Our Story

Our Story

I’ve always associated beer with the best parts of life — friends, family, laughter, good food and unhurried conversation. Long before I ever thought about making it myself, beer was just part of how I connected with the people I loved.

That changed in the summer of 1993 on a camping trip to Durango, Colorado. I stopped for breakfast at a place called Carver Brewery and Bakery and noticed they were selling growlers. I’d never heard of a brewpub. There were none yet in Flagstaff. Something about the idea of a place that made its own beer fascinated me in a way I couldn’t quite explain.

When I got home I bought a book about brewing. A month later I bought a starter kit from a local liquor store that kept their homebrew supplies in milk crates in the walk-in cooler. I brewed my first batch that same night — complete with a boilover on the stovetop. I loved every minute of it anyway.

I bottled that beer a week later and drank my first homemade beer a couple of weeks after that. It was simultaneously not very good and the best beer I’d ever had. I was hooked.

Brewing opened up a whole world I hadn’t known existed — styles beyond American light lager, breweries worth seeking out, beer festivals worth traveling to. I went to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver in 1997. I started brewing all-grain batches in 1996 and won a gold medal at the Great Arizona Beer Festival in 1999. I made beer for my wedding, made beer with friends, and got steadily better at the process along the way.

That last part matters most.

My oldest brother Jimmy was 23 years older than me. When the four of us brothers got together — which happened at Christmas and whenever Jimmy could make it back from Maryland — we’d tell stories, give each other a hard time, laugh and drink beer. When I got good enough at brewing I started making a light, easy drinking beer especially for those visits. We called it the Jimmy Beer.

Jimmy died in 2019 from ALS. It’s an awful disease and he was a good man. When I started Woodcock’s Beer Kits in 2020 I named our Cream Ale in his honor. It’s the kit I’m most proud of, not because it’s the most complex beer we make, but because of what it represents.

In 2002, long before Woodcock’s existed, I bought a homebrew shop in Flagstaff called Homebrewers Outpost from friends who had started it. I taught myself search engine optimization, focused on mail order, and built it from a small local store into one of the larger internet homebrew retailers in the country. A major Google algorithm change in 2011 started a decline that led to closing in 2013. It was a hard ending to something I’d built carefully, but everything I learned about brewing, about customers, about what new brewers actually need — I carried all of that forward.

Woodcock’s Beer Kits started during the pandemic in 2020 with a specific idea in mind. I wanted to make kits that were genuinely worth making — not the add-water-and-wait approach of some beginner products, and not the tiny all-grain kits that look simple but give a first time brewer a real chance of failure. I wanted something in between. Something that teaches you the actual process — boiling, adding hops, watching the fermentation begin — while being forgiving enough that your first batch turns out well.

That’s why we focus on 2 gallon kits built around dry malt extract and specialty grains. Two gallons is about a case of beer. It brews in a standard 5 quart stockpot that most people already own. The equipment is modest and won’t take over your home. The process is real and the beer is genuinely good.

I live and work in the pines of northern Arizona at nearly 7,000 feet, which is a beautiful and unlikely place to run a mail order brewing company. Every kit is assembled fresh when you order it.

I took a long pause after shoulder surgery in November 2024 and came back in the summer of 2025 more certain than ever about what this business is for. Brewing has a way of quieting everything down. For a few hours it’s just you, some simple ingredients, and a process that’s been around for thousands of years.

That’s worth making easy for people. That’s what we’re here for.

— Scott
Woodcock’s Beer Kits
Northern Arizona