of the way the Occasional Brewer helps people's understanding of what goes into making beer.

One way is to force carbon dioxide straight into the beer; that's typical of most commercial breweries, but plenty of brewers do it too.

"What we do is more artisan, I guess. With bottle conditioning the yeast has eaten up as much sugar as it can, so we enter a measured amount of sugar, as dextrose. The yeast that was dormant kicks back into life and starts working but because it's in an enclosed container the carbon dioxide that is a byproduct of that process can't escape.

"You can work out how much sugar you need to get the level of carbonation you want: a wheat beer hefe might be quite heavily carbonated, a best bitter or porter less so than a pilsner."

Some people make their own customised labels for their bottled brews. It's quite a moment to take the first sip of your 40 litre "Park Rd Pilsner" or "Bob's Best Bitter".

And it seems plenty of the amateur brewers are pleased with the result - a lot come back to try making another style.

Leniston says that now the interminably long Victoria St roadworks/streetscape improvements outside his front door are over - he's had his water cut off twice, lost his phone for a week and courier drivers were getting very antsy - he's hoping the future of his venture is even frothier.