- An Introduction

I enjoy libations of all sorts. Particularly I like beer and bourbon. I also enjoy wine. I have long been interested in the notion of self-reliance, and have been growing my own vegetables the best that my living conditions allow. I have since decided to, and am now addicted to, creating my own fermented beverages. Unfortunately home-distillation is illegal, so for now I'll have to keep buying my bourbon. Beer and wine are another story.

An enthusiastic conversation originating around a campfire led me to seriously consider home-brewing. When I started looking around online there was an overwhelming plethora of technical information. I bought the brewers' bible, or something similar, which contained a great deal of information, but was confusingly full of mubojumbo. This at first discouraged me. My interest in brewing comes from elsewhere--partially the fact that I can do it-- a notion re-affirmed when I tasted a bottle of beer created by my friend, one of the original campfire discussion participants. It may have been the best I tasted up to that point. He learned the basics and devised the rest from experimentation, he didn't use books; he dove in head first. His beers continue to amaze me.

There's certainly a place for all the precision and anal-retentive homebrew heros, but it's not here. To me, experimentation is the key--not data-sets. I want to pull things from available resources and create enjoyable beverages, cheaply. I want to see what is possible without using brewshop ingedients (with the exception of yeast.) I want to explicitly utilize things available in nature, things commonly found in the woods, around the house, in the grocery store, at the local grist-mill, farm etc... The most fundamental piece of information is sugar + yeast = alcohol, the rest is a field day.

In my initial quest for useful information on a back-to-basics approach, there was little to be found (though there was enough to get me off and running.) Such is the purpose of this site: to document my experiments, successes and failures and perhaps add to the fermentation store-of-knowledge that has been building for thousands of years. Hopefully, you might even find something useful (if not entertaining.)