Wearing a T-shirt that read, “If it’s not hand crafted, it’s not Worth Brewing” on the back, Peter Ausenhus leaned over a drain waiting for the sanitized water pouring from a hose to turn to partially brewed beer. When the frothy brown liquid started pouring into the drain, Ausenhus connected the hose to a machine to chill the liquid.

With Worth Brewing Co., Peter Ausenhus can combine two things he feels passionate about: flavorful craft beer and historic preservation. Worth Brewing Co., which Ausenhus owns with his wife Margaret Bishop, is located in downtown Northwood, Iowa, which Ausenhus recently helped get on the National Register of Historic Places.

He takes pride in the history of the Worth Brewing building, and said it previously served as a utility building and the original Worth County Bank. Ausenhus has tried to restore the natural look to the building by doing things like uncovering stained glass in the front and replacing the awning.

The bar where Ausenhus serves his freshly brewed beer is an old bank teller cage that was moved in and is on permanent loan from the Worth County Historical Society. Ausenhus said he believes the cage was originally used in that building when it was the bank.

“This all kind of came together a couple years ago when a building came for sale … I thought it’d be fun to rehabilitate the building, and maybe put in a brew pub, too,” Ausenhus said.

The brewery started as a part-time job for Ausenhus, but it’s become a full-time position.

“It’s been very surprising,” Ausenhus said. “We weren’t sure people would really take to this craft beer or not. People are used to drinking kind of light Miller, Bud products. … We’ve changed a lot of people around. We’ve got people now who won’t ever drink that stuff again.”

Ausenhus learned to brew through more than 20 years of home brewing, and he said he picked up some important sanitation tips and other methods while working at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.

“I started tasting different beers, realizing there was a wide variety of beer styles and tastes. I wanted to not only to drink more, but I got curious about the process, the history and the culture of beer, and so I just went to the library, checked out a couple of books, started reading about it,” Ausenhus said.

Ausenhus brews his beers in the back of his building, where there’s a garage door where the 50 pound sacks of grains and other materials can be brought in.

Different grains are used for different kinds of beer. Ausenhus gets both domestic and foreign grains from places like Germany, Belgium and England for the different kinds of beer he brews.

The brewing process takes about five to six hours. The barley is mashed to heat the starches to gradually convert to sugars. The sweet wort is then strained into a boiling kettle, and hops are added to balance the sweetness and add aroma. Wort is what’s left after the boiling, and it’s pumped into a chiller that cools the liquid to around 70 degrees and also adds oxygen to the beer, which is used by the yeast during the fermenting. From the chiller, the wort is pumped into a sterilized fermenter where the beer will ferment heavily for four days and a total of about two weeks in temperature controlled rooms.

All the beer Ausenhus brews is sold on tap in his bar, and he always has at least six beers he brews on tap, which include the Dillon Clock Stopper, Pale Ale, Brown Ale, Oatmeal Stout, English mild and one new beer each month. He also carries different beers from around the world with fifteen to twenty different kinds of bottled beer and a guest beer sold on tap.

For the five beers he always carries on tap, he needs to brew consistently to maintain the same flavor, but there are many methods he can use when creating a new flavor.

“It’s all aspects,” Ausenhus said of brewing new flavors. “It’s the type of grain you use. It’s the type of hops you use. It’s your water chemistry. It’s the amount of time you’re mashing. The yeast you use is incredibly important. The temperatures you ferment at. There are literally millions of variables to do, but there’s basically 80 or so recognized styles.”

Ausenhus brews two batches every Monday and two batches every Tuesday, and he’ll brew a few batches over the rest of the week as needed. He said he brews about 40 to 50 gallons a week, but has to brew multiple batches because of his small brewing system. “This is tiny. This is only a 10 gallon system, so it’s almost like a home brewery size,” Ausenhus said. “Generally a professional brewery, at the minimum, is about ten times this size. So I think I’m the smallest licensed brewery in the country, actually.”

Ausenhus said using small equipment allows him to brew many different kinds of beer.

While he only sells beer on tap now, Ausenhus would like to expand to sell beer to restaurants and bars in the area, but it would be more difficult to sell in Minnesota, because he’d need to sell through a distributor, and he can distribute himself in Iowa.

Despite the recent economy, Ausenhus said he thinks there’s a bright future for the industry. The first step toward selling wholesale would be buying a larger brewing system, Ausenhus said.

Certain laws in Iowa are good for brewers like Ausenhus because they can sell their beer wholesale without a distributor, and licensing is cheap. But Ausenhus said Iowa is one of only three states that have a limit on alcohol, meaning Ausenhus and other brewers can’t brew any beer over 5 percent alcohol content. Ausenhus said this law that dates back to the prohibition era doesn’t apply to beers imported into the state, and he said it puts Iowa brewers at a competitive disadvantage.

Despite this competitive disadvantage, Ausenhus said he’s pleased with the success of Worth Brewing. Over 100 people have joined his mug club, where a customer pays a flat rate to receive a mug that hangs over the bar and gets that customer 25 cents off each beer. The mug club has a waiting list of over 40.