The set-up looks precarious — a wooden chair perched on top of the table to create a flow of gravity needed in this step of brewing beer.

But a shortage of space won’t keep Mike Meyer from his hobby.

“It’s an all-day thing, especially in an apartment,” Meyer said as he watched the hot water rinse down through a bucket full of malted barley — called mash — to extract a sweet liquid called wort, which is boiled and fermented to make beer.

A year and a half ago, Meyer, 63, and his wife Barbara moved from Vancouver, Washington, to Baker City.

Downsizing from a house to the ninth-floor apartment in Baker Tower meant they couldn’t bring all their belongings right away — but Meyer still hauled up his supplies to make beer.

He’s brewed beer for about 25 years, but well remembers his very first introduction to homebrew while visiting his grandpa in Lewiston, Idaho.

“We’d spend summers there,” he said. “I was 2 or 3 and he’d sneak us a sip of beer. That was my introduction.”

He smiled at the memory.

“And we couldn’t tell Grandma — ‘Do not tell Grandma,’ ” he said.

In addition to beer, Meyer has made his own wine, hard cider and mead, a wine made from honey.

Although it’s a bit time consuming, he says homebrewing is economical.

“The whole beer thing has been about saving money,” Meyer said.

Each batch yields 48 bottles, and the final cost is about 50 cents per bottle, he said.

Two well-worn books sit on Meyer’s coffee table — “The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing” and “The Home Brewer’s Companion.”

He’s read them both, and made most of the recipes.

His current batch … well, it is a pale ale although he didn’t follow any specific instructions.

And he doesn’t keep detailed notes about his batches — no notes at all, really.

“I’m not really scientific, but it always seems to work,” he said. “I’ve done it enough, I know it’ll be good. And cheap.”

Meyer has had a lot of years to practice. At first he used canned malt extract, but he didn’t care for the flavor so he began brewing with all grains.

He grew his own hops back in Vancouver, and plans to bring those plants to Baker City when he and Barbara move into a house this summer.

Hops are dried flowers that give beer its distinctive bitterness.

At the new place, he’ll probably go back to his old way of homebrewing — using a crab cooker outside to boil the wort rather than fuss with it on the kitchen stove.

The boiling takes 90 minutes — 75 with boiling hops, 15 with flavor hops, and aroma hops are added at the very end.

The liquid is then siphoned into a primary fermenter, where it needs to be cooled quickly.

This can be done with a system using a hose — but an outside faucet isn’t standard on the ninth floor of the Baker Tower.

So Meyer improvises and puts the fermenter in the bathtub with bags of ice.

After the wort is cooled, he removes it from the tub and keeps it either in the apartment or out in the hall because the fermenting process needs a specific temperature range depending on the type of beer. This pale ale, for example, ferments best between 59 degrees and 68 degrees.

“They’re all kind of fussy. They need to be at a temperature range for the yeast to work,” Meyer said.

See more in the May 25, 2016, issue of the Baker City Herald.