South End Suds
Some of us homebrewers were holding an ad hoc meeting on the side of the road yesterday, comparing notes on hops and malt extracts, sharing stories of exploding bottles and quality control issues, all the while dodging Labor Day traffic which was building rapidly to a Mass Exodus of all those summer people hauling boats and bikes and trailers and roof rack gear back to their primary residences in the Big Cities. You know, Conway and Sedro Wooley. Summer’s over for them, but we still have jobs to do —- namely, distilling barley extracts down to a winter supply of stouts and porters and barleywines. The root cellar isn’t full floor to ceiling yet with the bounty of a fine summer.
I know for some folks the idea of homebrewing conjures visions of bathtub gin or bad moonshine, desperate measures for the desperate times of Prohibition. When I started brewing, the micro beer craze hadn’t started. If you wanted a full bodies, pure ingredient malt beverage, you had to make it the old fashioned way: yourself. There were only a couple of self-help books on the market, but they were good enough to get things bubbling. And before long I was my own little brewery, South End Suds, pumping out ales and stouts and meads and double bocks 5 gallons at a time, bottling them in used sterilized bottles.
You see micro breweries dotting the landscape now, sea to shining sea. They’re the folks like us, the homebrewers who made a better beer than Bud or Miller Lite, who stood up to the Goliaths by saying ingredients matter, taste matters, quality matters. The Slow Food folks are doing the same thing. ‘Local’ matters, even if the beginnings were more Loco. In a world of industrialized everything, a return to basics is a revolutionary idea. Real beer. Real food. Someday, in the distant future, in a world we can barely imagine, you’ll grow a tomato that has flavor once again. Dream big! Change is coming, even if it’s one homebrew at a time.
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