Flyers fan brewing a winner

First, there was the lockout. And we didn't get our Flyers hockey until far later than we deserved.

Then came the losing. And it was far more frequent than we desired.

Finally, there was elimination; and it was just as final as we remembered.

As fans across the Delaware Valley sigh and pack away their Flyers gear for another long summer, Paul Lahm puts his in a box on his grandmother's porch.

Lahm and his girlfriend Ashley live on a quiet property deep in Bucks County, the backyard of which is shared by homes owned by his parents and uncle. A manmade creek bed catches leaves and lawn clippings next to a pool still hibernating from the winter. A mother sparrow pokes her head in the birdhouse dangling above our heads.

"She's got a few babies in there," Lahm's grandmother tells us with a grin.

And here, under the awning on this serene springtime voyage, is a furious Zac Rinaldo, about to brain the Blackhawks' Andrew Shaw with a flying right hook.

He eyes the label on the bottle of his homemade Rinaldo Right Hook Rye.

This isn't the first time this porch has been covered in a series of tubes and boiling water. Rinaldo is one of several Flyers honored by Lahm's home brewing. In his basement fridge, he's got Ron Hextall's Double Minor Double IPA, Danny Briere's Fist Pump-kin Ale, and the Jakob Voracek, Claude Giroux, and Scott Hartnell Ginger Line Strawberry Wheat.

At my request, he hands me a Broad Street Barleywine.

"You sure? Don't you have to drive?"

The man's got faith in his beer's alcohol by volume.

It's been a busy season in Lahm's beer fridge. Over the winter, the same basement held Gary Bettman Bitters, Fly-P-A, and a Jakob Vora-Czech Pilsner. He mentions plans to eventually craft brews for Peter Laviolette and Wayne Simmonds, but today, our target is even more obvious (To view all of Paul's beers and labels, click here).

Rumors have been swirling for what seems like forever over goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov – whether he'll be on the team next year, whether he's worth the trouble, whether something was lost in translation during that whole Stalin thing – but regardless of his long-term future, Bryz is about to be immortalized, and he doesn't even know it.

"I'm not ready to give up on Bryz," Lahm says, setting a stainless steel, five gallon pot of water on a burner set to 170 degrees. "Not until I see him play a full season and not be forced to play 22 games in a row.  Then the already [bad] defense goes through an absurd amount of injuries? Dude was getting pounded."

He finishes what he's doing and claps his hands together.

"You ready for a beer?"

Ashley looks at us. It's 10:30 in the morning. But we're also home brewing. Which isn't actually a reason to drink before noon, but we agree it sounds like one.

Leading to what, in retrospect, was an obvious label.

Yes, the Rinaldo Rye holds the distinction as the first beer in the country to feature an opposing player getting a vicious beat down, right on the label.

But it has received recognition for being more than just a satisfying label for those in mid-bloodlust. It was this concoction that won Lahm the first round of the Philly Beer Scene home brew competition. At the moment, his follow-up entry for the second round is resting gently in a barrel downstairs, waiting to be judged at the American Home Brew conference this June in Philadelphia (and will presumably feature a label with Shaw unconscious on the ice as Rinaldo is led to the penalty box, waving his arms to the delight of a raucous crowd).

Also catching on fast is the Ginger Line Strawberry Wheat. A hit amongst his friends and family – the chief consumers of this process, given the inability to sell his beer because of those pesky liquor and copyright laws – it's one of the beers in his arsenal that has been made repeatedly.

"I printed out an 8 ½ x 11, hi-res copy of the label and got Hartnell and Voracek to sign under their pictures," Lahm says. "This year I'm going back and getting Giroux's to complete the trio."

But for now, he's content out on the porch with Bryz.

"It's just a type I've never made before," Paul says when I ask him why Hefeweizen, why Bryz, why now. "This is just because…Paul's thirsty."

His Hextall Double IPA I'm holding is tough to keep around. It is so terrifically hoppy that it bounces out of the bottle and into your mouth – which makes sense, given its origins.

"Have you ever had Pliny the Elder?" he asks. "It's a tweak of that. I'd never done an IPA before, so I figured, start with the best. Then I'll tweak it from there."

Lahm talks about his best friend Anthony and his family, who are responsible for his fandom, and by extension, this beer in my hand.

"They're the people who got me hooked," he recalls enthusiastically. We're at the part of home brewing during which you literally wait for water to boil.

"If I had to point to one game that made me think, 'Holy [poop] this is awesome, I need to watch this every day,' it was when we played Ottawa in 2004 and it was the record-breaking penalty minute game with the huge brawl. That was the first game they made me sit down and watch. And they had no idea what was coming, they were just like, 'Every time we play Ottawa, there's always awesome fights.' I thought, 'I'll try to get into this.'"

"I was like, 'This is [expletive deleted] awesome.'  I was hooked."

The home brewing hooks were in him a bit later, but with equal intensity. And once the starter kit arrived in the mail last March, he was off to the races.

"I've just been slowly accumulating more and more stuff since then. But I usually buy stuff in bursts. As soon as I got the turkey boiler and the two pots, those were the last big things."

Home brewing in general is a hobby greatly rewarding for those willing to experiment, and involves a lot of what the Flyers seemed to lack this year - chemistry.

Lahm's tweaks to the Russian River Brewing Company's Pliny the Elder masterpiece have made it his own, as do every other shift, strain, or alteration that change the volume, method or temperature of the end result.

"I'll find recipes online, then tweak them to how I like my beers. I might tweak the hops that are used, or the amount of hops or the mash temperature just to get a dryer, sweeter beer. I tend to like them dry and hoppy so I'll add some more, change the variety, or just ferment lower. Stuff like that."

The Black IPA resting quietly in the dark of the basement (next to Ashley's homemade wines) is the first of Lahm's creations that isn't the hybrid of a baseline recipe and his own preferences; it's composed by way of ingredients and procedure that are all his own.

"It's my first real creation," he says.

"And since it's for the competition, I don't get to name it," he explains, after I presume there's some "Black Eye-P-A" label in the works. "I actually don't even get to drink any of it. The first one of these, the home brewing contest actually sold out, so I couldn't even get into the event."

There are 15 gallons down there, and every one of them is required for judgment in the contest. It's a cruel twist, one that clearly preoccupies the beer's maker on occasion.

But the process must go on, even as the rain intensifies. Lahm drains his pot and slowly pipes the mixture into a water cooler. The mash, the boil, and fermentation; the procedure in its entirety includes a plethora of uniquely shaped and titled items.

"What awesome name does this have?" I asked, brandishing a utensil somewhere between a spatula and an oar.

"That's a mash paddle," he replies.

"Awesome."

Like the Flyers, Lahm is forced to play the waiting game for now. As an ale, it'll be a week before Bryz's brew is even drinkable -something like a lager takes closer to a month). Afterward, it's passed into bottles, where it will carbonate for three more weeks.

Patience: It's key to being a Flyers fan, and the main part of home brewing. It only makes sense that one fan – with, sadly, more time than ever away from his team to spend on hobbies – fills his grandma's porch with the tender majesty of home brewing. Hobbies are important for distracting from work, whether that work is in an office, or watching an endlessly frustrating hockey team.

Like Lahm, the Flyers are all at home now watching other teams combat each other for the Cup. Only one of them, however, will be competing in the second round of Philly Beer Scene's Home Brewing contest this month. But there's apprehension for Lahm when it comes to embracing this skill as a career, regardless of how talented he is.

"I kind of feel, not to completely rule it out in the future, but it kind of seems to me like one of those things where doing it as a hobby, it's something you love, but doing it as a job, you quickly grow to hate it," he says. "Only because there'd be stress and deadlines and it would become work."

It can be tough to repress all the "work" Flyers fans did while their team finished with less than 50 points and missed the playoffs for only the ninth time in human history.

Lahm sips his Barleywine.

"The reason I enjoy it so much is because it's what I do to get away from work."

Hockey? Or brewing? Let's say both.