I Almost Gave Up On Sourdough. Then I Read About Hollis.

I'm going to be honest with you. I almost scrolled past.

I'd seen the post on r/Sourdough on a Tuesday night — one of those threads where someone had written about a small bakery in upstate New York called Brenner Bakery. The man who runs it is retiring after forty-two years, and before he closes the doors he's putting his entire recipe book online for the people who never got an apprenticeship. His handwritten notebook. The exact method he's used since 1982. Everything he'd teach a grandchild who wanted to learn.

My first thought was the same one you're probably having now: here we go, another sourdough kit, another retirement story, another Reddit post pretending to be organic when it isn't.

I closed the tab.

That was a Tuesday. By Friday I'd opened it four more times.

→ See what the post was about

What kept pulling me back was one line in the comments. Someone had written: "I'd tried three YouTube tutorials and two other books before this. Hollis's is the first one where every single step is explained in detail — what to look for on day four, what the dough should feel like, what to do when it goes wrong. Nothing else I'd read did that." That's not a marketing line. Nobody writes that in a promotional post.

I'm fifty-four. I left my job at a Portland public school in June — twenty-eight years teaching third grade, and I was tired. My plan for retirement was to finally learn to bake sourdough. My grandmother baked sourdough in her Sacramento kitchen every Saturday of my childhood. When she died in 2003, nobody in the family knew how to keep her starter alive, and it went into the sink within a week. I have wanted to learn how to do what she did every year since.

I tried, in July. I ordered a beginner sourdough kit from Amazon — one of those ones with the little glass jar and the plastic instruction card and a bag of flour. Forty-two dollars. I followed the steps on the card exactly. Feed on day one. Feed on day three. Feed on day five. Bake on day eight. What came out of my Dutch oven that Saturday afternoon was a flat brick. Gummy in the middle. Sour in the wrong way.

The worst part wasn't the loaf. The worst part was that I had no idea what had gone wrong, because the card only told me what to do. It never told me what to look for. It didn't say what my starter should smell like on day four. It didn't say what a healthy bubble pattern looks like versus a dying one. It didn't say how the dough should feel when I press two fingers into it. I had followed every instruction on the card, and I still had no idea whether any single step had actually worked.

That was my one attempt. I hadn't opened the flour bag since.

So on the Friday evening, with a glass of wine and absolutely no intention of spending money, I went and read the Brenner Bakery website properly.

The bit that got me

There's a section on the site where Hollis Brenner — the baker — explains why beginner sourdough kits fail. I'd been telling myself for four months that I'd failed because I wasn't cut out for it. Reading his page, I realized the problem wasn't me.

The problem, he wrote, is that recipes don't tell you the parts that matter. What the starter should smell like on day two versus day four versus day six. How many bubbles you're looking for and what size they should be. When the dough is ready — the exact number of seconds the fingerprint should hold before it springs back. What the crust should sound like when you tap it. None of these things fit on a printed card. They live in the hands of a baker who has done it enough times to know, and they are the reason most people give up before their second attempt.

He's been baking sourdough since 1982. Forty-two years of the same method, in the same kitchen, in the same town. He wrote all of it down by hand in an 84-page notebook — the same one he used to teach the two apprentices he had over the years. Every page in pencil on cream paper, with corrections in the margins. He's scanned the whole thing.

That's what you get when you order the kit. His notebook, sent to your inbox as a PDF, five minutes after you place the order. Not a rewritten typed version. His actual handwritten pages.

That was the moment I stopped thinking of this as another kit and started thinking of it as a last chance. Because here's what nobody had said out loud until I read it: when Hollis closes the bakery, the notebook comes down. He doesn't have an apprentice. His wife Cathy is done. Once the last kit ships, that book stops being sold to anyone. I had to sit with that one for a minute.

→ Read Hollis's story

I ordered the kit that night

Ninety-nine dollars and ninety-five cents. Not cheap. I hovered over the checkout button for a good ten minutes before I clicked — because my last sourdough purchase was the forty-two-dollar Amazon kit, and it had left me with a brick and a bag of flour I was afraid to open. What was I about to do.

I clicked anyway.

Five minutes later, exactly as promised, an email arrived from Brenner Bakery with a PDF attached. Hollis's 84-page book. I opened it on the couch that same Friday evening and I read for two hours straight.

I got to the sourdough chapter and started reading his instructions for building a starter from scratch. He explains everything. Why the water temperature has to be between 75 and 78 degrees and what happens if you go outside that range. What the flour should look like when it's the right kind and what to check on the bag before you buy it. What day two smells like. What day four smells like. What to do if by day five it doesn't smell like anything at all. Every question I'd had in July — questions I hadn't even known how to phrase — was answered in a paragraph, in his handwriting, sometimes with a small pencil drawing next to it.

I closed my laptop and sat on the couch for a while. It was the first time in four months that I felt like I might actually be capable of this.

→ See the kit here

What arrived on Wednesday

The tools arrived on Wednesday morning in a brown kraft-paper box with a handwritten card tucked inside. Not a printed one. A handwritten one, in pencil, from Hollis. It said "Diane — this one's yours. Take your time. — H."

I opened the box on the kitchen counter. Inside: a nine-inch banneton with a linen liner tucked into it. A five-blade lame with a walnut handle. A Danish dough whisk. A precision scale that measured to a tenth of a gram.

Every piece had weight. This wasn't the plastic-and-cardboard scale from the Amazon kit. This was the actual equipment Hollis uses in his own bakery every morning — sourced from the suppliers he's been using for forty-two years, chosen by a man who has actually baked bread every day of his working life.

Day one, day seven, day fourteen

Wednesday evening I started my own starter, following Hollis's day-one instructions to the letter. Twenty grams of flour. Twenty grams of water at 76 degrees. Stir with the whisk. Cover with a cotton cloth.

Day two, small pinhead bubbles across the surface. Just like the book said.

Day four, the smell had turned from wet flour to something like green apple. Just like the book said.

Day seven, my starter doubled between the morning and evening feed, and passed the float test on the first try. My starter. Built by me, in my kitchen, from scratch, following the exact method Hollis has been using since 1982.

Day fourteen — this past Saturday — I pulled my first loaf out of the Dutch oven.

I stood at the counter and stared at it for a full minute before I did anything else. Deep amber crust. An ear on the top that curled the way the picture in Hollis's book showed it should curl. The crackle-song a proper sourdough makes when it cools on a wire rack. When I cut into it two hours later, the crumb was open and glossy and even, and it smelled like every bakery my grandmother had ever taken me into.

It was perfect. First real attempt. Following his book, step by step, page by page.

I made another one on Sunday. And another on Tuesday. My husband David — who told me I was throwing money away — ate half the Sunday loaf in one sitting and asked if I could make one for his mother next weekend.

→ See the kit here

Now, about the price

Ninety-nine dollars and ninety-five cents for a beginner sourdough kit is, I am aware, more than the Amazon version I killed in July. My husband David said exactly this when I told him. "Diane, you already own a scale and a Dutch oven. You're paying a hundred dollars for a book and a basket."

I had the same thought when I ordered. So here's what I said to him after the first loaf came out on Saturday.

I had a scale in July. It measured to the gram, not to the tenth of a gram, and Hollis's ratios only work if you're accurate to the tenth. I had a Dutch oven in July. Nobody had told me to preheat it for a full hour at 500 degrees before the loaf went in. I had a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon. Nobody had told me the spoon shreds the gluten strands and that a Danish whisk folds the dough without breaking it. I had a bag of bread flour. Nobody had told me what protein percentage to check for on the label, or which mill Hollis buys his own from.

None of my tools were wrong. I just didn't know how to use them for sourdough. And the recipe card that came with the Amazon kit didn't tell me. The three YouTube tutorials I'd watched didn't tell me. The four months of blog posts I'd bookmarked didn't tell me.

Hollis's book tells you. In detail. On every page. In pencil, in his own handwriting, in the margins, with small drawings — the way you'd teach a grandchild in the kitchen, not the way a marketing team writes an instruction card.

That is the ninety-nine dollars. His 84-page book, delivered in five minutes to your inbox. Plus the exact tools he uses in his own bakery — chosen by a man who has baked bread every day since 1982, from his own suppliers, at the specifications he trusts. Not sourced by a purchasing department.

And that's the reason I'm writing this. Because when Hollis's last kit ships, the book comes down. Cathy is done. The bakery closes. His forty-two years of notes in the margins stop being sold to anyone who didn't buy the kit while it was still on the shelf.

What I'd tell you if we were friends

If we were sitting across a kitchen table and you asked me whether you should order Hollis's First Loaf Kit, here's what I'd say.

I'd say: don't order it because you love sourdough. If you already bake beautiful loaves every weekend, you don't need this. Save your money.

Order it because you tried once and failed. Because there's a bag of expensive flour in your pantry from an attempt six months ago and you don't want to look at it. Because you have wanted, for years, to be the kind of person who bakes bread on Saturday morning and have never been able to figure out how to start. Because you watched a grandmother, or an aunt, or a neighbor do this thing when you were a child, and you have never been able to reach across the years and touch it.

Order it because Hollis has been baking sourdough in Rhinebeck since 1982 and he is about to put the tools down, and this is your one window to have his handwritten book, his method, and his tools in your kitchen before the doors close.

That's what I'd tell you.

I placed my order on a Friday evening with a glass of wine and a lot of doubt. Two hours later I was reading his book on my couch. Fourteen days later I pulled my first real loaf out of a Dutch oven. My husband David — who told me I was throwing money away — asked me to bake one for his mother. My neighbor Karen came over on Sunday morning, saw the loaf on the cutting board, asked me where the recipe was from, and ordered her own kit that same afternoon.

If you've read this far, you already know what you're going to do. I just thought someone should tell you the truth about it before you decided.

— Diane

Diane Porter lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband David. She taught third grade at a Portland public school for twenty-eight years before retiring in June 2026. She baked her first successful sourdough loaf on the Fourth of July, 2026, following Hollis's book to the letter.