This Old House and Homebrew

I was looking for the right forum for this post, so hopefully it's right.

Last night I turned on PBS right before the VP debate. Turns out "This Old House" was on. The segment was about a couple who had water in their basement, and Roger Cook was coming over to help install a dry well outside the house. When the couple was showing Roger around the house the showed him their Cascade and Mount Hood hop vines along with their grain compost pile and went into some basics of homebrewing. By the end of the segment they were all drinking a homebrew stout.

Anyway, I just thought it was cool to see homebrewing come up in a show I've loved since I was a kid.

Dude, that's awesome! Hopefully they'll replay this episode this weekend. I grew up on this show too, kickin' it Bob Vila-style.

bob's a hack, everybody knows norm is the man...

Oh, I know. I miss Steve, Kevin's OK but he's got about the same level of skillz as I do.

I love TOH and I watch Steve's new show Renovation Nation.

I'll have to keep an eye out for that episode.

This Old House is awesome, and I can say growing up in Boston, even we made fun of Norm's ridiculous accent. As far as Kevin goes, he is a good host, but had to be reminded to hit the NAIL with the hammer, not the board he was hitting it into.

They just played this episode again. I about freaked out!
Anybody know the couple?

uglygoat said:

bob's a hack, everybody knows norm is the man...

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Haha, I met him on a shoot once for a commercial in Cleveland. Biggest jackass ever. Totally agree!

the_bird said:

Dude, that's awesome! Hopefully they'll replay this episode this weekend. I grew up on this show too, kickin' it Bob Vila-style.

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Dude, me too! I now have a subscription to their magazine because its so interesting, I don't even own a house right now...

The homebrew segment definitely adds to their clout...

You know, even better... I happened to flip on Yard Crashers, a show I've never really watched before, it was on HGTV or DIY (can't remember which). Not only was the whole show about hooking up this homebrewer with a sweet backyard patio setup, it was all about making this place into his Brew Central. I literally saw the last three minutes, but I'm pretty sure they build him a bar with a 2-tap tower. You could see his three-tier system in the background, he had like a dozen kegs kicking around, wort chillers, the whole 9. I've been trying to find the episode again, I managed to save those three minutes but that's it.

Didn't I hear Rodger say "This is stuff is almost as good as Coors Light or Budweiser!”?

Norm is da Man. Love the New Yankee Workshop. One of my all time favorites was "Home Time". I forget the hosts name, but he always had a chick du jour on. Rumor was that he was involved with the female co-host, then a while later a new woman would appear on the show. It used to be fun to watch to see if his love life changed, and who the new "build babe" was going to be. That show was more instructional than the Bob Vila version of This Old House. My sister-in-law would go crazy when my brother and I would be on the phone during the show, talking about the new laser guided miter saw, or some other great tools. Now that was a GUY's soap opera.

Sorry to say, but TOH is not what it used to be, at least that how it feels here.

I started to get turned off when they spend so much time on some old (rich) fart's house in Concord, restored as a 18th-century farm or something like that.

Occasionally glancing at it while channel-surfing, it looks like the projects cover a lot of expensive, exotic solutions, not really within reach of most people, IMO.

That made me stop contributing to GBH, in fact.

Mr. Morash (+ wife) have the stronghold on the show...

I haven't watched it nearly as much in recent years. I'm pretty sure that the introduction of "Ask This Old House" was a direct response to that, though. The show's roots were always in DIY; lots of sweat equity, Norm and the guys always talking about doing projects from a homeowner's perspective, Bob always clumsily getting in the middle and trying his hand at a project. The show was made for people who were working on their own houses.

It's definately transitioned to a "Oooh, look at that! Pretty!" show over the past... well, over the past few decades. I mean, gorgeous projects but nothing that I'm going to be able to do, lots of stuff that NO homeower can do themselves. That's the niche that they decided to go after, then it seems like they realized how far they had strayed from their roots so they brought in Ask This Old House for the typical DIY/maintenance concerns.

It's not in the "must watch" category anymore. I get the mag, but that's an ongoing Christmas present from my mother, I doubt I would buy it myself (she also gets me Family Handiman, which tends to be a lot more useful).

You know, kind of on this front... I'm planning on installing a granite tile countertop, so I went to TOH's website to see if they had any instructions or anything; bupkis. All I could find was stuff about solid surfaces, not doing a tile install, which I guarantee will look good AND is a realistic DIY project for a guy like me. I mean, I think of that as a basic DIY project, and unless I was missing something, I couldn't find anything about it because TOH is mostly about the kinds of homeowners who aren't blinking twice about paying $60+ a square foot for countertops.

Still love Rich Trethewey, though. If I ever get a basset hound, I'm naming him "Trethewey."