It's 10 a.m. and I'm nursing a hangover. Fortunately, no one can tell I'm reeking of beer because I'm standing in West Chester's Iron Hill Brewery at 3 W. Gay St. I've staggered through the doors after an hour in rush-hour traffic to witness the making of Iron Hill's 1,000th batch of beer, which will be available on tap at the brewery in February.

The beer being made today contains 1,000 ounces of hops, roughly 63 pounds (a typical batch of Iron Hill's hoppiest beer uses about 200 ounces), and is a nontraditional golden barleywine with an alcohol content of 11 percent. This very hoppy and bitter barleywine leaves behind a high-gravity wort that contains enough residual sugar to make a secondary beer with an alcohol content of between 4 and 8 percent. That's a lot different than less alcoholic brews, which leave behind a wort that's basically useless. "Making this beer is like making espresso," says Iron Hill head brewer Chris LaPierre. "Afterward you have enough grinds left over to make yourself another cup of coffee."

LaPierre decided to allow members of the Buzz Club, a local group of home brewers, to take home the leftover wort for use as a base element in their own concoctions. "The home brewers would love to have the wort," figured LaPierre. "It takes three to four hours to create and is more expensive for them [to make]." The resulting concoctions will be judged in a competition tentatively titled the "Iron Brewer," scheduled loosely for late February. The competition will be judged on the "wow factor," says LaPierre. "It'll be a blind tasting, more like, What's the best beer on the table?"

The 12-member Buzz Club drew lots to see who would walk home with the prize wort—the highest-gravity first batch with that 8 percent unfermented beer. Members filtered in throughout the morning to pick up wort with progressively less gravity.

Chris Clair, president of the Buzz Club (founded in 1993), says, "We brew out of our homes, in basements, garages. Home brewers are very innovative in that respect. They find and cobble things together to make equipment." He uses Tupperware to ferment beer.

They are also a competitive bunch of beer snobs. "There is a little one-upmanship. You want people to say 'wow' when they [taste your beer]. You want other people to say, 'How'd you do this?'"

LaPierre says Iron Hill aims to maintain a good relationship with the homebrew community. "They're our best customers and biggest fans," he explains.