OK, I can assure every one, that most of my beers meet the most important judge,,, ME. I am not making beer for any body else. I have no pretense (or daddy goggles as was so eloquently said) that it is the best and could not taste better. But I also have a budget to my beer making. $200 here, $100 there, to me, is $300 that I could spend on ingredients, not hardware to make my crappy beer a little bit better. I seldom if ever see anyone use a scale on how much better their beer is after they spend $$$ on the latest and greatest hardware. Did your beer go from "3" to "5",,"7" to "9" or better yet "2" to "8" when you spent $300?
Some of you are in the hobby to make world class beer and have the means to do it. Some of us just make (now I question) drinkable beer. I guess I'd rather have 30+ gal of "my quality" beer than 5 gal of "perfect" for the same investment.
I hope I don't come off sounding like I don't appreciate all the experimenting and research that some of you do and your helpful comments, quite the opposite really, I would probably enjoy some of your "failures" as much as I do my meager results.
Cheers,
Joel B.