An Ankoù
Well-Known Member
One of my contentions, for right or wrong, is that the home brewer, especially with all the resources we have at our fingertips, should be able to make beer which is Better than commercial beer. We are not constrained by profits, shelf life, storage under adverse conditions, unbridled ignorance and all the other horrors the commercial brewer has to put up with especially profits.
Certainly the home Brewer has benefitted from industry in availability of equipment, understanding processes and quality of ingredients, but that doesn't mean we have to be shackled by their constraints. I bottle my beer in 50 cl clear glass bottles because they don't have to sit on a shop shelf under fluorescent lighting, for example.
There are commercial brewers who don't brew for maximum profit, the trappist brewers, for example. The monks at Saint Sixtus claim : we are not brewers, we are monks. We brew and sell beer so that we can live as monks. Their Westvleteren 12 is considered by some to be the finest beer in the world. They sell it for about €1.20 a bottle. Lots of Belgian beer is in this tradition, and not just Belgian. It's when the big multinationals buy up the little breweries that quality inevitably falls.
The philosophical question is whether beer brewing is an expression of art or of commerce. I'd argue that for the home brewer, it's the former. Industrial practice is not necessarily best practice, although it may be best commercial practice. That doesn't mean we have nothing to learn from industry, just don't take industrial practice as gospel.
Certainly the home Brewer has benefitted from industry in availability of equipment, understanding processes and quality of ingredients, but that doesn't mean we have to be shackled by their constraints. I bottle my beer in 50 cl clear glass bottles because they don't have to sit on a shop shelf under fluorescent lighting, for example.
There are commercial brewers who don't brew for maximum profit, the trappist brewers, for example. The monks at Saint Sixtus claim : we are not brewers, we are monks. We brew and sell beer so that we can live as monks. Their Westvleteren 12 is considered by some to be the finest beer in the world. They sell it for about €1.20 a bottle. Lots of Belgian beer is in this tradition, and not just Belgian. It's when the big multinationals buy up the little breweries that quality inevitably falls.
The philosophical question is whether beer brewing is an expression of art or of commerce. I'd argue that for the home brewer, it's the former. Industrial practice is not necessarily best practice, although it may be best commercial practice. That doesn't mean we have nothing to learn from industry, just don't take industrial practice as gospel.
