How frequently are you making "awesome" beer?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

benko

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 2, 2008
Messages
161
Reaction score
2
Location
Wilmington, NC
This question has its roots in a little bit of brewing self-doubt, which I know goes against the whole RDWHAHB philosophy, but I wanted to ask it anyway.

How frequently are you brewing what you consider an "awesome" beer? By this, I mean if you thought of your top few favorite beers, this would be one of them. I've brewed about fifteen batches now, and I'd say that only one (a hefeweizen) has been the type of beer that I would order several of at a bar. None of my beers have been bad. They've all tasted like decent beer, with no major problems, but they didn't blow my socks off, either. I don't want to kid myself and say that every beer I brew is the greatest I've ever had.

For example, consider the commercial craft beers out there. Out of every 10 new beers I try, probably 2 or 3 I don't care for at all, 5 to 6 are pretty average, and 1 or 2 will be beers that I really like and would order again and again. How many of your brews turn out to be that 1 or 2?

On a somewhat related note: What's your preferred approach to making that killer beer. Do you brew completely different recipes, and occasionally you hit one out of the park? Or do you find one that's promising, and then brew that same recipe over and over, making minor tweaks, until you reach your goal? If you do the latter, how often would you say it takes you to "dial in" your recipe?

Thanks for any thoughts. I'm really curious as to how you guys go about it.
 
I brew something between 3 and 5 times a month. It's not always beer, I do mead and wine too. Probabaly 75% are what I'd call Above average for style. 20% are average and 5% or less are really ho-hum beer. I guess that is a pretty good average.
I've done a lot of styles, and only a few times done the same recipe twice. (Bier Munchers Cream of 3 crops!!!) But I have a problem refining my taste in beer. I like it ALL. I am thinking of trying to nail down a Lager (red Stripe only better??), A Pale or Amber, and A Stout to have on tap with Coke and Apfelwein as "House Brews". Everything else will be bottled, and experimental.
 
Well, I don't have a whole lot of batches under my belt but I think I run about 70% awesome. I think a lot of that can be chalked up to my inexperience and "fiddle-fartin'" around with recipes. Once I get to that 50 batches mark, I expect to be brewing "awesome" batches 8/10 times.

4 - Pale Ales (1 extract, 3 AG)
The extract was very good, but uninteresting. 2 of the all grain batches were "awesome", and one batch was just pretty good.

3 - Wheat Beers (1 extract, 2 AG)
The extract was OK, and didn't have the wheat flavor I was looking for. The 2 AG batches were kick ass and I have had the most compliments on them. Wheat is not my favorite style, but it is a crowd pleaser and a SWMBO favorite.

1 - Brown Ale
Holy hell, this is the BEST beer I've made...and the best Brown Ale I've ever tasted.

1 - IPA
Great beer, and qualifies as "awesome".

1 - Kolsch
Not my favorite style, but crisp and clean and again a HUGE crowd pleaser.

1 - Stout (still in primary)
1 - Blonde Ale (still in primary)
 
In the past year, each beer I have brewed has either met my expectations (in that I wouldn't tweak the recipe) or has exceeded my expectations (meaning it flowed from the faucet effortlessly).

I have only ever had 1 beer in my life that blew me away. And oddly enough it was a Tillburg Dutch Brown at almost a year past it's bottle date. Now, we can't even get that beer fresh here.
 
I've got a few brews I've actually swapped out of the kegerator because I didn't like them well enough. The only beer I've ever actually "loved" that I brewed was my Special Bitter.

I can't reproduce it dead on either. :(

I still make mostly good beer. :)
 
I've been trying to reproduce one of my favorites that I made. I have come close, but haven't nailed it down yet. I have made maybe 4 or 5 that I have just loved, a few other that other people have loved more than me, and 2 or 3 that have been poured down the drain. Other than that, most of my beers are really good, but pretty forgettable, as I would say a lot of craft beers are.
 
I would say 10% of my brews are disappointing - IE not what I expected. Still better than BMC though.
Another 20% are ho-hum, These are just general house beers.
The other 70% is where I am very happy with good to great beer, while friends do say some of them are "awesome", I would not put them up there. Good to great is about as far as I have gotten. (I'm real picky).
 
well I'm going to go against everyone else and say I've had 2 beers that I designed the grain bill and mash schedule and everything that have turned out amazing. Those 2 beers I would imagine I could sell and have a following with them. They were simply ****ing amazing.

See I'm my own worst critic. If something doesn't taste how I want, and no one else says damn this is good, I just get rid of it.

Now that's not to say I don't make good beer, but amazing... not all that often. For me to really like it, it's just got to be out of this world good.
 
I think most - like 90% - of my beer is pretty damn good. There are the odd troubles, of course. But I've never had a friend hand back a beer I've poured for them, unless it's a style they just don't like.

The best method to make 'awesome' beer is, IMO, dialing in a recipe. Yeah, it can take ages to do, but the other method described is scattershot. Trusting on luck is no way to make 'awesome' beer; careful record-keeping, attention to detail and skill makes divine drink. Is it possible to brew something different every time and get lucky? Hell, yeah! We've all done it. But if brewing consistently awesome beer is the goal, you gotta tweak.

Cheers,

Bob
 
I'd say around ten percent of the beers I've made have been awesome, in the sense that if they'd been on sale in my local beer shop I'd have chosen them over the other beers available. The rest of my beers have been either good, or else perfectly fine but not so great I'd rush to have them again.

But I think we need to alter the question a little bit, so that we're comparing our beer with the other beers we could have had instead - as I think that's a fairer comparison. So not only "how many of your beers are awesome?", but also "how many of the other beers you try do you think are awesome?". I must have tried hundreds of beers from various places over the past couple of years. Out of all those commercially available beers, most of which are from small local producers, I've been impressed with maybe ten or twenty percent. The vast majority have been fine, but nothing special. And some have been actively pretty bad. So the beer I make probably has an excellence strike-rate comparable to independent brewers.

Hopefully as I get more experienced, my strike-rate will get better. Because I figure we as homebrewers should be able to make beer that's better than most commercially available stuff - we can make it more slowly, use proportionally more expensive ingredients per batch, tailor the beer to our own specific taste, and age it as long as we want without any commercial pressure to generate money through sales. I guess the home-brew strike-rate can get compromised a bit by doing experimental batches, but given that that's where a lot of the fun is, I'm prepared to live with it. :mug:
 
Hmm, good question. I have only made one recipe that I would never make again. The majority are good first go 'round but often they go back to the drawing board for tweaking. There are a few which are home runs that I have never changed but that is the smaller percentage. My newest goal is to not buy commercial beer anymore. I have been doing well with the occasional 6-er for when I am craving a style that I don't have on tap or bottled.
 
To add another question to this...how many of your beers could be mistaken as commercial microbrews if the drinker didn't know they were homebrews? I ask this because in my previous brewing life many years ago (extracts + spec. grains) I never produced anything that someone would think was a commercial example. They all screamed HOMEBREW! I don't know if it was what people refer to as "extract twang", but none of them really tasted like something you'd get on tap at the local brewpub.

My first two AG batches from my current brew life are in fermenters, and I'm hoping for better results. Forget awesome. How many of your beers just taste like real commercial beer that you could serve to guests without qualifying in advance that they were just homebrerws?
 
. . . How frequently are you brewing what you consider an "awesome" beer? . . .
I’m too much of a hopeless paranoid to think that any of my beers are “awesome.” There have been a couple that have disappeared surprisingly quickly at family gatherings and parties, so I guess that’s good. Dropped off a couple for a competition yesterday. My first. So we’ll see what the experts say.

My brewing philosophy has been to not clone something that I can buy, and not copy someone else’s exact recipe (except for Apfelwien.) After a lot of experimenting (brewed batch 61 last night) I now have a few recipes that I continue to tweak hoping to get that “awesome” rating.

But, although quality is important, for me it’s more about the fun. I enjoy everything about this hobby. From fine-tuning equipment and recipes to draining the last drop out of a keg. Even if the beer isn’t awesome, I just like the brewing.
 
In my limited experience brewing, I've yet to brew a beer that didn't surprise and please me. Although I have yet to brew an awesome caliber beer, I will be brewing most of what I've done again, I like them that much. I still have lots of recipes that I'm waiting to try so I just have to get moving.
 
I just reviewed my spreadsheet. And for me I have brewed 26 AG 10gal batches in my brew career.
I have focused on: APA, IPA, HEFE, and a couple of sessions.

I have 5 of those listed as AWESOME.
16 lot of not bad ( I drank them)
4 - questionable - but I had "issues" somewhere in the processes
1 that got an infection in the primary.

My issue is that my confidence is low due to most of my sucess was early on and 5 iffy batches have been more recent with a couple of "good ones" thrown in there as well.

A couple of bad batches can make you question what you do.
 
I have yet to brew an awesome beer but I have only brewed 9 batches so far, only 5 in the bottle. My first couple werent very good but they have been getting better. I have several in carboys now that are already tasting good. I have high hopes for the ones I recently bottled just waiting on time to pass so I can find out.
 
It's good to see that most of us are in the same boat. You see all these posts of people talking about their great beer, and you get a little paranoid that you're not brewing masterpieces every single time. Danek makes a good point by adding the question "how many of the other beers you try do you think are awesome?" For me, the frequency of my homebrews that I really like is comparable to the number of commercial beers that I try. Very few are great, most are average, and a few taste like a hot Zima found on the side of the road.
 
I can't give an unbiased answer to that question. I've loved all the AG beers I've made, and I'm still in the "Holy crap, I can't believe I can make beer this good myself" stage. Though I'd have to say that the first pale I did wasn't great, but it was drinkable.

I'd say 10% drinkable, 60% great and 30% awesome.
 
I think about 10% of my beers are awesome, 80% are acceptable and good, 10% questionable.

Compared to BMC even my worst beer is awsome.

I'll have to agree with both of these statements in terms of my beers...But I'd have to say, that based on what happened with the beer I wrote about in the "Don't dump your beer" thread, even that turned out to be pretty awesome..So maybe 5% are the crappy ones, but like camiller said so eloquently...even those are more drinkable to me than a BMC product.

I have a couple recipes that I no longer even tinker with, and are so perfect that it also really is a waste of effort to brew them as AG, when the Extract w/Grain versions are fantastic...My "haus" amber, and my version of Yooper's Rogue dead guy clone are examples of that...they don't NEED to be mashed to turn out fantastic...and my dead guy is one of my most requested beers. (Which dispells the idea that AG is the ONLY way to make great beer- A good solid recipe, and a nailed down process, is what makes beer great.)
 
I have only brewed only 11 batches so far, I would say two turned out above average, 7 boring, and 2 crappy.

I have a feeling I need to start being more experimental, as if I fail I want to fail big! :D
 
I haven't had a homebrew yet that i thought was perfect. And what i mean by perfect is "well maybe it would be better a little malty" or "maybe it would be better dry-hopped." I'm not saying that i am going to break my back by making 15 variations of a beer, keeping everything constant except for say hops used, but i definately take good notes of my process and finished product.
 
I just past my one year mark at home brewing. I've made (withouth looking at my notes) 18-20 beers. I'm still new, so a lot of it is still experimenting for me. Trying different styles, and different recipes of the same style so I get a better sense of everything. I've made 3 beers off the top of my head that have been awesome that I can't wait to make again (chocolate stout, DFH clone, and a nut brown).
I know it'll take time, and probably a few more years even until I have it down pat.
 
I rarely make a beer that I wouldn't drink, that being said I would say the majority of my beers are on par with many commercial brews but I would say that maybe only a couple I would have called awesome. Trouble for me is for one I'm very critical of my own beer, the other is that I haven't found a lot of commercial beers that where awesome so maybe I'm just picky.
 
I'm on my first two batches.
First is a Pale Ale, in the bottle.
Second is an English Brown, Primary.
Kind of nervous, but excited, we'll see how they come out.
 
Defining Awesome is tough because we all tend to like our own stuff and tend to be prejudiced. It also depends on what you are comparing against. Having said that, I'd estimate that 40% were first rate, most others were at least as good or better than the commercial choices. I've only had one real disappointment, but I'm going with the hope that after a year of aging it will also be awesome, too.
 
If by awesome, you only mean "I would order several of at a bar", probably 50% of my beers qualify. Except, I never buy two of the same beer in a night and I rarely drink two pints of the same homebrew in a day. I buy sampler trays in brewpubs, even my favorite places.

I'd classify most of my beers in the "worth repeating" category, which is good enough for me.

Took a Hop Wine to the HoTV picnic Sunday. Comments ranged from "This is terrible." to "I know a commercial wine-maker that would be interested in the recipe."
 
I've finished 11 batches so far and batch #11 is my first awesome beer IMO. The others were all good but not great. I'm hoping they will all be great from now on. Batch #12 is conditioning and #13 is fermenting. I cant wait to see if they are awesome too!
Beerbeque
 
I'd have to say that since going AG, they have all been better than extracts. In roughly 24 total batches, only one has been entirely undrinkable. If the criteria is 'Do I feel like another after I finish a pint', I'd say that applies to about 60-70% of my AG batches. I'm not sure if that means it's 'awesome', seeing as how on a nice hot day I can crush Coors Original pretty easily. I think outside input is the best though-one of the best things I ever heard was my brother tasted my scottish ale and claimed that he 'would pay a decent amount for this in a bar'.

I's also add that my beers brewed in the fall/spring/winter have been better on the whole than those brewed in summer.
 
I modified my process about a year ago adding a aeration stone and a tank of O2 for my grain/extract batches and that one pieces seems to have made a big difference. It seems like my process is pretty decent and then adding the aeration has given me a big boost. I've been very happy with, I would say, 9 out of 10 batches I've been doing with the only ones I'm not happy with being recipe issues more than process issues (the Imperial IPA I had wasn't too great. It came out like it was supposed to... I just didn't care for the recipe).

Are they "awesome" beers?? I dunno but I sure as hell like them and they have been going pretty quick so they don't seem to suck.
 
Back
Top