Thank you very much. We appreciate the fact that you are diligently looking after all of our best interests.
Personally, I haven't had experiences that support his comments but I defend his right to put them out there. I do accept the fact that there are risks to bottling too early and there are risks to bottling too late. Whether you accept his point on this or not is your call. Some would argue to leave the beer in primary for weeks after FG is reached. Others, based on the views of professional brewers will argue that the beer may be packaged as soon as it has reached FG. That argument will go on ad-nauseum and will not be satisfied in this discussion.
If he were responding to a thread about kegging, his advice would not have been a very big deal at all, albeit factually incorrect. However, he's advising that we are the ones who stop fermentation when we think it should be done, rather than letting fermentation come to an end on its own... and he's doing this in the beginners beer brewing forum in a thread about bottling. If nobody corrects him and another beginner reads his post and decides to bottle a saison at 1.010, he's likely to get bottle bombs. I think it is very important that, as a community, we point out incorrect information as such.
My issue in this has been with manipulation of numbers, quotes and facts in order to embellish or promote a particular point of view. That is fundamentally dishonest. Particularly so when the one doing it has had the temerity to call others dishonest. This practice and does nothing to assist those following the thread to decide what procedures they should choose to follow.
In addition to this I am concerned about two other issues: We have encountered here an almost religious zeal from those who seem to feel they have "THE ONLY RIGHT VIEW AND PROCEDURE" for brewing, and; we have comments to the effect of, "What does a kegger know about bottling?" The first displays a certain level of self-posessed arrogance and the last is IMO, vacuous. Does all a person learned while bottling for years suddenly go away when he decides to buy kegs? (We do seem to have an abundance of airheads.)
I do agree we shouldn't dismiss comments made by someone solely because they now keg instead of bottling. However, incorrect information is incorrect information, regardless of how long someone has been brewing or whether they bottle or keg, etc.
I have been brewing for years, bottling and kegging. I have read some, experienced some and learned a few things that I know to be true. If there is anything I have learned from this experience it is this: Beer is extremely tolerant of screw-ups. If you are brewing for competition the errors you make will probably be exposed quickly, but if brewing for friends and family and you follow a few basic principles your beer will, most likely, be pretty good regardless of the nits you may want to pick with your fellow brewers.
The fact is that people have been making very good beer in dark and cool basements, cellars and caves for centuries. (Sorry HBT devotees, reading and posting here does not make you a great brewer. It does make you very good at overthinking the process.) Beer is easy to make and it is adaptable to different conditions. We don't need HBT, temperature controllers, specialized yeast strains, etc, etc, to make beer.
You're right in that there are many ways to make beer and that making beer is relatively easy. You're also right that errors made aren't as big of a deal when brewing for yourself as opposed to competition. However, bottling too early throws that all out the window. From this point on, it's all physics. If you bottle early enough that you make bottle bombs, the finer points of the brew don't really matter.
What home brewers need accept is the fact that there is NO single right way to do this. This concept is tough to handle for the religious zealots of brewing but it is true whether they want to believe it or not. If you choose to be a zealot about how you brew then, by all means, feel free, but don't be so arrogant as to trash fellow brewers who have had a different set of experiences. Few readers of this thread will believe that you or I know all there is to know about brewing. And I am convinced that most intelligent readers of this thread are willing to grant that other's experiences, results and opinions are at least as valid as yours.
cheers and I'm outta here! (again)
You'll never hear me profess that I know all (or even close) to everything there is to know about brewing. And I definitely agree that there is no single right way to do this. However, there are definite wrong ways to do it, and even I can pick out bad advice.
And, again, if the poster giving out the bad advice had just followed up with some clarification or admitted he erred, this whole conversation to follow wouldn't have taken place. However, he chose not to do this, and then you have defended him based [presumably] solely on the fact that he has over a decade of experience.
And there's no need to leave this conversation. Stick around and have a conversation with us.
If you're truly going to exit this conversation, just quit posting. No need to tell everyone that you're done posting after each post.
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