Oh lord, I remember the days when one could have any malt one wanted as long as it was Briess or Muntons. I remember when Dewolf-Cosyns (DC) started to ship 50kg bags of malt to the U.S. At 110lbs, those bags were unbelievably heavy and I was young and strong. However. brewing with their ale and Pilsner malted barley was an eye-opening experience of what was to come. DC was a huge step up from what we were used to using. The only problem I had with DC malt was that it was floor malted and floor malted barley often as debris in it. The rollers on my first Schmidling malt mill had many scars from tangling with foreign debris in DW malt. My favorite domestic malt for a long time as Schreier. Their two-row was sweet and malty. It was kind of like Rahr and Great Western on steroids.
I trust that guy.
Maybe I should mail off and see if he sends me a copy of the book 
OMG! That ad sounds almost word for word that Leigh Beadle says in the book I have. My primary is still fermenting away on the first five gallon batch I made using his recipe. I wll definitely update here in late september with the results!
Also, I just want to add that I am not treating this a some sort of brewing bible, but just as an effort to try something a little out of date and to give me a break from all grain brewing… I am actually really attracted to the fact that this can be done in under an hour ( maybe not the 30 minutes they are boasting). Last time I did a whole grain batch from cleaning to bucketing, I swear it took about seven hours. Though I am a rank amateur for sure.
I know this is off topic, but, when using yeast, does the type of yeast matter when you are throwing fresh wort directly on top of the yeast cake from the last batch (i.e. racking and immediately introducing the wort into the fermenting vessel)? I am speaking of pitch rate of which I know very little other than throwing in the dry yeast or yeast prepped in warm water.
Yes. Different strains behave differently. Even if you are pitching a ton of yeast, Windsor is still Windsor and Nottingham is still Nottingham. They will still have characteristics unique to their strains. I keep yeast cakes stored in mason jars in my fridge for a long time so that I can preserve those strains that can be difficult to come by. When I am ready to brew again, I just pitch the pint of slurry in my mason jar or, if it is older than a month or so, I make a starter with about a quarter or half cup of the slurry.
nice. i know, it must have been a crazy thing back in the day. the things i heard from people who knew people who did it pre 2000 was “bathtub beer” and stuff. must have been a long slog to even get to those days when i started where it was exciting to have -roasted barley/2row/pilsner/a few crystal malts. and i think that was about it.
good anecdote.
It wasn’t quite that bad, at least around here.
Around here I had to order stuff from Jacksonville until a real shop opened in Tampa in the early to mid 1990’s. There was a “grow store” that had some supplies before that, but I didn’t want to get busted by shopping there. That and I didn’t want to use brown hops.
Brewing was only bad for me for about three years. Luckily, my home brewing supplier of choice was focused on growth. Instead of just catering to primarily new home brewers, they embraced to entire community. The shops where home brewing supplies were just a side business folded fairly quickly after shops like this one started to grow and were able purchase supplies at volume discounts. What made things challenging over all was that the entire American brewing supply chain was targeted at supplying the large industrial brewers. Craft and homebrewing had to go offshore to acquire malt that was not targeted at making macro lager. All of the American hop cultivars available in the 90s were bred for bettering or being used in finishing hop blends as replacements for noble and English hops.
so, i know you’re roughly in the american NW? or central west? the birthplace of the current incarnation of homebrewing.
when did you first feel like “wow, we really have a ton of malt hop and yeast selection now”?
if i lived in toronto in the early 2000s, it would have been better, but im in a medium sized town, not really close to any major city, so for a long time the LHBS was friendly but i couldnt really get the stuff others were talking about online. heck, no joke it still doesn’t have liquid yeast, after at least 20-25 years of being open.
so, at least i can order online.
I’m in Oregon, starting brewing in 1998. There was a decent selection of ingredients, including Wyeast since it’s so close. I could get my hands on a did variety of mlts and hops even at that point, but those are produffed around here, too. I’d say that by 2003, maybe sooner I started seeing an even wider variety.
Ok, wow 1998? Somehow I thought you were doing it earlier, though that is quite early of course.
Yeah that situation sounds about right. I was considering buying hop rhizomes back in the mid 2000s, but hop choices became much better and cheaper afterwards.
I did my first brew in 1998 too. I always assumed Denny had been at this for much longer than me. Seems, he was just a lot more dedicated than I was. 
The “good” LHBS was only 4 blocks from my house back then. It had everything I needed at the time. Later it got sold and ended up buying the second best LHBS and the third just went out of business. Eventually Beer Crazy opened and put the first one to shame in terms of variety and customer service. Sadly, they are all closed now.
Paul
My first brew was ‘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) [emoji15] bottled in Grolsh-style ‘flippies’.
I took several years break while stationed in Europe and picked back up in ‘13 when AL made homebrewing legal.
I first brewed in 95. There was an LHBS near my work. I remember extract batches based on recipes from The Joy of Homebrewing. I also remember Wyeast from the door of a fridge in the shop.
I also took a long hiatus when I had kids. When I moved to Mississippi the beer scene was terrible (max ABV was capped at 6.2%) so I went back to homebrewing in 2010. I served Gary Glass one of my homebrews at a legislative event in Jackson, MS. He didn’t like it [emoji52] But, his presence to help us legalize homebrewing is why I joined and stay in the AHA.
+1 My friend.
A lot of us took a long hiatus from brewing when we had kids. There are life events that are more important than brewing.
20 year hiatus. I am making up for that though, in spades.
now that we’re just reminiscing about life events…
ya, i took a few year hiatus after a kid.
now i just do mostly extract or partial mash brews, so i still don’t have to spend as much time on it.
i wonder if i’ll ever have the kind of free time i had when i was in my 20s again.