If you think the hobby is down, take a gander at the roughly 112K members of /r/homebrewing on reddit, or the 190K members of homebrewtalk.
I think local homebrew stores may be struggling for a number of reasons (similar to many other brick and mortar shops).
I have a Facebook account for family only. It’s bad enough that a major data harvester knows that much about me without giving them complete insight into my life.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I try and support my LHBS when I can. The nearest one to me is about 1.5 hrs away, but thankfully they ship.
They’re usually a little more expensive than Northern Brewer/Midwest/Etc, but I want to keep them in business.
But if they struggled to keep inventory in stock, I’d switch back to Northern Brewer and not look back. As much as I want to support a local LHBS, if they aren’t reliable I’ll look elsewhere. That could be the cause of OP’s LHBS woes.
As for millennials, like every other generation there’s a mix. While it’s true many seem to buy into the social media culture, not all do. I’ve had more than a few ask me about home brewing, especially mead.
That’s funny. I finally broke down and got a FB account recently. I ONLY use it to follow breweries as many of them only update information there compared to a website.
We have had 2 LBHSs fail in Topeka. Both for the same reason. Bad business practices. First one rarely had anything in stock and rarely was open during his business hours. Second one carried stock he thought was cool rather than items his customers wanted. He lasted almost a year.
Based on info I’ve seen, the meteoric growth of homebrewing the last few years is starting to level off. But AFAIK it’s not going down.
I am a member of some of those FB forums. I don’t find them nearly as useful as this or other brewing forums. Mainly because they are broken down in various sub forums (fermentation, DIY, etc…). If anything I find the FB groups to be a bit tedious…the same questions being asked by different people. Plus you can’t really do a search and find the answer yourself like you can in a traditional forum.
I find FB less than moderately useful, but not so useless as to not be a part of it at all. But when it come to intelligent and deep discussion about interesting topics… FB is NOT a very good place for any of that.
Millennials tend to be a fickle bunch. But they are young yet. We might see very good things from them in another 10-15 years when they grow up. Probably. For now they just can’t find the time to focus on any one thing such as homebrewing for longer than 2 minutes. MHO YMMV
When I recently told a friend of mine that I started homebrewing last year the first question he asked was how long it took to get to the final product. I told him, “It depends. For an entry level homebrewer who is still bottling (me) and maybe waiting a bit longer for their beer to clean up in a fermentor because they don’t have the most excellent temperature control (also me, still) - you’re probably looking at a month to six weeks before you crack open that beer. For a more advanced brewer, brewing beer that should be consumed ‘young’ and throwing it in a keg - you could probably go grain to glass in as little as two weeks.” He told me that there’s no way he has the patience for either of those scenarios. Clearly not the hobby for everyone. Glad I didn’t tell him about sours or brett beer.
The best things in life are worth the wait.
I guess that there will be at least three of us here on the forum. I’m anti-facebook too. It’s not a good idea for a teacher to be out there. I’ve seen some stupid things that I don’t want to be a part of.
My wife is a teacher too, Frank, so she’s pretty cautious like you. For sure, lots of stupid stuff to steer clear of.
It’s also true that kids grow up. As a teacher I have seen this–it may be the only thing that keeps me going. I would hate to have people judge me on how I was when I was a teen or twenty something. The millenials will be more like us than we think, or that they would like to think.
She’s smart. Lots of nonsense out there.
I’m far from a naive person, but when I hear stories of what some of these kids are doing and then posting about, I’m just blown away. She keeps her distance and then some where that’s concerned.
I’m anti facebook, too. If I want you to know what I’m doing right now, I’ll give you a call and tell you. Add to that the fact that a lot of companies are watching what their employees are posting. Before I retired, there was one guy the company fired. He was on medical leave for his back, but was in good enough shape to go out of town for a rollerblade competition. The company found out because he posted this stuff on FB. There was also the guy who would call off and then get on FB and tell everyone he was smashed again. And these are the same people who scream about a lack of privacy in today’s world. Now what was the question?
DMV’s motto!
I remember feeling that way when I first started. But now that I have a nice rotation going I always have a brew I am drinking while my new brew is fermenting.
I don’t drink anything I’ve made until it has had at least 6 to 8 weeks of aging on it (even my most ‘standard’ ales) and my IPA and Porter age for a full year before I tap them (in keeping with the tradition of those styles). My Burton/Old Ale/Barleywine ages for even longer than that.
It’s really not all that difficult, it just takes some planning. But I almost always have a good supply of properly aged beer on hand.
Funny thing is, I’m probably more careful and diligent about proper aging than most craft breweries tend to be these days.
If that shop was riding the boom without any real business plan but opening the doors and letting customers come in then I could believe business has dropped significantly, especially if prices are too high or there is a competing business in the area.
The shop might be doing decent, but not great, and he has decided to try to guilt people into giving him a lot of business under the guise of keeping local access to supplies. I remember one of the larger online retailers used to give “tips” on one of the big homebrew forums that prices on supplies were going to go up and to buy now. 100% of the time he was wrong but picked up a lot of extra orders.