If I want 4-8% brew, I'll happily buy locally-brewed stuff to explore, learn & support.
When I see the kind of things I am interested in going for $4-6 a bottle in stores, I figure it's worth the work to make my own crazy idea stuff.
I found a beer I liked that was made into a clone kit, and it did cost the same per bottle (not counting labor). That beer I buy as six-packs...no questions, no looking back.
Going to go with 0.5 liter (16.9 oz). ale bottles because someone got me a deal on them...reduce the number of bottles to fill and just sanitize & use. I'm done de-labeling, cleaning and sanitizing saved bottles...that was one of the worst parts timewise.
All true. Back in the late '80's through mid '90's I was seriously into homebrewing. It was a much smaller market then with few retail outlets for supplies. It was fun and rewarding and a lot of work. That was the time of the first micro-brewery boom. It wasn't called craft beer back in those days. Being in a college town, there was a brewing club headed by a professor visiting from England where he had brewed for many years, so we had some good advice available. The goals back then were good porters and stouts, real lagers were virtually impossible due to the refrigeration requirements. Top fermenting ale yeast, dry, was all we could get. Munton and Fison was the primary source for most all ingredients. Eventually liquid yeasts did arrive and that was great. By then I was repitching the good stuff I had found as I was brewing weekly anyways.
Bottles were a pain, eventually I had cases of them prepped and in their own cases, Tuborg used to come in 12 bottle hard cases with flip open lids and that was the source. I produced enough at the peak that i didn't buy a commercial beer other than trying a new import or domestic micro start up for about three years. Eventually the bottles were for small batch specials, and 5 connie kegs were in rotation in a fridge with two taps in the door.
The cost was much cheaper than buying equivelant volume of imports in the styles we made. I happened to be in a local store the other day that sells supplies and man, has the costs gone way up! The gear is much nicer and he kit options are pretty sweet, but it does not look like a hobby that also paid a benefit in cost savings like it used to!
Eventually in the quest for a better beer I ditched extracts and went to full grain brewing. That combined with the new liquid yeasts sure did provide that result. By then I also had my process and gear well refined. It was mostly DIY on that front too. The flavor was far superior. Maybe now the extract taste has been worked out and removed but back then you could always tell when the beer had started as a can of malt. But after awhile spending maybe 6 or more hours on a brew day got old, and good micro's had flooded the shelf so I quit and have not been back.
We had (have still) Geary's two hours south in Portland, where Alan Pugsley had been a huge kickstarter of the craft industry in this part of the country, and Greg Noonan's Vermont Pub and Brewery in Burlington where my brother lived and we visited often. Noonan was an early author and authority on the subject. I still have that book somewhere. Jim Koch started Samuel Adams in Boston and that quickly got distribution up here.
This was pre-internet of course, so books and the magazine Zymurgy from the AHA were our primary sources. I still have my old AHA member card too, probably a very low member number
Charlie Papazian was our idol and I had both of his books as well. Then the big corporate brewers swooped in and bought up a lot of the new guys, faked their own micro's with what they called pilot breweries and generally ruined the scene.
Now we've been in a second boom and I think it's here to stay and I'm glad. The craft guys products are often outstanding and we have two beverage stores in town now that have huge selections of locals and regionals along with the big dogs. So a beer connoisseur's life is good now.
Man, that was a ot longer than I had thought...sorry about that. Now please excuse me, I have a King of Tone board to finish populating today
Topic: Any Brewers, Wine makers or distillers here? (Read 46671 times)