Another round: Happy Hop opens second shop

A Belleville home brew and wine making supplier now has opened its first shop in Madison County.

Christian Powell has seen the demand for his hobby-based business spread beyond his downtown Belleville store and has established a second in Edwardsville. Happy Hop Homebrew & Winemaking at 103 E. Vandalia St. provides all of the kits, supplies and ingredients that his Happy Hop Homebrew & Gourmet sells at 122 E. Main St. in Belleville.

Powell said his business has become a destination shop, and he wants to make it more accessible to other home-brew and wine-making enthusiasts.

“We serve the better part of Southern Illinois all the way up to Springfield to Vandalia and Mt. Vernon, so those distances are pretty great for people,” Powell said. “We compete with major online retailers in the home-brew and wine-making market, so our locations are important. So basically, we’re bringing it to them, rather than having them go online. We have a lot of customers around these parts, in Edwardsville, Granite City and the surrounding communities. I would like to see them a lot more. That’s why we’re coming closer to them rather than lose them to online retailers.”

Born in Belleville and raised in Collinsville, Powell’s business spawned from an existing home-brew supplier that had previously operated from the East Main Street location. Powell took over Dave’s Home Brew in May 2012. He got his first taste of craft beer during the early 1990s when he was working in a Chicago restaurant.

“That was the first thing I’d had besides a Budweiser or a Milwaukee’s Best,” he said. “That kind of opened the door to my world for craft beer.”

He acquired his taste for micro brews as he sampled several more micro-brews during his travels as a guitarist and member of a band.

“Over the years, I had traveled with my band pretty extensively through the country and got to visit a lot of places, outside of the St. Louis-Anheuser-Busch realm, to experience other things,” he said. “That was all part of the initial experience to that.”

Home brewing has become an increasingly popular pastime among Americans. According to Gary Glass, director of the American Home Brewers Association in Boulder, Colo., an estimated 1.2 million households are brewing their own beer in homes across the country.

“That’s a very conservative estimate, but it’s been growing at a pretty rapid clip in the past decade,” Glass said.

However, Glass also said the growth in home brewing may finally be beginning to slow after a decade of robust expansion. He said the association tracks home brewing deliveries to home brew retailers and has recognized a slight decline this year among some clients, but he said that varies from business to business.

“The hobby’s popularity is higher than it has ever been and continues to grow, but a lot of retailers out there are not experiencing that growth in terms of revenue,” he said. “So it’s great to see a store like this doing very well by opening another location. I think a lot of people who start home brew supply shops are home brewers themselves and get into it because they are passionate about it, but they are not always the best business people. The stores that succeed are ones that are really well run, and that sounds like the case (with Happy Hop).”

Powell said brewing and wine-making kits, or what he calls “brewing and wine making in a box,” are among the most sought-after at his shops. These kits cost $149.95 and are often the first purchase that leads many into the hobby.

“It has all of the necessary equipment that you would need to go home and start brewing beer or making wine, outside of adding water or possible heating on the stove,” he said. “It’s as easy as following a recipe and adding yeast to these things and it takes its course and converts into a tasty beverage.”

Aside from the kit and water, you will also need hops, barley and yeast. Aside from the beer- and wine-making supplies, Happy Hop also carries more than 100 brands of malted barley and as many brands of hops.

Powell said brewing is easy. He said if you can make a good pot of chicken soup, you can brew beer.

“It’s really that easy,” Powell said. “It’s something that anyone can do, if you can follow a recipe. And the rest of the time, you let nature take over and do it’s thing. We just put the ingredients together.”

Next, he is looking to expanding his Belleville store to include brewing and wine making classes in a room upstairs from the shop. Construction of the new classroom is underway. He is also considering a cheese-making class and wants to provide space for a newly formed home-brewing club.

He said the past three-and-a-half years in downtown Belleville and recent opening in Edwardsville reveals the local thirst of homemade beer and wine.

“Belleville’s been great to us,” he said. “Edwardsville is a very similar community, and we’re very pleased to be here. We’ve had great reception so far.”

This story was originally published December 6, 2015 at 1:00 PM with the headline "Another round: Happy Hop opens second shop."