Customers hop to play brewmeister: Southland company caters to suds-slurpers who just want to brew-it-themselves.

According to the great Teutonic brewmeisters of yore, there are three methods to get a good quality, tall, ice-cold stein of beer: Buy it, steal it, or make it yourself.

Patrons of the Hamilton Gregg Brewworks in Hermosa Beach have chosen the latter alternative in the search for higher quality and freshness, if at premium prices.

With manual hops-grinders, large boiling vats, thermometers, chrome gadgetry and ingredients galore, the Brewworks is a place where an ordinary condo-dweller can step into the shoes of a brewmeister and conjure up suds of the old country. "I like the flower, or bouquet, you get from making the beer here," says a whiskered Fritz Hutten, 67, a native of Dusseldorf, Germany. "It reminds me of when I was 14 and went into the bars in my hometown and had my first beer."

Hutten shakes his beard at domestic brews. "American beer is so full of preservatives, you could set it out on the porch in the sun for a few days, and it would still taste the same," he asserts.

At the beachside Brewworks, the beer couldn't get much fresher -- two weeks after hand-grinding the hops on site and boiling up their eight-gallon batch of brew, patrons return for a bottling-and-labeling session. Then, it's bottoms up. A step away from beer-lover Hutten, Julie and Nidel Miller, a husband-and-wife team practicing the ancient art, are labeling their bi-weekly output of 48 bottles, each 22 ounces. "The beer tastes better," they proclaim, when asked why they would work so hard for a stout.

It is perhaps in the labels, even more than the beer, that the creativity of Brewworks' customers is revealed. Indeed, in this age of the ubiquitous personal computer, a large number of the labels are very professional in appearance. Freed from a censor's shackles, the label makers of the Southland are a provocative, or sometimes perhaps merely raunchy, lot.

Some examples:

* "Ugly Dog Beer -- Drink 'til She's Cute"

* "Hurl Lager" (graced by an illustration of a feline barfing)

* "Dog Doo Bock Brew"

* "Busty Broad" (with a buxom woman's picture).

To be sure, many of the labels are polite, or merely affirmations of the brewmasters' identity, such as "Julie's Kickass Beer," replete with a photo of a kickboxer (presumably Julie) in action.

The Miller couple chose to affix a traditional-looking Christmas label on their bottles.

Generally speaking, patrons do not formulate their own beers, but use one of 35 recipes created by the Brewworks.

The brew pub and the recipes are the brainchild of John Hamilton Scudder (scion of the Scudder potato chip clan), his Canadian friend Anthony Gregg and also marketing ace Patricia Spiritus, who have sunk more than $500,000 into renovating and equipping their seaside brewery.

It is billed as America's first brew-your-own pub and looks to hold plenty of promise for franchise sales, judging by the crowds on a recent weekend.

The tab to become brewmeister for a day at Brewworks is between $80 and $120, depending on type of beer, plus a $40 deposit on the bottles. A Brewworks assistant will guide first-timers through the whole two-hour beer-making process, from grinding the barley to leaving the batch to ferment for 14 days.

Brewworks patrons will be extending an ancient lineage -- the making of beer is one of man's oldest arts, extending back into pre-history. The Egyptians brewed beer at least as early as 2000 B.C., as evidenced from hieroglyphics.

The modern English word "beer" probably stems back to the Latin word "bibere," which means to imbibe. The Latin word entered spoken German sometime early after the time of Christ, and then crossed the English Channel to Great Britain when a Germanic tribe known as the Angles invaded the island in the fifth century. English is derived from the language the Angles spoke.

Beer is made (with many variations) by boiling water and adding barley mash, wheat, corn or rice cereal and then hops, a cone-like flower bud that gives the brew its bitter taste.

The key ingredient is yeast, which causes the whole concoction to ferment -- to become alcoholic. After two weeks of fermenting, it can be filtered, carbonated and then put into barrels or bottles.

At Brewworks' modern-day Hermosa Beach locale, patrons can make strong beers, such as Iranian Ironman Barley Wine (a carbonated beer-like brew, despite the name), with 9 percent alcohol content, or lighter beers more akin to domestic output.

After gaining experience, patrons can make their own recipes. An eight-gallon batch costs between $80 and $120, depending upon the type of brew, and there is a deposit on the 48 bottles needed for the eight gallons of product.

The price, at roughly $2.00 a bottle, works out higher than, say, Budweiser, but below a typical premium microbrewery's retail price, and actually less than Guinness stout or other premium brands.

While brewing up one's own beer at Brewworks seems fairly easy, a lot of work went into the location, says Spiritus (who will flash a drivers' license to prove her last name is authentic and not a pseudonym assumed for this venture). Spiritus says that Brewworks' 1,480-square-foot building dates back to the 1920s and wasn't originally built to accommodate the electricity and sewage needs of beer making.

"We even had to strengthen the structure so that we could put cooling equipment on the roof," she says. "This whole building has been virtually rebuilt." As is de rigeur for many Southland designers, bricks are exposed, along with woodbeams, in the Brewworks' interior. There is an indoor shuffleboard to while away slow moments.

Much of the Brewworks' equipment, most of it gleaming stainless steel, has been specially constructed and designed, which caused start-up costs to spiral, says Spiritus. "I'll say this: Starting a second Brewworks would be a lot cheaper." And plans are afoot to do just that. The formula of a microbrewery for the consumer has been tested somewhat successfully already in Canada, where there are 300 franchised outlets of "U-Brew."

However, sales of do-it-yourself brews in the Far North are driven by a heavy, 53-percent tax on commercial brews. That stiff tax is not levied on Canadian brew-it-yourselfers, who are subject only to state alcohol taxes, which are relatively light.

But the Brewworks' founders say that their prototype outlet is successful, so that franchising in the states with brew-your-own is imminent anyway. "We offer a super beer, and the fun of making it," says Scudder.

For all the convenience -- when compared to homebrewing -- of the Brewworks, not all are enamored of the small beer factory. One patron, Mark Tillach, a nuclear engineer at UCLA, admires the premises but says he could brew at home for less. "You can brew at home for one-third to one-half the price here. You can get a starter kit, which will allow you to brew five gallons of beer, for $50," he says.

In fact, Tillach does brew at home but came to Brewworks to test out the site. Still, he concedes he is a Mar Vista homeowner with plenty of living space, "and someone in an apartment may not want a microbrewery on the premises."

And Scudder of Brewworks notes, "A lot can go wrong homebrewing -- you can have batches that don't work out. Here (at Brewworks), the conditions are held constant. If you don't like the beer, bring it back and try again." In short, Brewworks' customers aren't charged for foul-tasting batches.

But don't try too often -- under state law, patrons can only brew 100 gallons a year for home consumption.