Who on here is a homebrewer?

If you are a homebrewer, what beer do you brew that you feel would rank at least 4.5 on BA?

If you do not home brew, why not?

I am not a homebrewer. I am tempted a few times a year, however my reasoning:
1. It is seeming is very time consuming.
2. I *think* it takes quite a bit of room.
3. Initial costs are not worth the effort since there are so many great, fairly cheap beers available.

Like any hobby, it costs money. The myth that you can save money doing so is just that. If you take away the cost of equipment and time, yes you save money in ingredients than you would buying 2 cases of said beer sold at retail. Yes it’s time consuming, yes you won’t make 4,5 beers out of the gate, or ever. It’s labor of love and you either love it or you don’t. I know this is not a compelling argument, but I’ve been doing it for over 15 years and don’t see me stopping anytime soon. My brew day is 5 hours including clean up.

my suggestion is that if you are interested, find someone who does and shadow them for a day. Watching people do it on YouTube doesn’t really do it justice.

You gotta be a tinker-er and enjoy turning the screws.

I probably come out ahead cost wise making high ABV Belgians. Saisons, too, so many around here are over $12/bottle and I don't come close to that. Quality? Some of my beers are better than pro/commerical stuff. Some are simply closer to what I want that I can't find on a shelf or from a local brewery.

As for space, that's hard to quantify. There are so many options, even all-in-one systems.

I started homebrewing in about '71 and stopped in the mid 80s. I made extract beers, and never went to all-grain. The best might have risen to 3.5 ratings. By the 80s my all-grain acquaintances were making very good beer. I still have a few of my 40 yr old bottles in the basement. One we recently tried was a dark ale that aged well (still a 3.5 with good carbonation, body, and hop bitterness). The second, an amber ale, had flaws that were evident when brewed but was otherwise ok. So if you referment in the bottle, use a secure crown cap, and save some in a cool dark place, your grandkids might be able to sample it.

I don't do it to save money, though at times the inputs do cost significantly less than the equivalent output, at least when you don't factor in equipment. I factor in equipment less because at least in part the building, maintaining and real world skills that takes are valuable to me as an exercise in more practical problem solving, given I'm a computer person by trade and having to solve non-abstract problems isn't something I have a paid outlet for.

While it's not impossible to get return on investment, you really have to enjoy the process and not care if it saves you money.

I used to be until it stopped being fun for me.
One thing that you need to take into account is a cost-benefit analysis of your free time. Brewing isn't just about brewday, it's also packaging and maintenance of equipment, and acquiring supplies. Think about the things that you like doing in your free time, and then think about whether or not you'd rather not do that and instead brew a beer, then clean bottles/kegs and lines, purchase ingredients, buy CO2 if you keg (guess what, most homebrew stores don't carry it, so that's a separate trip!), tighten seals, take apart and clean valves, etc. While there is a good amount of downtime during brewing, it's in small chunks, so not enough to get into reading a book or playing a video game or whatever. For a long time I liked brewing more than other stuff that I'd otherwise do, but once that balance changed, I gave it up.

That being said, it's a great outlet for creativity, and once you're proficient, you'll save money if you really like imported beer that American brewers don't really produce (especially Belgian styles). Like anything, the more you put into it, the more you'll get out of it.

4.5 beers??? Hell, I thought all my beers were that,,,,,,,, unless we count the infected ones which were drain pours, hahahahahahaa.

I did save money homebrewing and I’ll also say I had a sweetheart deal on ingredients, built my own mash tun, reused anything I could convert to makeing beer, and it was super.

saddly, age catches up with us all if we live long and making 200 gallons a year just don’t have the same appeal it did. Bet I’ll make 50 or so gallons this year, half for presents.

still have all the gear and lately, another family member is getting into the sport, so who knows.

brew or not, it’s a blast and on this forem, I met many great folks and a few odd ones, all into brewing. Of course, some may say I’m a bit odd as well, hahahanananaa

I have definitely slowed down the last couple of years. It use to be that I "needed" to brew at least once a month, but habits change, family kids, etc. At one time I had a homebrew store in town and one near my work, which made things real easy. The one in town closed early on, and the one by my office took on real strange hours during COVID and never went back to normal. They eventually closed last year. I now buy most if not all my ingredients and equipment online. I have also stopped developing my own recipes for the most part because that requires having odd quantities on hand an I do not have the room for or feel like investing in storage for. I choose a style and find a recipe I like and order it, usually through More Beer or Great Fermentations. Brew Hardware is a great store too, but just out of desirable driving range on a weekday and shipping is high (not their fault.) I would say on average I brew once every 60 days. Kegging is essential.

You are missing a lot about homebrewing . . . there is more to it than just the beer:

If you are serious then you'll develop expertise in organic chemistry. How those atoms are bonded together and how as a homebrewer you are going to break those bonds to create that elixir is pure magic. So you have a skill that is the envy of many.

Very quickly you'll learn that yeast is the real brewer, humans just create the wort for those single-celled organisms to turn into beer. But to get them to cooperate requires a decent understanding of bio-chemistry. Mastering the knowledge of how their mitochondria acts and watching these cells bud into new life while creating alcohol and delicious flavors & aromas can only be appreciated by a homebrewer hovering over their airlock.

Water: you were taught that it is colorless, orderless, and tasteless. But a homebrewer learns to scrutinize every cation & anion, manipulate the acid & alkaline, filter & aerate. All subtle inputs that add swagger to a brewer's day.

Early on it becomes obvious that your brewery equipment requires modifications for your specific needs. A homebrewer becomes adept in metallurgy, with drilling, clamping, attaching, maybe even welding . . . in essence a boilermaker. Great pride comes from fabricating a brewhouse unlike any other in existence.

Who doesn't enjoy the challenge of thermodynamics? Homebrewers tackle this every brew day . . . mastering the science of transferring heat into and out of liquids with an array of thermometers and timepieces. It's almost as if you tame entropy itself.

Many of us keg, which if you stick with it makes you a master plumber . . . a skill that never stops giving back. You will scoff at the unwashed masses as they struggle with leaky faucets and toilets, knowing this is child's play for a kegger.

A brewer learns to really appreciate the Gas Laws to a degree that a theoretical physicist could only dream to aspire. Yep, making those gas molecules dance to your tune is a sense of real power.

Homebrewers can handle a mop better than the majority of housekeepers. Maybe not the most glamorous of skill sets, but valued nonetheless.

So don't concentrate on just swilling the beer, but rather the pilgrimage to get there.

Another thing......

Brewing beer is easy.

Brewing good beer is a skill

Most homebrews don't end up being reviewed on BA (or Untapped, or wherever). But many homebrewers will say that their beer is better than most commercial craft beers, and many (most really, IMO) of them are wrong. I wrote an article for Brew Your Own a few years ago about why a brewer's opinion about the quality of his/her own beer is more or less meaningless, but I digress.

It might be interesting to look at what a 4.5 might mean in homebrew terms. There are homebrew competitions, and most of them are sanctioned by the AHA/BJCP. Scoring is on a 50 point scale, which we could equate to a 5.0 rating. Neither one ever happens, so they are at least consistent that way. You mentioned 4.5 as a threshold. That's interesting, because that's where the BJCP draws the line for "World Class," i.e. 45-50 is considered World Class, whereas 38-44 is considered merely "Excellent." 45s (or higher) are fairly uncommon (as are 4.5s or higher). When I was competing on a regular basis, I had some, but not a high percentage. I was, however, pretty disappointed if one of my beers scored less than 40.

Not exactly what you asked, but here are some styles where I have scored 45s ("4.5" if you will) or higher. But others would have different experiences.
Bohemian Pilsner
German Pilsner
Northern English Brown Ale
Fruit Beer (Berliner Weisse base)

Thanks for all that. I think I understand a bit more now and will not delve in to it lightly.

Ahhh viker,,,

A brewer who thinks his or her home brew is 4.5, better than what they can buy or other accolades CAN be right if only in their minds. And why not, except for one person, ok home brewers are not gonna compete with their brews, try to go pro, make a living,,,,they,er gonna drink them, share with pal, and often, complements will b givin.

And if I think my brews are better than commercial stuff, hey I win, let’s have a beer, hahahahahahaha.

have fun,

I think it is very possible to make better beer than commercial at home. The key is scale because you probably can't use that quality of ingredients and pay that level of attention to the details if you had to do it in a batch 50x that size.

I look at it this way: There's a whole lot of people who can code that don't do it professionally. There's a ton that do it well. However, doing it day after day, and having to really mind your P&Qs when you have mission critical systems at a fortune 500 company running it, it's a different ball game.

I've brewed over 150 batches since 1999. I still brew about 5 times a year, not as much as the old days, mainly because I'm not as big a drinker anymore, and also because the damn internet has turned into like 5 times as a distracting addiction as it once was.

Honestly, none of my beers would score highly on BA, but not for a reason that you might think. The Reason: I like to brew beer-flavored beer, of traditional beer styles... you know, those styles that existed more than 10 or 15 years ago?! Yeah, those. The one outlier, which I do brew regularly, is my Jalapeno Porter (and the recipe is all over the interwebs if you're interested). That one has done very well in dozens of competitions and events. And if you go easy on the jalapenos, it even tastes like beer (gasp!).

Just like any other hobby, homebrewing can be as simple or as complicated or expensive as you want to make it. Me? I brew small batches on my kitchen stove. Easy peasy, nothing too fancy. All my equipment put together is worth less than a few hundred bucks. I was making beer for like 5 years using basic equipment that cost me less than $100 (back in the '90s and early 2000s). I've since invested in a grain mill, a Tilt hydrometer, and a few uKegs, and an assortment of different sized fermenters. And actually most of this stuff was gifted to me so I literally didn't pay more than a few bucks for any of it. This does NOT need to be an expensive hobby -- living proof right here. And still I make pretty decent beer most of the time. I no longer enter competitions but I have a nice collection of medals in a drawer someplace. Ingredients have gone up in price some, especially yeast and hops, but not too terribly actually, and still on par with the prices you'll pay at your liquor store or grocery (some a little more, some less). The ingredients and equipment take up a little space but nothing too crazy. All my crap fits in a space of about 10' x 10' x 10', and if I were better organized I know it would take up much less space.

To brew any size batch using all-grain takes about 4 to 5 hours. And then fermentation takes a couple weeks on average (with many exceptions). But it's all FUN though. It's a bit like making soup, but as long as your recipe comes from a good source, and/or education & experience, you know the outcome is going to turn into good beer, and if you want you can quaff a few while it's mashing and boiling. What else better have you got to do in your spare time?? I mean come on. It's a great hobby, with a great community, clubs, conversations, friendships. Ditch your other stupid hobby(s), or lack thereof, get off your FAT ASS, and try homebrewing, dagnabbit! You might find yourself bit by the bug, and brew for the rest of your life, like me. For all you geeks and nerds out there... homebrewing is a way to nerd out as well. Enjoy science and math? We've got you covered. Feeling creative? Definitely have you covered there. Truth be told, about half of all homebrewers are engineers or IT guys, or some kind of scientists. If you aren't within those categories, you're less likely to be super interested in homebrewing. But if you fit that bill in any way, shape, form... you NEED to try homebrewing.

Cheers all.

Thank you

I've been brewing for close to 30 years and for the most part still brew quite regularly. I'm also a long time BA member and essentially a lurker on this forum most of the time.

There are a myriad of reasons people take up any hobby and its rarely a cost and/or time-savings thing. (Despite that constantly creeping into the conversation there are very few hobbies that can compete with industrialized economy of scale for end product.) I have similar opinions to what's already been said about beer quality and its appreciation by the brewer.

What I'll add to the convo is the third point by the OP:
"Initial costs are not worth the effort since there are so many great, fairly cheap beers available"
Are there many great beers on the market? I am not going to argue the "great" part; but I will argue the "many" part.

I brew for diversity. Craft beer gained its popularity because of diversity.
We have sort of regressed into a Craft Beer market that is 9 IPAs for every 10 beers on the shelf.
So I brew for the love a good Brown Ale or Amber or Wheat. I brew to craft a beer that tastes exactly how I interpret a certain style to be great. I love that strangely pillowy soft yeast character you get with a good kölsch vs a blonde ale. I crave the subtle flavor difference between roast and toast. I enjoy the distinction between biscuit and caramel that you can dial into a Pale Ale recipe. I brew to explore styles I just can't get good examples of where I live in the world; and I live in and around NEIPA meccas.

To me that makes the hobby priceless...and my beer great.