This guy brews beer with the best

Beer: It has blessed and bedeviled us for millennia.

Pottery jars dating back 7,000 years contain traces of early brew, and an ancient Sumerian hymn to Ninkasi, the patron goddess of beer, is the first known recipe for brewing the drink. In olden days, most brewers were women who were accorded the status of priestesses.

Today, South Florida has its share of home brewers, and while they’ve yet to achieve sacred stature, one local beer master’s craft has attained national recognition.

Russ Brunner of Tamarac has been named one of the most talented homebrewers in the country .

He and two others beat out 1,000 entries to take top honors in the annual LongShot American Homebrew Contest sponsored by Samuel Adams.

The Boston brewery will bottle Brunner’s beer and showcase it in a specialty six pack next spring.

“I was absolutely shocked,” said Brunner, 37, a self-described “beer geek” who started brewing about three years ago, drawn to the possibilities of custom-flavored beer.

“With home brewing, you can make any flavor you want,” he said. “My wife enjoys sweeter things like chocolate. You can actually put those flavors into beer.”

Similar sweet ingredients went into Brunner’s winning American Stout, which contest officials described as “Abig malty stout with notes of chocolate and coffee that carry through to a velvety finish.”

Earlier this month, Samuel Adams flew Brunner and his two fellow winners to Denver for the Great American Beer Festival, where their awards were announced. “It’s a very big deal. It’s walking the red carpet,” said Gary Fuller, a Cooper City brewer. “Russ has knockedit out of the park this year.”

Fuller is president-nominee of Fort Lauderdale Area Brewers, or FLAB, whose 20-some members meet to share and compare homemade brews.

Club motto: “Give a man a beer and he’ll waste an hour, teach a man to brew and he’ll waste a lifetime.”

Brunner said that when in brewing mode he’ll spend six straight hours measuring grains and hops, crushing grain in a mill, stimulating enzymes and monitoring fluids.

The couple’s spare bedroom has become a mini-brewery.

“I do a lot of research on brewing, a lot of reading, a lot of talking to other brewers,” he said. And experimenting.

He once brewed a chili beer made with hot peppers for FLAB members.

“They loved it, but it was brutal stuff. I couldn’t even drink it,” he said.

“Oneguy actually drank an entire pint. I was impressed.”

But Brunner’s serious beers have been gaining some serious attention.

He won a gold medal at a homebrewing contest last spring in Philadelphia for his craft ale. “He’s been one of the most successful brewers on the circuit this year,” said Fuller. “He brewed an AmericanStout that is as good as anything anybody is producing commercially right now.”