There enough people who have been in the hobby long enough to remember the bad old days that this post should not turn into a monologue. People who came into the hobby over the last decade or so do not realize the embarrassment of riches brewing at this level has become.
To start off, what boggles my mind is has how fast American brewing at the amateur level eclipsed that of British homebrewing. When I started to brew in early 1993, pretty much everything other than hops and some grain came from the British homebrewing market. The Brits were far ahead of us. The only domestic malt extract at that point in time was Alexander’s Pale. Malt extract, dry or liquid, pretty much meant Munton & Fison or Edme. It would be a few years before a Briess entered the extract market in earnest. Kit beers were can and a kilo from Great Britain. Wyeast was the only liquid yeast propagator at the homebrewing level. Most of the early craft breweries obtained their initial pitches as quarts of slurry from Siebel or from Alan Pugsley if they had a Peter Austin system. The Wyeast catalog had less than a dozen cultures at that point. Dry yeast was a box of chocolates in that one never knew what one was going to get. All-grain brewing meant DIYing one’s brew house (that is how the keggle came into being). However, we made beer.
In spite of the crude ingredients, I was still very happy with my first batch. It included about 2 lbs of table sugar. But the only beer I had drank before was American macro beer, and the homebrew seemed much better - lots of flavor. It definitely depends on what you’re comparing against.
The old can & kilo was a little better than grocery store malt syrup and bread yeast, maybe. The biggest challenge was brewing something you could suck down without gagging. I think the most fun came from guessing when to bottle:) Will we do flat or exploding this time?
What’s early? Didn’t Sierra Nevada start as a homebrew shop back in the 70s? When I started extract+steeping grains was a big thing for beginners but I hardly hear anyone talk about that now.
I’m more interested in the next few years. Morebeer bought homebrew supply.com and I see more consolidation on the way. Seems like it could be ok, good retailers seem to be expanding. I’m wondering if craft malt is going to bring the next big wave of craft. I’m thinking it might not be the next IPA, but maybe the next sour if that makes sense. More malt forward beers that showcase local craft malt. Lots of headlines, not as much sales, but it sticks around at low levels.
I didn’t start until 1996. I honestly can’t remember where I ingredients from now. Must of have been mostly mail order, but I just can’t remember. Huntsville (AL) actually did have a homebrew shop that was the secondary store to a health food store. And in '97-'98 we had a pretty good store called “Bama Brew”. It went out of business after he got threatened by the ABC (homebrewing was still illegal).
I remember getting Wyeast and making starters. I moved on from dry yeast after the first batch, which was the John Bull extract with yeast under the lid that came from a homebrew shop in PA and was gifted to me from my mother on Christmas '95.
But I also remember being in a late '70’s homebrew shop with my dad. He was a wine maker. I distinctly remember dried, yellowed hops just sitting out the air for sale (not sealed).
There were no online forums when I started and I read Papazian, Noonan and the Style Guide series … and that was the foundation for my learning. There was email news group that came out from the BA or whatever it was called before the forums that was interesting but really hard to follow (I can’t remember what it was called now, someone will remember). But the first forum I really got involved with was the “B3” or “Beer, Beer and More Beer!” forum (now defunct). That’s where I first came across Denny and even some of the other old AF people still floating around on this forum. I really learned a lot being involved with forums, which is one of the reasons I still like to stay active today.
I started brewing in '92. There was a second liquid yeast supplier, Dan McConnell’s Yeast Culture Kit Company, which sold vials of yeast and equipment to start your own yeast ranch. It was out of Ann Arbor MI, so close to me, but it was sold in homebrewshops. It shut down late 90s IIRC.
Dan had a good collection of strains. That ended up a White Labs, some were then put into production.
Just remembered Blue Ribbon Malt Extract, which was out of the Detroit area. It was an old brand started in prohibition. Don’t know if it is still around.
Propagators were smack packs. They just contained less yeast so you had to propagate it. Activator contain more yeast, so the idea was that you could activate them and pitch without a starter.
I started in the mid-90’s after visiting a homebrew shop run by the nicest lady around. The shop had all the usuals: John Bull, Munton’s, dried yeast, starter kits, and a handful of bits and bobs. But what I remember most about those days was how helpful and friendly that lady was. No way I was taking up the hobby without her knowledge and her kindness to a newbie. I loved giving her my money and rooted for her success, but alas, she only made it a couple of years. As did I, on my first go round.
I’ve been brewing for 15 years, so I mostly missed the bad days, as well as the mediocrity of the 90s brewpub movement. What I did drink then I couldn’t tell was bad (or at least, any worse than Rolling Rock).
I do, however, have a book from my grandfather who was a very early Homebrewer. It’s called “Home Brewing Without Failures”, by HE Bravery, and it might be one of the worst things I’ve ever read. It was published in England in the 50s and republished here sometime in the late 60s, and has recipes with 100% crystal malt, overnight mashes, and other atrocities. I give him credit though for making beer in the 70s, as well as ordering grape root stock for homemade wine from New York back when it was considered a major winemaking region for the east coast.
I started in 1990 with a Dogbolter Bitter kit from England. After that I tried to read as much as I could and attempt mashing. Everything was mail order here until the late 90’s, except for the hydroponics store that sold old homebrew stuff on the side. I didn’t like going there because it always seemed like they were being surveilled as a “grow” shop.
My older brother tried malting and brewing from scratch in the 70’s without much success. There’s a nice article about him and his craft malting business in the latest Zymurgy.
First brew was in '95 with a Mr. Beer kit. Beer came out horrible because of not knowing the nuances of sanitation, but I was hooked. Graduated to extract kits a year or so later and made a porter with Munton’s extract. It was either Munton’s, Coopers. or John Bull for extract kits. Did those for a few years before starting all grain. Yes there were limited suppliers of malted grains in those days, but we made it work. Equipment was also limited. Used a 10 gallon Polarware pot with a false bottom as as both the mash tun (in a styrofoam box) and as a boil kettle. Fermented in a plastic bucket. It was a primitive setup but I could make pretty good beer. Even with that setup, I grabbed a gold medal in the first competition (the Ohio State Fair) that I entered.
I for real saw cans of this in the early or mid 2000’s. I had always heard about it but never saw it before. It was in a little country store in Alabama. It had the yeast under the lid and instructions on how to brew beer.
My first batch was May of '92. Pale dme, Hallertau pellets, Edme dry yeast, from a homebrew store in Boise (now defunct).
It turned out pretty well I thought, but that was a long time ago and it was my first batch of homebrew so who knows? I do remember thinking it tasted a lot like beer …
Cans of Alexander pale lme were easy to come by, as were relatively fresh Cascade and Willamette pellets, and the Wyeast Propagator packs. That’s pretty much what I used for the first couple of years until I went all grain.
I could see where it might be overwhelming for someone just starting out today, with the dizzying array of ingredient and equipment choices available. When I started out there were far less ingredient choices and if you needed a piece of equipment that wasn’t available you just had to make it yourself.
I first started brewing in '84 and boy was it ever primitive then. No internet of course, went to the local bookstore [the only one in town] looking for anything I could find to learn how to brew. The store owner recalled seeing a book about brewing in one of his catalogs, turned out there were 2, “Better beer and how to brew it” by someone named M.R. Reese, and Dave Line’s “Big book of brewing”, which I guess was sort of a bible, at least to some British brewers. I didn’t hear about Papazian until years later.
Finding a source of supplies was the next hurdle cuz there were no brewing magazines available here and of course no brew shops, I somehow found a place in MA called The Village store, from whom I was able to mail order equipment and supplies. And by mail order I mean you mail them your order with your check, once they receive the order & the check clears their bank they mail the stuff to you, with a turnaround time of 2 to 3 weeks. Muntun & Fison and John Bull LME, yeast was Muntuns , Red Star or some generic stuff in plain white packages labeled “beer yeast”, and unbranded DME.
At the time I was still drinking Adolph’s Rky Mtn bladder wash and thought that was what I wanted to replicate, I’m sure most of you can guess how well that turned out with crappy yeast and no temperature control. We did make a couple batches of stout that were okay, and one amber lager that fermented in a cold back room during winter that was awesome enough to keep me interested. Most of the rest of the dozen or so batches we made before moving to a much smaller house forced us to give up on brewing were yeasty junk that tasted like the lousy homebrew they were. The boil kettle was an 8 gallon porcelain water bath canner, FVs were ~7G buckets with lids that were supposed to be airtight but of course weren’t. The last few batches I did all or mostly grain, the mill was a Corona hand crank, and for the life of me I can’t remember how I did the mash & lauter.
Fast forward to 2016 when life circumstances finally allowed me to resume brewing and it was like being reborn into a magical new homebrewing universe, un-freaking believable all the ways the “hobby” has improved, and the improvement in the beer I make now is commensurate. Sometimes, some aspects of “progress” really are progress.
My first brew was in ‘92. An extract kit from William’s that I boiled on the stove in an enameled steel canning pot and fermented in plastic buckets in the storage shed in Georgia (no temp control) bottled in Grolsh-style ‘flippies’. Brewed beer like that for a while then I took several years break while stationed in Europe and picked back up in ‘13 when AL made homebrewing legal.
To the best of my knowledge, Wyeast has always offered the smack pack. That was their competitive edge. However, the early smack packs had a tiny amount of yeast compared to an Activator pack. When White Labs showed up in '95, their claim to fame was that they were direct pitch. I guess direct pitch is relative.
