PVA Northwest Chapter members bond over adaptive beer brewing
Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) Northwest Chapter members have concocted a new social bonding event and group – an adaptive home beer brewing club.
Started by PVA Northwest Chapter member and Army veteran Brent King in March, the group has met three times – twice in western Washington and once in eastern Washington – and made four kinds of beer already. Not only does it allow members an opportunity to learn about and brew beer, but it also gives them a chance to get out of the house, socialize and develop camaraderie. Plus, it shows them that with the right tools in place, they can even start brewing beer on their own.
“But the goal is just to bring people together to do something other than having to do sports. You know, mental health. That’s one aspect of it. But just the camaraderie and being together,” says King, who sustained a level T12 spinal cord injury from a 1994 rope fall during obstacle course training at Fort Benning (now called Fort Moore) in Georgia and is a double amputee. “It’s just a varied group coming together and just military veterans.”
Fourteen people attended the Oct. 19 adaptive beer brewing day in King’s home garage in Colbert, Wash., where 4 Barking Dogs Brewery brew master John Newton helped teach them about the beer brewing process and had members help brew a red ale.
Newton, who’s been brewing beer for the past 40 years, has strong military ties, too. An Army veteran, Newton spent 20-plus years in military intelligence – serving from 1977 to 1999 – before retiring. Now, he serves as a brewmaster in the Burien, Wash., business, a noncommercial nanobrewery (which makes under two barrels).
Newton showed members that beer brewing can be done adaptively. They brewed it doing the extract method – steeping grains during a boil and then draining them to become a sugary liquid called wort, then stirring in dry malt extract, hops and yeast before cooling it down and fermenting it. Newton made everything easily reachable, including a brewing kettle, bottling jug, air lock, large spoon, thermometer and hydrometer (measures the sugar density of beer and wort) and a cleaning/sanitizing bucket area, allowing members to help clean and sanitize and stir in the different items.
“Our goal here is to teach the process – clean, sanitized process – in the preparation and the execution in the cleaning and then the bottling,” Newton says. “So, in about two weeks, this fermentation is going to be done. And we’ll do bottling. And bottling for here is going to be gravity. So, we’ll gravity it into a bottle and then cap it. They’ll be doing that.”
PVA Northwest Chapter member and Air Force veteran Sean Halsted traveled from Rathdrum, Idaho, about an hour away, to attend the event. Halsted sustained a level L1 burst fracture in 1998 from falling about 40 feet from a rope during combat search and rescue exercises at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
A Paralympic sit-skier, as well, Halsted loves the camaraderie and also wanted to learn more about beer. He’d already been to the other event in western Washington and liked this one, too.
“I came out here because of the group. I do like beer. But I definitely am not in it as much. What I would like to do is come into the club and help support the club make the beer. Not be the specific person myself because I don’t have the brain to do all the different things that he was talking about, all the different numbers and the timing. I’m not that meticulous … but the camaraderie and the group is what I more appreciate than being able to do it myself.”
