Rhubarb Blonde Ale. Peanut Butter Chocolate Porter. Lavender Orange-blossom Mead. Smoked Cinnamon Oatmeal Stout. Anyone can throw the kitchen sink into a brew kettle, but it takes more than imagination to make the results sing, which is why these concoctions weren’t just among the stranger beverages I tried recently, they were among the best.

The American Homebrewers Association purports that there are 750,000 homebrewers nationwide (that’s almost one out of every 400 Americans). Quite likely, there has been no greater gathering of craftsmen than the 33^rd Annual National Homebrewers Conference that took place in San Diego from June 17-19. This AHA-sponsored event once again set a new record for sold-out attendance, having welcomed 1,900 people within the fraternity of homebrewers from all 50 states and Canada.

The numbers don’t tell the story, but they’re jaw-dropping nonetheless. Some 1,650 people entered virtually 7,000 homebrews into the competition. Over 700 kegs of homebrewed beer were on site at the conference, meaning if you attempted to try just one ounce of each beer (with plenty of honey mead, cider, and perry—pear cider—as well), you’d have to drink 15 pints worth each day.

Of course, that wasn’t all the beer on hand. Dozens of craft breweries provided hundreds of kegs and cases of beer. As these beers were poured, the brewmasters freely offered tips for brewing their notable styles if not flat out answered questions about how to clone their beers. The brewing community is amazingly open source. Better still, it’s a two-way street between those who brew for a living and those for whom it’s a hobby.

Not only is nearly every commercial braumeister or brewster a former homebrewer, but many keep tabs on what the amateurs are doing as inspiration in their professional workplace. Most notable are the hundreds of pro-am beers, wherein a brewery invites a regular hobbyist—albeit one with great talent and deep interest—to create his or her own recipe on a large-scale system and actually sell it in their brewpub or occasionally bottled. NHC had no shortage of such pro-ams. What makes those fun is that in a few years from now, you can expect more than a few of those beers and those homebrewers will make the leap to the pros. I, for one, can’t wait to say “I drank them when.”