While I have yet to experience brewery-fresh West Coast IPA on the West Coast, I’m a huge fan of the style. I very rarely purchase commercial IPA anymore now that I regularly brew my own hoppy beers on a regular basis. While I certainly don’t claim to brew better IPA than the pros, I can definitely brew it fresher compared to how it is available locally.
I’ve had a lot of mediocre craft beer, but in general I think a decent craft brew trumps a decent home brew of comparable style the majority of the time.
Personally, I still have a hell of a lot of learning and growing to do as a homebrewer. I do have enough experience to be able to brew suitably well to meet my tastes. When I brew a batch that I really nail, I’ll take that over any commercial brew out there. Part of it is definitely pride, and the other part is because I know my tastes very well. Still, I’m sure that a decent commercial brewery would make the same recipe better the majority of the time. You can’t help but have your process and ingredients dialed in if this is your livelihood.
This is ridiculous! I love it! But seriously, an experienced homebrewer with happy yeast can make beer that rivals the pros in quality. If we didn’t believe it, we wouldn’t be here trying to learn and improve our process. Maybe we could even clone Roche 10 if we brewed it hundreds of times to dial it in as they likely did. And we’ve all had commercial beers that sucked too. Whether it was just stale or something like the irish stout I had recently from a national chain brewpub- tasted like rauchmalt- YUK!
To suggest that brewers and the media tell us what to drink? Not in the craft beer world! They brew it once and the drinkers tell them whether or not to brew it again…and again. There’s far too many great choices out there to spend my hard-earned cash on a less-than-great beer twice!
I love this debate. It’s neat to see all of the opinions from around the country.
I’ve seen homebrew improve greatly - even in the past 3 years. I remember the first competition I judged, I had a beer that tasted like “wet dog poopy feet”. No joke! Now, the biggest problems I see (beyond the occasional gusher type infection) are diacetyl and acedaldyhyde in lagers.
I’m also spoiled by some pretty great homebrewers in my club. ;D
All that being said, I still hunt out certain commercial beers. A few come to mind: Russian River’s sours, Boulevard’s Saison-Brett… hmmm. Making me thirsty!
My observation on commercial vs homebrew is that the better commercial brews seem to have a level of malt character that I see in very few homebrews. I don’t know if its a matter of oxidation from the average homebrewing process vs a system that puts the beer through without ever touching air, or just what is going on, but something like Boston Brewing’s brown ale has amazing malt flavor and I see this in so very few homebrews and then its often more muted.
Homebrewers can make excellent hoppy beers, and the ones that have distinctive yeast character are very much in our wheelhouse thanks to WL and WY.
Here’s an anecdotal of my point. I gave a BMC drinking neighbor a bottle of my APA with Simcoe and cascade. He gave the polite response, ‘not bad. Kind of different.’ Then a couple weeks later he said he got curious and ordered one of those APA things at a restaurant. Didn’t say what brand, but told me that mine was better. He just didn’t know it at the time. My point is that people expect pro beer to be the standard. Of course he didn’t even know what it was much less what it was supposed to be.
I wonder some times if people are acquiring a taste for bad beer…
I always look at making beer to be like any other cooking. I see this issue to be a lot like grandmother’s cooking. For some people, there is no store-bought pie that is better than the one their grandmother makes from scratch. Whatever the reason, freshness of ingredients, choice of ingredients, the recipe itself, etc., whatever it is there are some things that bring that intangible quality to it that gets written up as that touch of love. Perhaps in some cases the preference is influenced by a sentimental attachment. The Mrs. Smith’s company makes fine pies, but they have to make allowances for mass production that grandma doesn’t.
On the other hand, there are a lot of grandmothers out there who can’t make a decent pie to save their life, or maybe their pies aren’t as hand-crafted because they use store-bought pie shells and store-bought pie filling.
I wouldn’t put any random homebrew up to any craft brew, but I would stack any “decent” homebrew (defining decent here being someone who is adept at it) up against any craftbrew. I certainly believe it to be true that it is easily withing the scope of anyone who wants, that they can, in general, make beer at home that is as good or better than most commercial made beer. There are some possible exceptions that have been mentioned, such as those requiring very special techniques or rely heavily upon local flora, but you run the same challenge trying to make San Francisco sourdough outside of San Francisco.
Couple things to consider when you are considering pro vs home brewer. A commercial brewer brews several times a week, brewing the same styles over and over again. He or she learns to be very consistent and really works with malt, hops, grains, yeast and fermentation every single day managing several batches. The vast majority of home brewers brew once every several weeks at most. There are those truly obsessed homebrewers who do brew weekly, sometimes multiple batches per week at a stretch. But even these home brewers don’t approach the amount of time commercial brewers spend with actual hands on, day to day brewing.
OTOH home brewers can really afford to experiment and come up with some great (and not so great) brewing ideas. They spend their time reading magazines like Zymurgy and discussing ideas over forums and meetings while I think a lot of commercial brewers give up on experimenting and learning once they start brewing day to day and some probably start to assume they know everything and fall into the trap of complacency.
