Summary: <a href="http://offthegridbiz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Jason.jpg"></a>Jason Smith - Adventures In Homebrewing & Austin Homebrew Supply<br> <br> <a href="http://offthegridbiz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/AIH-logo-flag-and-website-2100-white.png"></a><a href="http://offthegridbiz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Texas-logo-star-400.bmp"></a><br> <br> From experiments in brewing while serving in the Army to now over 20 years in the Homebrew industry, Jason Smith joins us to talk about the joy of Homebrewing and fermentation.<br> <br> Checkout Jason's fine websites to help you in your homebrewing adventures today!<br> <br> Adventures In Homebrewing - <a href="https://www.homebrewing.org/">https://www.homebrewing.org/</a><br> <br> Austin Homebrew Supply - <a href="https://www.austinhomebrew.com/">https://www.austinhomebrew.com/</a><br> Transcription<br> Intro: Jason Smith is the owner of Adventures In Homebrewing.<br> <br> It all started when he was brewing beer in 1992. While serving in the army in 97, he left the army and moved back to Detroit to pursue pharmacy school. While preparing for school, he realized the lack of competition in the homebrew market in Detroit and opened up his own shop in 1999.<br> <br> Over the last 20 years, his business has evolved into both retail and online sales as well as producing their own warehouse management system. So the gap year that he took off from pharmacy school has actually been over 20 years now, but it's been quite a rollercoaster ride.<br> <br> Jason Smith, welcome to The Off The Grid Biz Podcast.<br> <br> Jason: Thanks for having me.<br> <br> Brian: So why don't you let everyone know a little bit about what it is that you do?<br> <br> Jason: My name is Jason Smith. I own Adventures In Homebrewing and Austin Homebrew Supply. We do homemade beer making, wine making, cheese making, distilling of products.<br> <br> We have guests that do soap making, soda making to kind of anything that you would make at home. As far as beverage supply goes for sure.<br> <br> Brian: How did you end up of all things in the home brewing industry?<br> <br> Jason: It's kind of crazy. I started out in the Army. And when I started, I wanted to make wine with the guys in the Army. And they're like wine, How about beer?<br> <br> Well, I suppose we could do that.<br> <br> So we got involved with some beer making.<br> <br> I worked in a pharmacy. We had lab equipment available to us, of course. So we started culturing a lot of our own yeast doing different things in the beer making side of it. We really didn't have what's available today.<br> <br> Internet access, we couldn't just order something.<br> <br> It was a lot of finding where can we get grains, where can we get hops? And then of course with the yeast we started culturing a lot of it within the labs at the hospital at the time, I did that for some time, started a small homebrew club at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, did some fun stuff with that.<br> <br> And then as I left the military, I got home, I was gonna go back to school for pharmacy.<br> <br> When I got home, there was a couple small shops, but nothing really, that had bar equipment and you know, the kegging equipment and just the bigger items that were available.<br> <br> I just had a larger vision of what home brewing could be versus what the local shops had had. Says talking to a friend one night over beer, of course, and kind of determined that we could do a better job than what was currently available in Michigan.<br> <br> So the first thing we did was kind of that ESPN mentality.<br> <br> Well, we can open this in Michigan, but there's a whole world out there. Let's jump on the internet and make sure that we are getting out to everybody. We started collecting email addresses, phone numbers, names,
