The Black Hill man started brewing his beer after developing a taste for the finer stuff.

He said he was looking for a cheaper way to drink a quality beverage. 

“Craft beer was fairly expensive to buy on a regular basis and I sort of needed another hobby. So I decided to brew beer, and brewed a few of the Coopers kit tins,” he said. 

Describing his first batch in 2013 as “terrible”, Mr Morrison said experience and support from the strong Ballarat homebrew community meant he was onto a winner reasonably quickly. 

“(Despite the taste) the first time I made it, I thought ‘that’s my own, that’s awesome’,” he said.

He has moved on from the kits and designs his own recipes. 

A recent gem for summer was a lighter citrus-infused brew. 

Mr Morrison will be one of the competitors at the Beerfest’s reach out to the backyard inventors of the ale community, the Great Homebrew Summer Slam. 

Beerfest director Ric Dexter said the amateur Ballarat brewing scene was as strong as the professional side of the sector. 

“Ballarat’s got one of the highest population of homebrewers. There’s three and a half thousand people doing it here,” he said. 

“That’s a hell of a lot for a population of 100,000.” 

Mr Dexter said he left brewing to the professionals – reasonable considering he co-owns a pub. 

He said entries were strong, with over a dozen people submitted several beers each to the competition. 

There are gongs available for the following beers; pale ale, India pale ale, lager, red/amber ale, dark ale and wheat beer. 

Mr Morrison, an operations coordinator at McCain by day, said becoming a brewer had even helped his drinking. 

He said he now favours quality over quantity, and would even like to get into brewing in a more full-time capacity. 

And the cost-saving that got him into it in the first place? 

“It comes down to about $25 for 20 litres,” he said.