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A wee bit of history...
A Short History of the Triangle Homebrewers League and What
Followed--
Part 1. The Early Years
The Chapel Hill/Carrboro area was a hotbed of home brewing activity in the late 1970's and early 1980's due to the presence of the Superbrau factory outlet store, which sold various flavors, sizes and mixtures of Superbrau malt extract, Red Star Yeast, 10 gram packets of pellet hops (unlabeled as to variety), basic equipment items and equipment kits and home brewing instruction books written by Leigh Beadle, the owner and operator of Specialty Products Incorporated, an extract manufacturing firm headquartered in Clinton, NC. [The company is still operating but sells mostly through mailorder and wholesale channels. Leigh Beadle has recently patented a small scale brewing system.] Early advertizing leaflets promised import quality beer for twelve cents per bottle. This was technically achievable, but Chapel Hill being the kind of place that it was (and is) most brewers were connoisseurs who sprung for a high quality 18 cent per bottle recipe. TRUB's origins can be located precisely at the point where the tracks of the North Carolina State Railroad cross Main Street in Carrboro. In the early 1980's, the last of a succession of store managers, Earl Nelson, (a Ph. D. candidate in the English department at UNC-CH and a homebrewer) invited some frequent customers to his apartment in Carrboro to sample each others brews, discuss techniques, ingredients and meaning of life. [Earl completed his doctorate, and moved on, presumably to even greater successes.] These early participants were primarily graduate students, spouses of graduate students and recent graduates of UNC-CH. The departments of chemistry and neurobiology were well represented. After meeting at Earl's apartment several times, the meeting place shifted to other apartments in Carrboro, and eventually crossed the line to Chapel Hill.
About this time, a few meads started to creep in, and while the beers generally increased in quality, the occasional problem beer was passed (or sprayed) around. Brewing techniques were limited to primary fermentation with extracts followed by bottling. About this time, someone decided that the group needed a name, and the Triangle Homebrewer's League was proposed and approved by a vote of the members as the least offensive of the suggestions. [The relatively unsophisticated brewers did not realize at the time that all home brew clubs needed a cute acronym.] The league picked up enough new members that a larger meeting place was needed. One of the members knew the owner of the Mariakakis restaurant [known to old-timers as Qwikie Takeout, and regarded by many as the best restaurant in town] in Chapel Hill, who agreed to let the club meet in their banquet facility at no cost, but with the promise of new regular customers (a tradition which even today drives the choice[s] of meeting establishments). [This restaurant exists today as a cafe‚ and specialty store in the same location.] Also, about this time, Alternate Beverage in Charlotte became known to local brewers as a supplier of a wide variety of brewing supplies. While extract brewing was vastly more prevalent that mashing, the diversity of styles sampled at the meetings increased greatly.
When it became necessary to leave Mariakakis, Tim Ely (a meadmaker of distinction, pharmacologist and latter day college professor) arranged a new meeting location at the Cosmopolitan Tap Room (later known as the Fiesta Tap Room, and still later, as Aden's), a bar and Mexican restaurant (known to some people as "the place where the upper half of the Ivy Room used to be") on Main Street in Durham. Because the meeting room (know as the Red Room, for obvious reasons) was reserved for the local Marxist study group on Monday nights, club meetings were shifted to Wednesdays. It was here that a guest speaker from Freshops in Oregon arranged for subsequent delivery of hop rhizomes for club members interested in cultivation. It is likely that offspring of these plants still grace the gardens and homesteads where early club members lived.
One of the early catalysts to the evolution of the club was a trip by a few early club members to a home brew competition in Charlotte (the club's second official President) sparked the interest (and motivation) for the first TRUB OPEN (TRUB I) in 1988 which was organized and run by the authors of this article.
About this time, the club revised its official name (in order to keep up with the trend toward cute acronyms) to Triangles UnaBashed Homebrewers (TRUB). With Rick Rinehart's infusion of ideas from his Homebrew Club in Rochester NY (which at that time had been in existence for about 12 years) about things homebrew clubs could be and do (e.g., competitions) and about the world of 2 can extract and all grain recipes, the club started to evolve to a more sophisticated level. Some of the early club members who were not receptive to constructive criticism of their brewing efforts soon stopped coming to the meetings. They were gradually replaced by individuals interested in learning to make all-grain beers, understanding flavor profiles of different styles of beer, and interested in what was the beginning of the U.S. microbrewery explosion.
This became the early renaissance of the club. Club experiments (e.g., water, brewing salts, bittering and finishing hops, yeasts) were common we had club picnics at one of the Duke Forest pavilions 1 to 2 times a year (or club picnics in the boonies followed by overnight camp-outs for the more hardy members), the TRUB OPEN became an annual event, and a tradition of many of us going to judge in other Southeast homebrew competitions began. This coincided with a movement to the Weeping Radish (a newly opened bar, brewery, restaurant which located at the site previously occupied by a Studebaker dealership, which had been vacant for decades) as a free meeting location and a concomitant increase in the representation of Durhamites in the club (e.g., relationship established with the Durham Co-op for home brew supplies) Often after the official end of meetings Dave Hull, the original brewer at the Durham Weeping Radish, would tap a minikeg or draw some pitchers from a vat of his latest brew for general consumption and the meetings would continue unofficially until close to closing time.
This was the end of the beginning for our homebrew club and we moved into another era with the leadership from a number of individuals who had some different approaches to what the club should be. So relax, don't worry and have a homebrew and maybe another pair of club members would like to reminisce about more recent historical times in a future issue.