Why did you start brewing?

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Why did you start Home Brewing?

  • To save money

  • Access varieties you can't obtain locally

  • You were fascinated by the hobby/ It seemed fun

  • The pride of making your own brew

  • To obtain a fresher/more natural product


Results are only viewable after voting.
Yes, bird, I was referring to the parental units. Not that mine would have cared.

Another added benefit is that kids will gain an appreciation for real beer, and stop drinking the turpentine-laced water that you find at all of the high school/college parties.

Just to clarify, of course, I'm not condoning underage drinking (although I have a very European stance on booze).
 
Besides the 'secret place' to be able to make the beer the 3 things I can think of that stop the teenager are:

a) lack of patience - We're looking at at least 2 weeks to make beer and piss poor beer at that. Delayed gratification isn't exactly a skill we're teaching teen in the US.

b) inability to keep one's mouth frinken shut - that beer has to spend a lot of time uinattended and a teen being able to not tell his friends about it till it is a done deal is probably asking too much. The odds of a secret staying secret drop dramatically with each teen who is made aware of it.

c) lack of honest self confidence - let's face it, as adults most people get into this hobby and spend a lot of time worrying about what we mighta screwed up. not having the self confidence to press ahead can be crippling.
 
My German Mother-in-Law came across an out of print book that detailed how to brew your own beer and the pitfalls in starting a brewery. I can't remember the name of the book, but it was a great read and entertaining. I started making good beer right away and SWMBO drank one every evening before nursing my daughter. She said it made the milk come in like gangbusters (must of been the yeast).

That was 18 years ago. Now I brew to make a craft beer and pride has lots to do with it.
 
the_bird said:
Secretly from mom and dad, is how I interpreted that....

We get kidlings on the site occassionally (there was a flury when school let out for the summer). I kinda like being a bit of a dick to them, just because I'm practicing for when I'm a curmudgeon in my old age. I do wish, though, that we had thought of homebrewing back in the day, would have been better than paying the scary dude $3 (and having to let him into my car) to pick us up an 18-pack of Bud.

Nothing illegal about buying grain, yeast, malt, and buckets...



LOL I was thinking the same thing about wishing I would have thought of this when I was younger. I got started after buying my brother in law a mr beer kit. I went to the HBS and started looking around and talked to the guy who was working there. Back in the early college days (80's) I can remember going to some friends house and they had a bottle of grape juice with a balloon on top of it. "Making wine" they called it. It was more like horse pi$$.

Great poll

loop
 
ayrton said:
You know, since I started brewing, I always wondered what on earth could stop a teenager from making his or her own beer (provided you had the space to do it secretly). You can order the stuff online, and it's not like there are any age checks. If only I'd have known back then... :drunk:

Do you mean to tell me that age checks like this one on the Miller Brewing Company web site don't actually keep out the underaged teens? :confused: I'm flabbergasted and shocked! ;)
 
a chance alignment of 2 stars ... the first, duclaw brewing opening in belair, md and tasting their "venom" (check ratebeer.com under apa's ...venom has been in the top 3 for at least the last yr)

second ... my brother got married and as a favor i started doing his wife's sister's husband's tax return at the reduced "family" rate, aka "free". As a "thankyou", he would bring me 2 six packs of his own homebrew ... they were simple extract brews, and always great. i began saving beer bottles for my eventual attempt at brewing "one day".

then, one christmas, my brother, after consulting with his brother in law, got me the kit ... buckets, airlock, hydrometer, capper, caps, hops, syrup, yeast, hoses, bottling wand, racking cane ... you know the set-up. by this time i had about 90 bottles (still with labels). i had no excuses.

my bro's b-i-l came over the house one cold january saturday and he walked me through my first brew ... that took care of that ...
 
Kinda' late jumping in here - I scored three cases of Leinie's Original in returnable bottles for $5.99 a case in central Wisonsin in 1999 - kept the bottles in the garage thinking that someday I'd use them to homebrew. Also knew I had a bit of a sulfite allergy that BMC seemed to kick up and had been thinking about homebrewing to get around that.....SWMBO bought me a kit for Christmas '05 - four extracts and five all grains later - I'm hooked and pretty danged glad to be that way!

Sköl!
 
ayrton said:
You know, since I started brewing, I always wondered what on earth could stop a teenager from making his or her own beer (provided you had the space to do it secretly). You can order the stuff online, and it's not like there are any age checks. If only I'd have known back then... :drunk:

There are TONS of things, a virtually unlimited supply, actually, that are legal by themselves, but when combined in a certain fashion, produce something that is illegal or restricted. What a silly thought...no offense.

And, um, furthermore, even if I had "known back then", it seems to me that it'd be alot harder to try to explain to my parents what this big setup that looks like a scientific lab is for (much less go through all that trouble as a teenager), than it would be to just ask Keith, the dude who worked in the McD's drive-thru with my friend, to run in to the liquor store and pick us up some booze. :p
 
loopmd said:
Back in the early college days (80's) I can remember going to some friends house and they had a bottle of grape juice with a balloon on top of it. "Making wine" they called it. It was more like horse pi$$.

Yeah, they do that in the toilets in prison, too. Mmm...prison toilet cab sauv. I hear 2004 was a great vintage!
 
this "underage" talk reminds me of what a guy in our brew group did in college. went to the grocery store, bought a jug of sweet apple cider, dosed it with fleishmanns bread yeast and let it roll. he never mentioned how good it tasted ... i'm not sure he cared.
 
I started brewing to get beer underage. Thus, I cannot take this poll since that isn't a listed option.
 
Brewpastor said:
Don't look now, but the feds are coming up your walk...

Yeah, I am really sure they care. I think there must be some kind of rule of thumb in law that if a kid is bright enough to figure out how to brew their own, they get to drink it.
 
My SWMBO said she wanted to brew some beer last Oct.:ban: I haven't stopped since.:rockin:
 
I bought my buddy a beginner's kit for Christmas in 1996 because I thought homebrewing sounded like a kick-ass hobby, and my buddy definately needed a hobby.

He made a couple batches of vinegar and evenutally gave the gear back to me less than a year later. I promptly put it to use.

-walker
 
Well, I started to save money, considering (drinkable) beer, starts at $40 a case up here in Ontario, Canada. I went to a brew on premise(which are quite popular here), paid them $90(for 15 gallons), and they said come back in 2 weeks to bottle. I did that, and the beer was udder crap, it tasted like drinking sugar water.
A trip to google found me this site, and after a month of reading I made my first batch. Bottled the first batch, and then started looking for kegging equipment. About a week and a half ago, my second batch went into the kegerator, last friday we tapped into it, and now its almost gone :drunk: and I have nothing in the fermentors :( . So this weekend batch #3 and #4 are coming up:ban:

lol, I sorta went off topic there but oh well

Wup

P.S. Is there something wrong with me if I poor my self a pint when I make a trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night?
 
I got into it in a real 'start & stop' way, so my story is kind of lengthy. I hope I don’t bore anybody with it!:(

When I got into high school in the mid-1970s a big hobby at that time was beer can collecting. I became a collector and just liked looking at all the different types of beers. All the great artwork, far-away little towns I’d never heard of where some of them were brewed. Most of the brands were gone or in the process of being driven out of business and I was just fascinated with them. I still have some of those cans today! I think I was always destined to do something beer-related, even though my parents weren’t beer drinkers.

Anyway, by the time I got into college, the legal age for beer & wine was 19 and I took full advantage of it! The summer after my freshman year, a buddy (and fellow beer can collector) decided he wanted to try his hand at brewing beer after reading an article about it. Unlike me, he came from a family of substantial beer drinkers. He talked me into joining him. We bought stuff from an LHBS, brewed two lackluster batches that summer and that was that. The equipment gathered dust in my parent's basement and we went back to school.

In the 1980s, after we had all left college, he got the equipment out of our basement, joined a homebrew club and made some very good beers. Still, I didn’t get the bug for brewing.

Jump forward to the mid-1990s. Micros were booming and I was getting a real appreciation for beer, due in part to a one-year subscription to Beer Across America, given to me by my girlfriend at the time – who hated beer. Remembering my college brewing ‘fling’, I started toying with the idea of brewing my own. I read through a couple of issues of Zymurgy at the library and got a copy Papazian’s second book (not the Complete Joy – mistake #1) and thought about brewing for two years.

By 1997, the girlfriend was history and my buddy had stopped brewing. But me - I was chomping at the bit to get started! I picked up a copy of Homebrewing For Dummies, read it cover to cover twice and my buddy gave me all of his old equipment. Amongst it was one of our original plastic buckets, which I still have today. I haven’t looked back since. I got into AG brewing in July, 2005.
:mug:
 
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