OAKTON, Va. — Tim Artz’s brewery is enclosed by glass walls on three sides and looks out onto a bluff of apple trees and a garden filled with beans, squash and 35 varieties of pepper. On a raw April morning, the brewery doors were open but the brewery itself was warm; the gas burner below the 30-gallon brew tank was cranking at near full power.

Artz was already a good 90 minutes into his brew day; the grain was milled and the hops were measured and waiting on a nearby table. It was just the moment for his wife to emerge from the house and ask if he and his guests would like a fresh mug of coffee.

Artz, 48, is just a home brewer, not a professional; his main job is director of information technology at a health care firm. But with the elaborate set-up he has built and installed in his Florida room (there is a big cask for holding mash and an $1,800 fermentation tank, in addition to the 30-gallon kettle), he could easily be mistaken for much more than an amateur.

A revival

Home brewing, which was rendered illegal by Prohibition and not legalized again until 1979, is enjoying a resurgence. The American Homebrewers Association, based in Boulder, Colo., had just 11,724 members in 2006; that has since more than doubled, to 26,000. This increased interest, in turn, has fostered a mini-boom in brewing equipment, according to Gary Glass, who is the director of the association.

“Home-brew supply shops reported a growth of 16 percent in gross revenue, according to 2009 numbers,” Glass said, referring to the change from the prior year. The numbers for 2010 are not yet available, he added, but he anticipates double-digit growth once again.

 This increase has been aided by the rise of social clubs, books and competitions geared to home brewers, as well as by the success of microbreweries over the past two decades, which has inspired many amateur beer-makers. The DIY and locavore movements have played a role, too.

“There is a trend to do things more locally,” Glass said. “You don’t get any more local than doing it at home.”

Even the recession did not slow things, Glass added.

“Part of the theory,” he said, “is that people have more time for hobbies when they are unemployed or underemployed.”

In a way, the revival recalls America’s roots. The Pilgrims are said to have landed at Plymouth Rock rather than continue on to Virginia, because they had run out of beer and wanted a fresh supply. Many founding fathers brewed ales on their farms. (George Washington’s recipe for a porter brewed with molasses, recently recreated by a Brooklyn brewer, has been commercially produced by the Shmaltz Brewing Co.) Even the Obamas have joined in; they served an ale brewed at the White House and flavored with honey from the beehives there at their Super Bowl party this year.

‘Not a cheap hobby’

For many people, home brewing summons visions of beat-up equipment that is stashed in a corner of a garage, dragged out only occasionally, powered by modest propane tanks normally attached to the barbecue and yielding just a few gallons. (Professional breweries measure output by the barrel — roughly 31 gallons each.)

But as the ranks of amateur brewers grow, more of them are like the Artz family, people with high-end equipment who brew lots of beer and have a dedicated brewing space in their homes.

“When we looked at the house and walked into the room, we both knew this is where the brewery would be,” said Dot Artz, who occasionally brews with her husband but on that April day was growing crystals in the kitchen with the couple’s 8-year-old son, Ben. (A true DIY family, they also forage for mushrooms, make their own soap, keep four beehives and smoke meat on a large smoker made out of a cleaned and repurposed oil drum.)

The Artz family has also made substantial outlays for their pastime. Tim Artz rolled his eyes and grinned mischievously when asked how much he has spent on brewing over the years.

“A lot,” he said. “It is definitely not a cheap hobby.”

Pursuing a perfect pint

Some home brewers who invest heavily harbor ambitions of one day opening a professional brewery (as amateurs they cannot legally sell their wares). But other big spenders have no grand business plans; they equate brewing to activities like golf: a pastime that is a labor of love, exploration, trial and error, frustration and, finally, pride, when the water, malt, hops and yeast combine just right to pour a perfect pint.

For these dedicated hobbyists who are willing to spend money, said Glass, beer equipment manufacturers, like Sabco, of Toledo, Ohio, and More Beer, of Concord, Calif., are now making high-end commercial-grade products for home use.

“It is still the exception, not the rule,” said Glass, who is emphatically not one of the high-end hobbyists. He brews about six times a year, and does so on a Frankenstein system, an affectionate term used by home brewers to describe a mishmash of equipment that is not pretty, but gets the job done.

But the president of Sabco, Bob Sulier, believes the number of high-end brewers is growing. In the past, the company’s Brew Magic system — their $6,000 flagship — was sold primarily to professional brewers, he said, but now many are being bought by home brewers or home-brew groups. In 2010, the company sold about one Brew Magic system a day, he added.

“We cater to the higher end of the group, the advanced home brewers,” Sulier said. “For many, this is the next logical step. They are willing to drop a dollar.”