Much like Brewbama brewing is just one of many DIY pursuits, we essentially have a homestead here with vegetable gardens big enough to store and put up food forwinter, a small orchard, bees, and we do lots of foraging for mushrooms, berries etc…I am always cooking and used to be a chef. Unlike Brewbama I am not retired so don’t brew nearly as often as I like.
I brew mainly for my wife and I but look forward to entertaining much more this year.
We both brew mead. My favorite styles of beers to brew are English ales because they are a favorite style and hard to find. Other than that I tend to be seasonally oriented in culinary pursuits. I like to brew stouts and porters and one or two imperial stouts and quads for winter and German lagers for warmer months. I brew IPAs year round, including a Julius homage (not a clone). Last summer I successfully brewed some ipa’s that were under 100 calories and around 4 carbs per 12 ounces. They were surprisingly satisfying and I a want to do more this summer. Apart from one or two winter sippers many of my beers are less than 5% abv and rarely more than 6%.
I occasionally do random other styles: Hefeweizen, various Belgians including saison, black lagers, rauchbier.
I have access to a lot of apples and pears in the fall and press cider and usually make 30+ gallons of cider, perry, and cyser.
My wife doesn’t drink beer, but she has tasted every single batch that I’ve made over the last 32 years.
I used to share my beer at club meetings and send entries off to statewide competitions, but lately I brew just for myself, brewing ten gallons once a month or so.
I like to have a pale lager on tap, whether it’s a Dort, a Boh Pils, a German Pils or a CAP, I switch it up. Looking at my brew log it seems I almost always have a Rye Pale Ale or Rye IPA on tap as well. Other styles I brew less frequently are Baltic Porter, Belgian Witbier (to which I add Poblano peppers), smoked beer and occasionally a Strong Belgian or Imperial Stout.
No hazies or pastries for me.
Since I am 67 years old, my beer consumption has gone down a lot. I brew only 1 or 2 styles of beer. Kolsch and Bitters. Bitters during the winter months and Kolsch from spring until the fall. It is not easy to buy bitters where I live for some reason and Kolsch beers are even more rare and they suck anyway. But if you want an IPA, no problem because they are everywhere.
What styles do you like to make and drink ?
No idea on styles brewed, assign batches a number
Brewing mainly for yourself, significant other , kids of drinking age ?
Mainly myself, spouse will test taste new batches, occasionally grown daughter & husband
Do you try to clone beers ?
No
Do you try to make a beer that you can’t get locally ?
No, haven’t bought beer for about 2 years
Do you brew the same recipes over and over or wing it each time?
Wing it
The only beer I brew is my own recipe, an oatmeal porter with substantial portions of brown malt and oatmeal in the grist. Why? Because that’s the only beer I want to drink 5 gallons of. I know, my tastes are too narrow. Occasionally I’ll add some vanilla to a few bottles. I brew it to a strength of ~ 5% ABV. I occasionally drink other styles when dining out at places that offer craft beers. Unfortunately, most restaurants here only have the most basic InBev lineup and I will occasionally have a Guinness.
My lady friend doesn’t drink beer and I’m living in a new community without a lot of friends yet. I have joined a brew club and enjoy trying other styles there, but always come back to my favorite. I’m 75 and have weight and medication issues so I typically drink no more than three or four bottles or drafts in a week.
I bottle most of it so I can take a few bottles along when I visit out-of-town friends or send some home with relatives. I have donated a keg for brew club charity events.
I tend to brew based on the weather seasons. For winter I usually brew stronger beers like IPA, Belgian Quad and darker beers like Brown Ale and Porter. I try to have a easy drinker on tap all the time like lagers, cream ale, blonde and pale ales. In the spring I’ll brew a Wheat beer and maybe a Maibock. In summer I’ll brew a sour beer using Lallemand Philly sour for the second time. I also like Belgian Golden, Triples and IPA for summer. IPA is usually a 2.5 gallon keg so it will remain fresh.
Spring through fall I love to smoke ribs, brisket and pork shoulder. I also grill a lot of chicken, hamburgers and salmon. We have friends and family come over to enjoy the food and beer. I love to see family and friends enjoy homebrew with nice meal. I get excited when they enjoy the food and grab another pint! That is one reason I love homebrewing.
My wife doesn’t drink beer so I make mead and cider for her. She helps to bottle mead, cider and some beer but most of the beer is kegged in a chest freezer. She tastes every beer and usually says that’s good for beer. She actually liked a Belgian Quad yesterday that she tasted! I think she well drink it!! That’s a big deal as we have been married for 6 years and she likes a homebrew!!
My Big Four are: (1) pilsners (CAP, Czech or German); (2) tripels; (3) English bitters; and (4) American IPAs. Keezer hold 7 kegs, I always like to have those four styles available.
I do mix in other beers occasionally, like porters, amber lagers, dubbels, saisons, weissbiers, etc. but I found when I moved up to 10 gallon batches, I don’t want 10 gallons of those as much as the others. Now I know I could still brew 5 gallons, but it takes pretty much the same amount of time.
I do have an itch to brew 5 gallons of an old ale/barley wine/wee heavy, though.
My efforts are roughly divided along four lines of effort:
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Finding the perfect session beer: low-cal, low-ABV but still flavorful. These tend to revolve around milds, brown ales, pseudo-schwarzbiers, and Belgiany table beers.
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Figuring out how to make big, aged, woody stouts and brown ales (think Monday Night’s Ante Meridiem).
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Pursuing the idea of a lambic-inspired, “hyper-local” beer. Ultimately, I’d like to do something like Ben Richards’ Growing Beer: my own grain, my own hops, local wild yeast, aged on local fruit, etc, etc. This is a piecemeal, incremental effort since I’m still renting and not really in a place to plant hops or grain or anything like that. But I can buy local fruit at the farmers’ market.
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Other stuff: meads, bochets, ciders.
1 and 3 are for me. 2 is for my wife. 4 was for my wife at first, but both of us now (and my in-laws are mostly grain/gluten-free now).
[quote]Do you try to clone beers?
[/quote]
Not as such, but I definitely draw inspiration from commercial brews (e.g., Yellowhammer’s Midnight Special, the aforementioned Ante Meridiem, and Oude Quetsche Tilquin à la Ancienne for 1, 2, and 3 respectively — for 4, most commerical meads and ciders are too sweet for us; so they serve more as counter-examples than targets).
[quote]Do you try to make a beer that you can’t get locally?
[/quote]
Not particularly . . . but if I can perfect 2 and 3, that might be an example of homebrewing actually saving money since those tend to run $10-$20 for a 375 or 500 ml bottle.
[quote]Do you brew the same recipes over and over or wing it each time?
[/quote]
I tend to make at least some small adjustment every time. This is why I’ve gradually stepped my batch sizes down from 5+ gallons to 5-8L. I don’t have the attention span to work through 5 gallons of anything.
Homebrewing absolutely saves money unless someone is really doing a “cost is NO concern at all” approach, and even then i think they would.
one approach to consider is knowing what stuff is affordable at the store and just brewing things you love but cost a lot. - strong belgians, wood aged, imp stouts, etc
i made a good, flavourful imperial stout for $1.09 per 11.5oz bottle. its equivalent - a basic, non-big name craft imp stout would be absolute minimum $4 and up, likely more.
homebrew ingredients prices are stable. commercial beer prices have only gone up and up and up here. i used to not bother making german pilsners when i had tons of selection in the $2 per 500ml range, now theyre reaching high 2s, up to $3 in some cases per tallboy can.
You’re right — homebrewing absolutely does not have to be an expensive hobby. If I’d started out with my current (relatively modest) equipment setup, I’d have (a lot) less sunk cost to amortize per serving.
I don’t think I actually save money by brewing my own beer at home when equipment, cleaning supplies, energy cost, etc. are accounted for. As I said above, I do it because I enjoy the act of taking raw materials and transforming them into a finished product.
When I played golf avidly, I did not amortize the cost of clubs, balls, tees, shoes, beer, food, my time, gas to get there, vehicle maintenance cost, etc. into the cost of a round of golf. I don’t factor those sunk costs into a pint of beer I brew either. For me, the cost of a batch is water, grain, hops, and yeast. Everything else is on hand and paid for.
After all, it’s a hobby. It’s not meant to be cost effective.
I like the concept of traveling somewhere and trying a beer that I really like but I can’t get at home and so… I try to make it. It started years ago with Victoria from Mexico which was not available here until 2010. I happen to like New Glarus Two Women but it’s only available in Wisconsin. I do occasionally bust through the cheddar curtain and buy it but I have created a suitable copy that scratches the itch. Two of my kids live in Austin (great beer culture there) and I fell in love with Live Oak’s Big Bark Amber Lager. I contacted the brewery and was lucky enough to get the recipe from the brewer so that’s another one that I make. I also cannot get Yuengling (I know there is a love-it-or-hate-it thing with Yuengling) where I live so to be able to make it when I want it is cool. We have access to such great equipment and so many great ingredients. That, coupled with all the great information from people on the boards… there’s no stopping us! 
This ^^^^^ I know I don’t save money homebrewing and I certainly don’t save any time. I brew at home because I enjoy the whole process, except the cleaning of course.
By the time I finally get perfect system setup, I’ll have too much money into it to be justified. I know you can do it on the cheap, but I’m always looking to make things easier or better, so I buy this gadget or that thing over there to help my day go along better or make the quality of the beer better.
It’s like saying that hunting trip to Montana or that fishing trip to Canada was well worth while because you got a bunch of meat or fish for free. That’s a hard sell.
I’d say yes and no. If a brewer’s goal is to make Miller Lite, then yeah, that brewer is not going to come out in the black. But with the rising cost of craft beer, my homebrewing (equipment included) has definitely saved me money vis a vis filing my frig with beer that I prefer to drink. Of course, outside of kegs, I have hardly spent any money on brewing hardware, and never plan to.
i am absolutely not trying to be pedantic on this issue of “it is cheaper to homebrew than buy”, but in my geographic case it 100% is, in the case of others i still believe it is.
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prices where i am are set by the government, and they seem to be attempting to harmonize the price of all “good” beer, whether its european imports and craft. the absolute cheapest beer you can get is natural ice type stuff at 2 dollars per 500ml can. that is a lot more than in the states.
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yes factoring in equipment costs does change the costs per brew, but in my case it is not drastic (and truth be told, i do think of the actual brewing part as a hobby and skill development, and so do not include some fractionalized “payback” of the equipment costs per brew).
-however, i have a basic setup that has lasted 2.5 years so far and i expect could go for another 2 years before i decide to change it. all my equipment costs were at most 500 dollars. over the 33 brews i’ve done in that time, this tacks on another 15 dollars per 20 litre brew over these brews and the equipment can be considered paid off now.
-so, adding that 15 dollars on to the costs i use for some beers i’ve made (am not cherry picking, just choosing a few)
- recent amber lager 5% - $1.07 per 500ml unit.
- recent porter 5.2% - $1.44 per 500ml unit
- vienna lager from last year 5.5% - $1.80 per 500ml (less tight controls back then)
- dubbel at 7.8% abv - $1.52 per 500ml unit
all of these prices are cheaper than store prices for me. #1 and #3 i prefer the taste of over store equivalents. #2 and #4 are comparable to store equivalents.
the factor that absolutely i won’t consider is time because that would probably make it theoretically more expensive than store bought beer, but there are reasons to discount time spent
- i try to minimize time spent by making DME with partial mash brews about every other brew
- if we did this we would need to effectively imagine that any time we spend cooking, watching tv, playing games, etc is “money lost” potentially. this would be insane
- even though you make $40 an hour at a job, you cant just have that as your value per hour.
homebrewing is absolutely cheaper than buying beer at the store in canada. in germany i am certain it would not be, but you’d be stuck buying cheap lager forever. in america it may break even in some cases, but depending on what beers you prefer i believe you’d save money.
It all depends on where you live, what you brew and how you brew it.
Jumping in a bit late on tis thread as too many things keeping me busy down here in FL.
I mainly brew some IPA’s (as my wife loves them), Saison, a Helles, Stouts, Porters, ESB, a Tripel, and a Wee Heavy. That said, I also am in the process of preparing to experiment with a Berlinerweiss and maybe a few other styles this year.
I brew a lot of the same things most of the time to make sure I can make them consistently and because they are well liked by me and the people that visit to enjoy a beer occasionally. I enter quite a few competitions to see how the beers stack up with the judges and to get valuable feedback.
That’s my story and I am sticking to it.
I like to make what the wife and I like to drink. Which is mostly IPA’s both juicy and hazy. Although, I have a Wee Heavy and some leftover winter warmer on tap right now. I have a stout and a bourbon vanilla porter in the planning stages currently and have done various other styles. I will sometimes stick closely to BJCP style guidelines if I’m doing a style for the first time or I want to experience the style as it was intended, but i do this for taste… not to win awards. Although I am considering entering local comps.
I haven’t seriously tried to clone a beer, although a local brewery left their recipe book wide open during a tour… 8)
I like to change it up to get experience with different ingredients and how they impact flavor. So while I do a lot of new recipes, I will do repeats when we enjoyed a particular beer.
As for saving money, well… my last hobby was a race car so yeah, I’m saving money… lol.
yes, denny. as i outlined above.
where you live? there are exceptions to this i would say but are few and far between. if a country is fairly poor generally, in my experience bad beer is plentiful at extremely cheap prices, so that is always available, but i dont think there are almost any homebrewers who don’t aim to produce “craft” style beer that is made to enjoy consuming. poorer countries with strong international trade (phillipines, vietnam) or a history of brewing beer (poland, baltic states) would likely have malt available for cheaper unit costs than in the west, making even craft beer there very cheap if you were a bit savvy about it. and again, these are obviously outside the scope of almost anyone on this forum.
if you want to product swill to compete with low-price industrial lagers you absolutely could beat them on price. ie. 50% of fermentables 2row, 10% corn, rice (if its cheaper), 40% dextrose or cane sugar. dry yeast packet, 1oz high AA hops. thats about as cheap as it can get and you will end up with beer that will get you drunk.
how you brew it? well yes, but what is the expected working lifespan on a ~$1000 all-in-one setup? should be 5 years at a minimum. $1000 divided by one brew a month over 5 years equals $16.67 extra per brew. my classic mashtun cooler, kettle, carboys, tubing etc setup was at most half that. i expect all of it to last 5 years in total if not longer. (an extra $8.34 per brew over 5 years). it’s just not a huge factor, and can eventually be completely dismissed after a payback period.
frankly, i am still waiting to and would love to see people explain how making their own beer is more expensive than buying it from the store. i don’t think its possible except in some absurd circumstances.