Have you ever wanted to create a loving home for urban bees? Us neither. Sad Mag does love the local honeys, though, especially in sweet tea, and we’re not averse to getting a little sticky now and again in pursuit of authentic consumables. So when Sad Mag learned about Homesteader’s Emporium, in East east Van, we had to get the dirt on what Rick Havlak’s urban homesteading supply shop is all about. From  classes that will teach you how to make your own Kombucha, to that pivotal item (rennet) you’ll need to create your own cheese, Homesteader’s is a friendly, practical and adventurous store, run by a guy who is more of the same.

Sad Mag: Who are you?
Rick Havlak: My name is Rick Havlak, I’m the owner of Homesteader’s Emporium. And also the founder of Homesteader’s Emporium!

SM: Splendid. And when did you start your business?
RH: I started working on this full time almost exactly two years ago, which is kind of crazy to think about, but the store’s actually been open for about fifteen months now.

SM: Can you explain to someone off the street what Homesteader’s Emporium is all about?
RH: Homesteader’s Emporium is a resource for people who are learning to become more self-sufficient. We use the catch-all phrase “urban homesteading” to refer to a suite of activities like beekeeping, chicken keeping, canning vegetables, making your own soap, baking bread, making sausage, curing meats, and growing vegetables. It’s a broad spectrum of activities that all kind of appeal to the same group of people.

We’re a resource: we sell hard-to-find supplies for all of those things and more. We’ve also gotten more and more into providing educational programs because in many cases you’re trying to learn something, but maybe you don’t know anybody in your circle of friends that does it, so we found a real need for classes.

SM: Right, I guess it only goes so far to sell the tool for something if someone doesn’t know how to use it.
RH: We initially thought that we would get by providing all of these base raw materials and we would cater to people who had done the legwork and knew that—[like] for cheesemaking, if you know you need rennet and you know exactly what supplies you need, you just walk down to the store and you pick them all up—but we’re finding more and more that there’s a demand for something that’s packaged together.

SM: In the year that you’ve been open, do you have an “average” Homesteader’s Emporium customer?
RH: That’s an excellent question. And it is extremely diverse. There are a lot of different people that come into the store for a lot of different reasons. We get people who are just in the neighbourhood who treat us as their neighbourhood store for things like gardening tools, but what we imagined when we opened the store was that we would be more of a destination, so that’s still a broad group of people. People who are interested in specifically the stuff that we have that are coming from all over Vancouver to find it.

But to get back to your question: we have a lot of young parents who are interested in teaching their kids some more back-to-basics information; a lot of people who maybe had chickens when they were young or they used to can with their grandparents or with their mother and they’ve forgotten how to do it because they hadn’t valued it enough to learn it until recently. We get a smattering of people who do live out in the country and are what you might consider more traditional homesteaders, where they live on a piece of land and they actually produce a significant amount of their own food. They are much more self-sufficient than most so-called urban homesteaders would even aspire to be. And then we get “preppers”: people who are motivated primarily by the concern that the next big earthquake is going to catch us all with our pants down—which it probably is. And then a lot of weekend warriors, people who are maybe professionals who are just interested in learning something different, and foodies who are really passionate about food and are accustomed to going out to nice restaurants and coming at it from that point of view.

SM: Going back to a bit more about yourself: what brought you to the concept of Homesteader’s Emporium?
RH: Basically it’s the store that I wanted to shop at. Immediately what got me into doing this kind of thing was a really serious homebrewing habit. My buddy and I got super into homebrewing and we would spend a huge amount of time watching the brew kettle and talking about improving it in different ways. It’s sort of a slippery slope where you hold this beer in your hand and you realize that it’s better than most of the stuff that you buy and you made that yourself, and maybe two years ago you never would have imagined that you could do that. As you’re holding this beer in your hand and you’re watching this kettle boil for 90 minutes you get to thinking—what else can I make?

We just started trying a lot of different things. We tried coffee roasting, we started making cheese and we built a beehive—all just by skulking around the internet trying to find somebody’s blog or obscure website that had some information about what we should do—what kind of things did we need to use. With cheese, there’s this mysterious compound called rennet and we knew we needed to buy it and we searched all over time and finally found it in the back aisle of Famous Foods.

What we continually found was that we would bring it up in social situations and so many people were interested in hearing about it. It’s such a compelling thing to discuss. I felt that there was a lot of interest and there needed to be just one place where you could walk in say “tell me all I need to know and set me up with what I need.” There has never been a place like that in Vancouver to my knowledge.

SM: Do you have any ideas about why there’s such a renewed interest in homesteading?
RH: In the 1950’s—and I wasn’t alive then—it became sort of a status symbol to not have to do all this drudgery in your kitchen. I was looking through this book on coffee roasting and it had some funny ads from around that era advertising pre-roasted coffee with a picture of a woman burning coffee in her kitchen. And mocking her for having the poor judgement to do it herself instead of just going out and buying it in a can. It was part of the cookie cutter American dream—your food came from a grocery store and you had a middle-class job and you didn’t have to break your back toiling in the garden. But now we’ve come to a point where we’ve lost the idea that being involved with your food is something you have to do because you can’t afford not to—and now we’re far enough away from it that it’s become a curiosity and also a point of nostalgia.

It’s a mix of familiar and unfamiliar—cheese and coffee—but if you ask someone on the street, “how is it made and where does it come from?” it can be a total mystery. For me and for a lot of people it’s very exciting to peel that back and look into something that we’re not exposed to often.

SM: In terms of customers’ interests, what do you think is the next “big thing”?
RH: There seems to be a huge awakening of interest in fermented foods and cultured foods and the idea that it’s okay to eat things that aren’t sterile because there’s microbes all around us and we might as well be putting ones into our bodies that are beneficial to us. So we’ve really noticed that there are a lot of people who are interested in making fermented vegetables, and in particular, sauerkraut. I grew up thinking it was this sort of soggy, skunky-smelling pale shreddy stuff, but it’s true that once you start making it, you just start finding ways to eat it and put it in your diet. It’s very healthy.

SM: What have you got going at your house right now?
RH: I started out trying this heritage Swedish yogurt cultured called filmjölk, which I make from raw milk that I obtain on the grey market. And that’s really nice. I’ve got a bunch of sauerkraut on the go, and I’ve got a bunch of meat on the go because we got a bunch of honey out of our beehives this year.

SM: And you’ve been curing your own meats too?
RH: I’ve been making bacon now fairly regularly. That’s sort of the entry point for many people. Because it’s incredibly delicious – with a minimum amount of time and equipment you can produce something that’s noticeably better than what you would purchase in the store, which is quite seductive.

Seductive. And perfect place to end. Thanks, Rick!