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Andy George just brewed beer using nothing but wild grass, dirt, and patience.
No malt bags, no hop pellets, no packet of Safale yeast from the homebrew shop — just what’s growing in the ground. On January 30, 2020, Andy George’s channel How To Make Everything released “Brewing Beer from Dirt and Grass,” the latest entry in his ongoing “How to Brew Everything” series, which strips alcohol production down to its rawest possible form. This time the target is beer, built from the same primal ingredients humans had available thousands of years before anyone bottled a yeast strain.
- George forgoes commercial malt, cultivated hops, and packaged yeast entirely, sourcing wild cereal grasses and native soil instead.
- He germinates raw wild grains himself to produce malt, rather than buying pre-malted grain.
- Fermentation is spontaneous — he relies on ambient, naturally occurring yeast captured from soil and wild flora rather than pitching a cultured strain.
Malting Grass Instead of Grain
Modern brewing starts with malted barley that’s already been kilned, cracked, and bagged by a maltster. George skips that supply chain completely, harvesting cereal grains still in their wild grass form and germinating them by hand to coax out the enzymes needed to convert starch into fermentable sugar. It’s the same basic chemistry every craft brewery relies on — just done with foraged grass heads instead of a 50-pound sack from a grain supplier.
Dirt as the Yeast Source
The most unusual move in the video is where George gets his yeast: the ground itself. Rather than pitching a lab-cultured strain, he uses native soil and wild plant matter to capture ambient microorganisms and lets spontaneous fermentation take over — the same principle behind lambic-style beers, except here the wild yeast is pulled straight from dirt rather than a brewery’s open-air cellar.
No cultivated hops, no packaged yeast, no commercial malt — just grass, soil, and whatever wild microbes happen to be living in them.
Mashing and Boiling in the Open
Once the malted wild grain is ready, George mashes and boils it using primitive outdoor methods rather than stainless kettles and temperature-controlled mash tuns, mirroring how early civilizations would have fermented grain-based drinks long before industrialized brewing science existed. It’s a hands-on rebuild of the entire process, from grass to glass, without a single ingredient bought off a shelf. Viewers curious about other from-scratch fermentation experiments can find a companion piece in Bringing Back The World’s Oldest Fermented Beverage, and the primitive-outdoor-craft crowd will also recognize the survivalist spirit of Amazing Bushcraft Tent made from Plastic Wrap.
George’s “How to Brew Everything” project has made a habit of stripping alcohol down to its rawest components, and this episode pushes that idea as far as it can go — no store-bought inputs at all, just grass and soil doing the work early brewers depended on for thousands of years before anyone isolated a yeast strain.
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