My passion for brewing stems from my passion for anything homemade. I tend to make my own pasta, my eggs come from our own chickens, and I 'm still eating the garlic I grew last year. Right now I’m making nettle beer because we have a lot of nettles on our land. Later in the summer I’ll make a yarrow IPA (YPA). I would love to hear what others are doing like this. Gruits? Growing your own barley ? Keeping bees? What are you doing that is totally ( like centuries) old school?
I occasionally make pasta, but also make pasta sauce, homegrown chiles, salad dressings, marinades, hot sauces, and bbq sauces, to go with my home smoked bbq. No nettles though. 
IOo We need more of that. Nothing is better than homemade.
- 1 to homemade salad dressing. A ridiculous thing to buy: same thing but with high fructose corn syrup! Yuk.
+1 to avoiding the high fructose. The homemade is sooo much better.
Just made a salad from the garden: sprinkle clean greens with saLt, massage, add about 2 TB Good evoo, toss, add tiny bit of red wine vinegar, toss again. Perfect!
I am going to plant some Barley this week just for grins. If it grows I will try and malt it. Inspired by Jonathan Fuller. I have packages picked up from the Briess stand over the years, so why not?
Cool! glad to have inspired!
I just received 25 pounds of conlon barley seed to practice malting. so that when my crop is ready I can hopefully be more successful than my last two attempts.
Last year and the year before I grew heirloom dent corn and made my own masa for tortillas and tamales. We just got three new hens to bring the total up to 6, just about right for three people as long as you don’t mind eating a lot of eggs. I’ve always got my eyes out for little hunting and gathering opportunities. Last year I found a random wild pear tree that produces nice fruit. I’ll be visiting that one again. A few years ago I found a huge fig tree by a river and picked 10 or 15 lbs of wonderful figs.
Unfortunately, between work and family there isn’t a whole lot of time left over for as much “back to basics” as I’d like. One thing I have done is moved to edible landscaping whenever I put in new plants. I ripped up the bed in front of my house and replaced all the bushes with berries. I have currants, gooseberries and blackberries there, along with some lowbush blueberries and cranberries for ground cover.
If there was a way to grow a lawn from lemongrass I’d consider trying it out.
I live in a condo. But have an herb garden. Tomatoes, peppers, lime tree lemon tree and strawberries. We also eat fish 2-3 times a week. Almost always from something I’ve caught. Yellowtail, yellowfin, dorado, rockfish, lobster, albacore, salmon, Dungeness
A lemongrass lawn would be something. I know what you mean about time. right now I have some fortunate circumstances for doing this stuff. My girlfriend and I are still young (well, 46) but our sons are both grown men now, she is into much of the same things, and we both have jobs with a lot of paid time off by American standards. Your edible, and I’ll add drinkable, landscaping sounds great.
I was also inspired by Jonathan’s barley. I’ve been thinking of it for three years but seeing his pictures put me over the edge.
I just made some pickled eggs with my own cider vinegar, should be good although it seems the vinegar wasn’t quite as tart as I’d thought. I’ve used it in dressings before and it tastes good. Also used it as a conditioner after washing my hair and it works well.
As soon as I get a decent crop, I’ll be juicing and making (hard) cider of my own apples. I have 3 trees with 7 varieties (grafted several on). I also have a gazillion raspberries so I’ll probably make a pie or jam this year, and now I’m trying gooseberries and they’re coming along nicely, should get a few this year. And of course I’ve grown my own hops for many years and brewed a lot of beers with those and they usually turn out great. I use mine for bittering, even without knowing the exact alpha acid, but found that it’s easy to figure out the alpha within 2-3 batches. In fact I get better results using them for bittering than with late additions.
I have a pyment mead with wild dark grapes from the back yard as well. Doesn’t taste wine-like but is very spicy and earthy. It’s not bad but not great, but certainly different, and turned the mead a deep puce color.
I have made an excellent gruit with sweet gale, yarrow, and mugwort. Go easy on the yarrow – it gives a certain tartness that I think is easily overdone. The sweet gale is most tasty of the three and can be used in the same amounts as your favorite hops. The mugwort tastes sort of like eucalyptus and should be used with restraint. All that being said, the beer tasted fantastic and I’ll be making it again eventually. Best advice on any gruit is to figure out how much herbs you think you would like to use… and then divide that amount by 3, because all these herbs are so easily overdone. Sweet gale would be the one exception.
I would like to make a gruit. Is sweet gale something you can get to grow yourself? What is its flavor?I make a yarrow ale every summer that I like. the yarrow is distinctive but not overpowering.We also make pyment with foraged wild grapes every year. We make a lot of melomels: cyser, perry, peach (we have one tree that gives us about 80#),elderberry, blueberry, mixed berry (blackberry, raspberry, blueberry, elderberry), rhodemel, maple tej etc etc. we have a dandelion mead in a fermenter now. We have a lot of wormwood growing near our elders that I think will turn into an experiment.
I currently keep two active bee hives in my backyard and we planted our first hops in the backyard last year. It’s really great watching them take off. And the bee watching is very relaxing in the afternoons after work.
My friend is making a root beer flavored beer with star anise and licorice root. Smelled great when he boiled it up. He’s not trying to make something that is like root beer, just an interesting gruit type of beverage. He’s allergic to (or intolerant of) hops.
Same thing attracts me to brewing. We have a big garden and grow a lot of our own stuff. Onions, Garlic, Peppers, tomatoes, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and much more…
We usually store 75 or so garlic plants, probably 100+ red onions - usually gets us through until about this time of year.
One thing we make a LOT of is Bloody Mary Mix - we use almost all of our own stuff, with a few extra things thrown in - but, I would say we juice enough tomatoes for making about 60-80 quarts of bloody mary mix. We drink it a lot - usually with no alcohol in it to be honest. It is nice and spicy.
Also can a lot of Tomato/Basil soup.
We pickle Asparagus for the bloody mary’s.
I make my own Horseradish - probably 20-30 pints per year… friends snatch them up as fast as I offer them.
I also make a lot of peach-habenaro BBQ sauce with peppers I grow as well as a number of other homegrown ingredients.
Pretty much anything we can think of -we do on our own.
As I was planting celery the other day I realized we would have all the ingredients this year for homemade bloody Mary mix. I bring the food processor outside when I make the horseradish so I can keep my eyes open.
Ha… I do the same thing with Horseradish - I made it once in my kitchen and nearly fell to my knees from the fumes. It is made on the screened-in porch since then.
Homemade bloody mary mix is great. We put tomatoes, onions, garlic, celery, peppers, lemons, limes, etc. all through our juicer to make the base and then add in things like horseradish, pepper, old bay, celery seed, Bold and spicy A-1, etc. It is an awesome way to make use of excess tomatoes.
I’ve got all of the heirloom non-gmo seeds to grow a myriad of vegetables, herbs etc. but, with everything going on with weird work schedules etc. I think I’m going to make next year my target for getting things rolling. In the meantime the wife and I only consume organic foods/dairy and grass fed beef with no hormones. It’s pricy until I can get my own stuff going but, I refuse to eat corporate sponsored poison!
As someone else said, I make my own BBQ rubs and smoke my own meats, low and slow. When I started out five or six years ago I decided to go with a wood burning offset smoker. Wanted to learn to tend the fire, rather than go with one of the set-it-and-forget-it smokers. Of course, since I do have to tend it, I don’t have time to use it as often as I might like. But it’s a helluva nice way to spend the day when the opportunity presents itself.
Unrelated, I’m planning to try some tomatoes this season, in pots out on my deck. Had some volunteer plants many years ago, but this will be my first attempt to deliberately grow them. We’ll see if I can keep the squirrels and rabbits away from them…