Shortly after starting her shift at the Malt House on a recent afternoon, bartender Jaquie Rice poured carafes of ice water and put them at the end of the bar with cups. It’s important to stay hydrated, she said, especially with the number of high-alcohol beers on tap at the east-side bar, located at the corner of Milwaukee Street and East Washington Avenue.

This is a serious connoisseur’s haven, with a constantly changing selection of 18 craft beers on tap and 150 to 160 in bottles, plus a wine menu and rows of Scotch and bourbon. Among the brews on tap this month are the Belhaven Scottish Ale and Ommegang Adoration Ale, a Christmas beer with Coriander, cardamom, mace and sweet orange peel.

The wooden bar, built in 1858, is one of the oldest in Madison. If the Cure wasn’t playing quietly in the background, it would feel like 1858, too. There’s no jukebox, no televisions, no gambling machines. But behind the bar are as many glass varieties as beers, and Rice knows each one: the footed pilsner, Belgian goblets, tulips, Nonic pint glasses and Imperial pints.

Rice, 43, started working at the Malt House when it opened in June 2008. An Ashland native, she moved to Madison in 1986 to clean rooms at the Inn on the Park with her best friend. Eventually, she got a degree in accounting and worked for years as an accountant.

Now she only does accounting on a freelance basis to allow time for her real passion, beer. She’s a member of the Madison Homebrewers and Tasters Guild. She recently took the Beer Judge Certification Exam and can identify all 28 styles of beer and each style’s three to six subcategories.

She recently spoke with 77 Square about homebrewing, beer glassware and why the Malt House is a conversation bar.

How did you get this job?

I know the owner, Bill (Rogers). We’re both in the Madison Homebrewers club. When he decided he wanted a craft beer bar, I said, ‘Ohhh, man, does that sound like fun!’ I’ve never bartended before, but I know my beers. All of the bartenders are very knowledgeable. Bill gives us ‘beer school’ about every other week.

That’s one of the things that I really love about working here. I learn something new every day. Learning about the beers every day is what makes this job so fantastic, and teaching other people what I know. There’s nothing in the accounting world that is this rewarding.

When did you start homebrewing?

I started homebrewing in ’95 when I got married. My brother brought us a homebrewing kit for our wedding. (My husband) soon got bored, but I kept on.

Is homebrewing the natural next step for beer connoisseurs?

People started brewing because the styles weren’t available. But now you can get anything at the store, craft beer, Belgian beer, anything. There are so many styles on the market now where there weren’t back in ’82 when the homebrewers club started.

What are you brewing?

The Madison Homebrewers do a club trip to tour different breweries, and we just went to Iowa over the weekend. I had a Belgian Wit and a porter on tap on the bus for our trip. I also have a Fuller’s ESB clone, which is an English beer, kind of a bitter, dry, little bit hoppy. And then in my fermenter right now, almost ready to be going to the secondary, is a Racer 5 clone, which is a hoppy beer from California.

What’s a clone?

It’s a clone recipe that the brewers will publish. Sometimes the distributors just can’t get it, especially if it’s out of state.

And then I’m also brewing a mead, which is slightly different than a beer. You don’t boil or heat anything, you just mix water and honey with yeast and nutrients and let it ferment. It’s a much higher alcohol product than beer is. A friend in the Homebrewers Club and I are making this together, so we’re planning on it tasting like an Old Fashioned, the Wisconsin drink of choice.

How do you get it to taste like an Old Fashioned?

We’re not sure yet. We’re gonna put in bitters and orange and cherries and brandy and see what we can do to make it taste as close to an Old Fashioned as possible, with that little underlying hint of honey, which is what makes a mead.

What was your first alcoholic drink ever?

We used to have little snippets of beer and wine at holiday parties when I was a kid growing up. So, either my dad’s Meister (Brau) or a Chablis wine. I discovered good beer in about 1998. I didn’t really know that much about beer before that. I knew that I liked something besides Budweiser and Miller, I just had to find what I really wanted.

Does it make a difference what glass the beer is served in?

For Belgian beers, I think so. At home, I have a tendency to drink out of Belgian beer glasses because they’re more open, they give you more aroma when you’re drinking your beer and smelling your beer, just like a wine glass does. I rarely use pint glasses at home.

One thing that’s unique about the Malt House is that it doesn’t have TV, jukebox or other distractions.

Yeah, it’s a conversation bar. Most people that come in here really enjoy that, that they can come in with their friends and sit there and talk to their friends instead of be distracted by a TV in the background with the latest sport game on or the ticker at the bottom reading off all the scores. I think it’s a great thing. We also don’t have Wi-Fi here, so we don’t have all the students coming in doing their homework, sitting with their computers open, either.

With the explosion in microbrewing, will macrobrewers like Bud and Miller survive?

It’s hard to say, because there’s still so many people that are all about the cheap drunk. And this place does not cater to the cheap drunk. We don’t want to see anybody get drunk. The people who drink Miller and Bud, they’re out to get pitchers of beer, after pitcher after pitcher after pitcher. Those people are still going to exist. It doesn’t matter how much you tell them about beer and the flavor of beer. They don’t care. They don’t want a beer that tastes good.

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