Hard To Make Bad Homebrew

[certaut]

brewed and found bees, tree leaves, assorted bugs in the boil kettle
boiled the mash during sparge, had Cheetos in the sparge,and my phone
used fish feed instead of hops (oops)
it all made beer, and I guess that my friends and neighbors like my ugly babies

 

[kh54s10]

I have to go somewhat against the grain and agree with the OP. In my case it seems that my municipal water is better than average. My beers may not make top marks in a competition, but I don't consider over 10% even mediocre. To me, and I am really the only one that matters, 50 - 60 percent of my beers are as good as or better than the average commercial beers. But, I don't buy the ones that are $20 a bomber, so I can't compare to those.... Of the rest 90 percent of them are quite good, 5 percent are OK and 4 percent are not quite good and only 1 percent are pretty bad. Out of 95 batches, I resigned one to using in beer bread and I have one that looks so disgusting I am not going to even try it. 4 months still opaque in too large a fermenter so I am sure it is oxidized. I was an experiment. One other bad one, but I drank it all was brewed with wild yeast from a rose bloom. It ended up sweet and super fruity tasting.

 

[Agtronic]

I dunno, I think it's easy to make beer that won't poison you or offend the average drinker, but in my 8-9 years of brewing maybe 5 batches per year, I have only had one or two batches I was really proud of. One was an imperial stout, and the other an APA. While the average beer drinker tells me my IPAs are great, I am never satisfied with them. So much so that I almost always have negative feelings about each batch before I ever try it. I'll be honest and say that lately it's kind of put a damper on my brewing and I brew much less than before. I also moved to AG maybe 6 batches ago and find that the added equipment and process makes the brew day excrutiatingly long. But many people have told me that I am my harshest critic when it comes to all my creative hobbies. I just seem to detect a certain signature flavour in every beer I brew, that only my beers have. Sometimes I have chlorophenol, sometimes not. I have gotten so deep (for my standards) into the technicalities of water and pH levels, all in an effort to nail that perfect flavor profile, and just when I think I'm close, I crack open one of my favourite commercial IPAs and it's like "yeah ok, not even close!".

But on the bright side, I've never had a dumper, nor have I ever brewed something that was terrible. It's mostly always pretty good, just never WOW!

Also, entered my first comp with a fruit beer (which I never cared to brew before, but happened to have some ready) and it did much better than I thought it would. Did 40/50 on two separate scorecards.

Maybe you will be harder to please as your taste for beer develops.

 

[darling]

I think a lot of this depends on your proximity to good beer in general. Anyone brewing in N America is overly spoiled for choice. You (in general) have local craft breweries within driving distance (don't drink and drive please). You have grocery stores stocking at least 10 drinkable stalwarts of the craft industry. If you don't live near a really great local brewery, you can always fall back on classics like Sierra Nevada or even Sam Adams.

If this is the case for you, your brewing experience is rife with sensory overload and a million and one examples of what you'd like to drink/make. Contrast that to those of us living in beer wastelands (I am in Romania).

Beer here is essentially a binary experience (and not on a good/bad selector). There is pilsener (blonda) and wheat (nefiltrata). That's it. If you're fortunate enough not to live in Bucharest, then unfortunately you do not live near a craft brewery. The grocery store has an immense beer aisle, even with a domestic/import split. But what do you find in the import section? Pilsener or wheat. German knock-offs that aren't fit for consumption; Belgians so over-priced I swear I've seen the same individual bottles in their cacophonous disarray on the shelf every week since I've been here (coming up on 125 weeks now...).

The ABInbev buyout is beginning too, but there are no local gems to be bought. There are Australian crafty beers that taste like someone farted in a Foster's and left in in the outback to boil. There are the usual suspects: Heineken (and every horrible thing they own), Grolsch (good for swing tops; bad for drinking), Guiness (long-time sellouts). Then there are the honey traps: Mort Subite - a Lambic! In my haste, I buy it, chill it, pour it, drink it, gag, spit, read the label, reel in disgust at the beer-flavored syrup whose main ingredient is an illusive "lambic aroma".

In short, if it's so hard to make bad beer, why are so many professional breweries doing it? I may be biased towards my beer. I have to be. I know I have made some mediocre ones, but with all the rat poison on sale, what recourse do I have? That being said, I do make a very nice IPA every now and again. I don't need BJCP scores to tell me how good it is, when my taste buds, worn out from long battles with the local swill, jump back to life at the first sip.

Long live Homebrewing!