A Westvleteren 12 clone. A Belgian that is often imitated, never duplicated by home brewers. Considered by many to be the best beer in the world.

Cary, NC – I have an interest in all things homesteading.  That doesn’t mean I do everything from start to finish but I find home brewing, wine making, gardening, cooking, even making sauerkraut and cheese – fun.  My wife says I just like to “ferment things”.

There’s great satisfaction to be found in building your own equipment, buying or growing some basic ingredients, learning some basic biology and chemistry and letting nature turn it into a gift.  In this case – it’s beer.

“This is grain… which any fool can eat. But for which the Lord intended, a more divine means of consumption. Let us give praise to our maker, and glory to His bounty, by learning about….. beer.” – Friar Tuck, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

BREW NERDS UNITE

In Cary, there is a club called “CARBOY” - ( The Cary-Apex-Raleigh Brewes of Yore) –  the inside acronym joke there is that a “carboy” is the vessel that homebrewers use to ferment home brew.

The club does demos, holds “brew-ins”, enters its members into the many contests, and shares different recipes, processes and styles.  One of the other joys of home brewing is that there are many ways to do it, boundless ingredients, and everyone throws his or her “spin” on it.  There are very few rules, aside from sanitizing and the use of barley.

BOUNDLESS VARIETY

Examples of this include the use of fruit, hundreds of varieties of yeast, different barley types, hops types and fermentation temperatures.  Some brewers even add chemicals to the Cary water to, for example, emulate the water appropriate to the style they are making.

Let’s say you a brewing a simple traditional ale.  You may want to get the yeast indigenous to the region’s style you are making (yes - actually buying perhaps what is naturally floating in the air in France, or Germany or the Czech Republic!), you may want to alter the water chemically to be the same as that region’s, you will buy the barley types they used, the specific hops and other adjuncts.

Dave Buning of CARBOY, and a brewer for 15 years told me, “I love the idea of brewing beer.  I love the experimentation aspect.  I’ve made a batches of basic ale and then altered portions of it to try to be true  to a particular style.  Recently I brewed an IPA and made a half of the batch an English India Pale Ale and half an American IPA using  Kent Goldings hops versus Cascade, Maris Otter barley versus American, British yeast versus American etc.”

Okay, we’re getting way too technical, but you know what I mean.

THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!

I’ve found that these homebrewers are all around us.  People that are boiling “wort” (unfermented grain “soup”) in their garages over turkey fryers or on the stove top in their kitchens.  People that grow their own hops in their yards, like me.  People that think fruit belongs in beer (yuck) or add corn, rice or rye.  People that build their own fermenting equipment out of old coolers or maybe have thousands of dollars worth of pumps and stainless steel conical vessels.

“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” – Benjamin Franklin

WHAT DO YOU MAKE?

In some future issues, I’d like to explore other Cary homesteaders.  What kind of things do you do in the interest of self-sufficiency and fun?  Let me know.  I’d love to share it with Cary!