Tim Artz

Engineer and extreme do-it-yourselfer
Oakton, Virginia

When the Cub Scouts asked Tim Artz, an electrical engineer in

Oakton, Virginia, to make s’mores at his seven-year-old son’s Cub

Scout cookout, Artz responded like a grizzled action movie hero:

“I’m not making s’mores.”

Instead, Artz smoked eighty pounds of chicken legs and

eighteen pounds of sausage in his Porkulator (a smoker he built

himself from an oil drum), finishing them on a charcoal grill at the

campground. He also served a four-gallon batch of homemade

beans, an equal amount of potato salad with homemade mayo, and,

for dessert, root beer floats with root beer that he brewed and

carbonated himself.

Artz, you see, is a bit of an obsessive when it comes to making

things himself. He makes his own honey (with three beehives

outside his home) and then makes his own mead using what’s left

over. He makes his own soap using rendered beef fat the way his

mother taught him to in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He makes six

kinds of hot sauce, which he puts in his own bottles with labels he

also makes himself. He makes pickles, beer, you name it.

Artz grows things, too. He grows figs, Meyer lemons, kaffir

lime leaves, two kinds of grapes, arugula, and San Marzano