I finally found it locally. Over all, meh. I think I make better beer. The stout is decent and I liked Pat-rye-ot beer but if I was ordering in a bar, I doubt I would be ordering seconds of any of these.
Sierra Nevada Beer Camp 12-packs?
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Yeastieboy
Well-Known Member
That's funny that you think you make better beer than 31 partner breweries across the country.
madscientist451
Well-Known Member
Whats so funny about his comment? Everyone has different tastes and just because some people believe some commercial beers are good doesn't mean everyone is going to like it. Remember, the beer MOST BEER DRINKERS in the US prefer is Bud Light.....so does that mean everyone should prefer it?
BTW, I think most commercial beers aren't all that great either. I also prefer my homebrew, but that's probably because its fresher and hasn't been sitting in hot warehouses, trucks and big box stores. But to each is own, what you like is up to you.
Maybe not.
It's a rare outing that I have a "bought beer" that is as good as my best...
Cheers!
Pro brewers often have to worry about ingredient availability, cost, and appealing to a wide variety of palates in making a beer. A home brewer who has the process to make good beer should be able to make beer that he prefers over most commercial examples thanks to freshness, individual tailoring of the recipe, and personal pride. Certainly some styles are harder than others to manage this feat and most of the time there will be high-end commercial brews that are downright better than what we make, but to scoff at a homebrewer for preferring his homebrew to a set of one-offs from a collaboration known more for genre-bending and creativity than award-winning beers is a bit silly.
Yeastieboy
Well-Known Member
[emoji23] Wow! The egos. Hilarious. You all should quit your day jobs!
I never said we make better beer. I said we prefer our beer. (The fact is, though, that sometimes we do make better beer.) Take Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. It's a great beer, the grandfather of modern craft beer that accounts for 80% of the production of one of the biggest breweries in the US. That beer is one of the reasons we have a big craft beer movement in the US and around the world. There are dozens, possibly hundreds if I tasted enough, of pale ales that I would prefer to a good old SNPA, my own pale ales included because they're better suited to my tastes (and because they're mine).
Craft breweries tackle far more challenges than just brewing good beer. As many homebrewers who have opened their own breweries (many successfully) will attest, making great beer is the easiest part of running a brewery. With good materials, good recipes, and good practices, any old schmuck can make great beer, and it's easier now than ever with the huge variety of world-class equipment, ingredients, yeast strains, and homebrewing literature available to anyone with a pot and a fermenter. The challenge of a craft brewer is to make money selling that beer.
Yeastieboy
Well-Known Member
Oh this is just too much... [emoji111]🏼
ThatVideoKid
Well-Known Member
Exactly. Especially in the one-off department. They only get 1 maybe 2 pilot runs to refine it. These breweries can certainly produce better beer and so can I. Running a brewery is more business than art. Just because a brewery produces thousands and thousands of barrels of beer doesn't make them the best. Just like how I can cook better than many restaurants. It's the same principle.
Why did this thread take this off topic turn? I have had 2 beer camp packs this year and while some beers were a swing and a miss, all of them were pushing the boundaries of their respective styles, which was the point. After all, if SN's only goal was to release a widely popular beer for the masses, they probably would have just released.............more Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
My better judgment tells me to refrain from comment regarding the supposed ease of brewing great beer on a distribution-size scale, but I can't. Having seen with my own two eyes what goes into a craft brewery with around 4 regular releases, and a handful of special releases annually, with regional distribution, I can emphatically say that NONE of it is easy, especially the beer part.
From sourcing ingredients, to ensuring consistency batch to batch, to simple things like sanitation and scheduling of tanks, its surprisingly difficult. Not impossible, obviously, but difficult. Batches don't turn out as planed all the time. What do you do when your tank gets a bug? Dump $40k down the drain? Or do you let it ride and potentially contaminate other equipment in your brewery that you need for your regular releases? Do you have 6 months to age a stout, or do you need the production space? Lets say you make a great beer with a fruit addition, throw it in your tap room, and people love it. What about bottling it? Will the fruit remain shelf stable, or do you have to try to sub ingredients, but still maintain the same flavor?
The point I am making is that thinks we take for granted can be exponentially more difficult in scale. Just because you can cook a mean pot roast does not mean that you can do that, consistently, to feed 50 people a night, along with making 10 other dishes on the menu. This is not a dig at anyone, but to say that with the right equipment and recipe and the like that it is simply a matter of business is in my opinion incorrect. If it was, then every neighborhood would have a nano brewery in it. Perhaps many business can be distilled down to its financial elements because, after all, everything has a cost. But that doesn't make opening a brewery economically lineal.
ThatVideoKid
Well-Known Member
Oh I get the consistency part. And I get why they do the beer camp. My response was less of a comment on that than it was on the comment claiming that someone can't possibly make better beer than 31 top breweries. Yeah it's probably inconsistent, but it's certainly possible to do it.
I get that. And I would agree that may home brewers can and do make beers that I personally would rank above many commercial versions of the style.
fuzzy2133
Well-Known Member
Family Values Brown and Stout of the Union both lack a flavor that stands out IMO. The rest I would buy again in their own 6 pack.
Yeastieboy
Well-Known Member
It's just dumb to discount such a large collaborative effort and say you can make better beer. You make different beer which you prefer above BeerCamp.
There seems to a couple people who have taken a great offence to my opinion to some of the beers in the sampler pack. Makes me wonder if the brewers are the one who are doing the posting. 
fuzzy2133
Well-Known Member
There seems to a couple people who have taken a great offence to my opinion to some of the beers in the sampler pack. Makes me wonder if the brewers are the one who are doing the posting.
I think many missed a key word in your original post. You definitely never claimed to be brewing on the commercial scale. For many of us it is hard to find something that we would buy repeatedly like SNPA and Torpedo if our pipe line of HB was to dry up.
Just because it's commercially available doesn't automatically mean it's good.
And anyway, why would you even brew your own at all if you didn't think you could make something preferable (i.e. better) to a commercially available product?
On topic, there are certainly some good offerings in that 12 pack, but certainly some misses.
Yeastieboy
Well-Known Member
Do y'all brew your own beer just to make something more preferable to yourself than commercially available beers?
At $30 a 12 pack, not counting deposit, I prefer my inexpressibly made ales!
I can't bring myself to spend twice as much as any 12 pack at my local bottle shop
Yeastieboy
Well-Known Member
We're all unique I suppose. I spend a lot on craft beers. I love sampling other people's brews. It's inspirational. I don't seek to compare my beer to others. It's my own creation and I judge it independent of what other brewers are doing.
If you think that collaboration necessarily makes something better, you should come to one of the teacher meetings at my school. 15 indecisive kindergarten teachers yelling at each other for 45 minutes trying to decide what color of paper to print the field trip release form on. Too many cooks, man. Collaboration beers are sometimes great, but when multiple styles and egos are all trying to assert themselves on the same beer, and especially when they're often also getting a bit experimental in the bargain, the end result is rarely their best product. Then again, maybe you're just being pedantic about the subjective nature of claiming one beer to be "better" than another.
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Yes.
Yeastieboy
Well-Known Member
[emoji17]
Check out this awesome write up that someone who was invited to brew at beer camp wrote. It is from last years but still cool. Shows how much they just "throw together" the recipes when they get there. The beers are far from perfect....except "sweet sunny south"
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/sierra-nevada-beer-camp.html
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/sierra-nevada-beer-camp.html
But Beer Camp is suppose to be the greatest beer minds coming together to create the best beer the world has ever seen!
JK
Yeastieboy
Well-Known Member
Good article. I would like to go sit around, drink, eat, and brew on SN's dime!
Note that he was on a team made up of consumers who won a contest. That's akin to y'all doing your own Beer Camp ;-). All other teams are made up of industry folks by invitation only.
Note that he was on a team made up of consumers who won a contest. That's akin to y'all doing your own Beer Camp ;-). All other teams are made up of industry folks by invitation only.
That's the first part of Beer Camp. The SN Beer Camp Tropical IPA that came out this year before the variety pack was a result of what was described in this article. The variety pack comes from breweries.
Yeastieboy
Well-Known Member
Exactly.
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