Brewie and the "art" of brewing.
I didn't think this would be so controversial on forums, but it appears as though this Brewie kickstarter project has a lot of people on the home brew forums up in arms and against the idea. Which is hilarious.
First, a bit of background; Brewie is basically a device which performs all of the steps in the mash and boil to produce your wort. It is fully customizable though, and this is key.
Why is customizability key you ask? Well, at the heart of it, that is really all that the home brewing community is about. The things Brewie and similar devices do for you aren't part of the art in my opinion. Heresy, I know. But hear me out.
When I first got started in home brewing, it was pretty typical. I started out with a Cooper's kit and a fermentation bucket and some erroneous supplies I had from mead making which more or less amounted to me having about the most basic home brew equipment possible. Roam the forums and you quickly find that simply following the recipes isn't enough to brew the beer you want to brew if you want to break free of kits.
You need to mash your own grains, control the mash temperature, sparge with a continuous stream equal to the drain rate of your tun with specific temperature water, bring it up to a boil as quickly as possible, add your hops at pre-defined times, cool rapidly once done and finally transfer to your fermentation vessel, add yeast and ferment (in a carefully controlled environment).
There is NO art to ANY of that (expect maybe in the building of the contraptions to achieve those ends). To get a recipe to turn out as you want, temperatures, times, volumes, etc... are expected to as near to exact as possible as specified in the recipe. And most of the people bitching have invested either loads of money, or effort, or both to attain equipment which can do that. Their brew days are largely mechanical processes. The "art" is in the recipe. And devices like Brewie pretty much allow you to control that. So I genuinely don't understand the beef.
I don't think Brewie will find a huge market though. I'm not even sure home brewers on the whole constitute a huge market. But within that market there are 2 problematic groups which make up the vast majority. Those who are just getting started, and those who are established. There are probably a few who could be considered somewhere between there.
For those getting started, the $1600 price point on Brewie is a big one for something you haven't even tried before. And it will take a long time to recoup that in savings vs simply buying beer. For instance... I made the generous assumption that I save over half of what I spend on ingredients vs buying, my average recipe is $40 and I know I've made about 25 of them. That is about $1000 over the course of a year. A lot of money saved, sure. If you account for me being overly generous and taxes you wind up at probably needing to make 50 batches before the unit pays for itself, at roughly 2 years. For newbies, that is a LOT of money and commitment for a hobby you're not sure you'll stick with. Not to mention, the product is still new. Will it even last 50 batches to pay itself off?
The next group is the established home brewers, incidentally that same whiny group complaining this sucks the art home brewing out of the equation while they invent ever more ways to make their own process more hands off or fault tolerant. The problem here is that these people already have the equipment. They have likely spent tons of money already. They have to weight the purchase of this system against the money they've already spent. Also, many of these people brew 10 gallon or larger batches which Brewie can't handle.
Frankly, while I think the latter group is whiny, they're probably right not to buy one. Just not for the reasons they spew.
So, who does that leave? Hipsters with money. But then, the problem is that Brewie doesn't handle the whole process. Those same people who weren't incentivized enough to make/buy the equipment and make beer the hard way still need to ferment and bottle/keg assuming they don't also need to do a starter to satisfy their hipster needs. Not to mention potentially wanting/needing to make starters. I watched the video for Brewie and I didn't walk away convinced enough that their advertising really considers this group of users. If it was even mentioned that when the wort comes out, you still need to deal with all of that and wait weeks it eluded me.
And guess what? Those bits are traditionally the most expensive bits for home brewers. Anyone too lazy to brew their own beer is basically the poster child for kegging. And that means building a keggerator or keezer and buying kegs, and then effectively the same thing all over again for the fermentation chamber. Depending on the route you take, you could easily put yourself back again as much as you paid for the Brewie.
Don't get me wrong. I love the idea. And I'm glad this project is getting attention. I hope it does well and we see more competition in this area. If a unit like this could make it down into $400-600 range I could see myself grabbing one. Even with my existing kit. At nearly 3x that price (probably more than that because I'm in Canada), the thing would need a lifetime warranty for me to consider it. I can replace any part of my current system for less than 1/10 the cost of that. And I didn't need to buy all f my equipment up front.
I have nothing against the idea. Not only are brew days long, but all of the things devices like this handle are the exact sorts of things home brewers basically spend their time and money trying to remove the art from. So, saying something like this takes the art of it is either wrong or pointless. You might as well say that using a thermometer or hydrometer takes the art out of it as well. If you measuring everything you can, tweaking to keep it rigidly within predefined parameters... that isn't art. That is science. That is mechanical. Arguing that it is art just because a human is doing exactingly boring things which a machine could do better is just nonsense. It isn't art in any way which matters.
As long as I can control the recipe to the reasonable degrees I would desire, I think the true art is still there.
BTW, if they made a unit at that price which would handle making the starter and go through to the end of fermentation, then it would be even more reasonable to me.
If you could make one half the price (even if it meant sacrificing volume to a reasonable degree) that would even take it to the point of serving so that I could get two for the price, I would buy one tomorrow.
At the end of it, brewing is a long, multi-step process which takes weeks (or even months) to take it to the point of drinking it in a glass, not to mention a variety of different equipment and processes, which inadvertently consume a lot of space. For someone serious about this, $1600 isn't necessarily an insane amount of money. But it is still a lot for most. Do I think the device is worth it? Like I said, it partly depends on reliability. It gives you back hours on brew day, the footprint looks WAY smaller than the myriad pieces of equipment it replaces. It takes the stress of the mechanical processes away and it does so a reasonable multiplier of the cost of the equipment it replaces (provided it lasts reasonably long in comparison). There is definitely value there. And possible enough to justify the price tag.
First, a bit of background; Brewie is basically a device which performs all of the steps in the mash and boil to produce your wort. It is fully customizable though, and this is key.
Why is customizability key you ask? Well, at the heart of it, that is really all that the home brewing community is about. The things Brewie and similar devices do for you aren't part of the art in my opinion. Heresy, I know. But hear me out.
When I first got started in home brewing, it was pretty typical. I started out with a Cooper's kit and a fermentation bucket and some erroneous supplies I had from mead making which more or less amounted to me having about the most basic home brew equipment possible. Roam the forums and you quickly find that simply following the recipes isn't enough to brew the beer you want to brew if you want to break free of kits.
You need to mash your own grains, control the mash temperature, sparge with a continuous stream equal to the drain rate of your tun with specific temperature water, bring it up to a boil as quickly as possible, add your hops at pre-defined times, cool rapidly once done and finally transfer to your fermentation vessel, add yeast and ferment (in a carefully controlled environment).
There is NO art to ANY of that (expect maybe in the building of the contraptions to achieve those ends). To get a recipe to turn out as you want, temperatures, times, volumes, etc... are expected to as near to exact as possible as specified in the recipe. And most of the people bitching have invested either loads of money, or effort, or both to attain equipment which can do that. Their brew days are largely mechanical processes. The "art" is in the recipe. And devices like Brewie pretty much allow you to control that. So I genuinely don't understand the beef.
I don't think Brewie will find a huge market though. I'm not even sure home brewers on the whole constitute a huge market. But within that market there are 2 problematic groups which make up the vast majority. Those who are just getting started, and those who are established. There are probably a few who could be considered somewhere between there.
For those getting started, the $1600 price point on Brewie is a big one for something you haven't even tried before. And it will take a long time to recoup that in savings vs simply buying beer. For instance... I made the generous assumption that I save over half of what I spend on ingredients vs buying, my average recipe is $40 and I know I've made about 25 of them. That is about $1000 over the course of a year. A lot of money saved, sure. If you account for me being overly generous and taxes you wind up at probably needing to make 50 batches before the unit pays for itself, at roughly 2 years. For newbies, that is a LOT of money and commitment for a hobby you're not sure you'll stick with. Not to mention, the product is still new. Will it even last 50 batches to pay itself off?
The next group is the established home brewers, incidentally that same whiny group complaining this sucks the art home brewing out of the equation while they invent ever more ways to make their own process more hands off or fault tolerant. The problem here is that these people already have the equipment. They have likely spent tons of money already. They have to weight the purchase of this system against the money they've already spent. Also, many of these people brew 10 gallon or larger batches which Brewie can't handle.
Frankly, while I think the latter group is whiny, they're probably right not to buy one. Just not for the reasons they spew.
So, who does that leave? Hipsters with money. But then, the problem is that Brewie doesn't handle the whole process. Those same people who weren't incentivized enough to make/buy the equipment and make beer the hard way still need to ferment and bottle/keg assuming they don't also need to do a starter to satisfy their hipster needs. Not to mention potentially wanting/needing to make starters. I watched the video for Brewie and I didn't walk away convinced enough that their advertising really considers this group of users. If it was even mentioned that when the wort comes out, you still need to deal with all of that and wait weeks it eluded me.
And guess what? Those bits are traditionally the most expensive bits for home brewers. Anyone too lazy to brew their own beer is basically the poster child for kegging. And that means building a keggerator or keezer and buying kegs, and then effectively the same thing all over again for the fermentation chamber. Depending on the route you take, you could easily put yourself back again as much as you paid for the Brewie.
Don't get me wrong. I love the idea. And I'm glad this project is getting attention. I hope it does well and we see more competition in this area. If a unit like this could make it down into $400-600 range I could see myself grabbing one. Even with my existing kit. At nearly 3x that price (probably more than that because I'm in Canada), the thing would need a lifetime warranty for me to consider it. I can replace any part of my current system for less than 1/10 the cost of that. And I didn't need to buy all f my equipment up front.
I have nothing against the idea. Not only are brew days long, but all of the things devices like this handle are the exact sorts of things home brewers basically spend their time and money trying to remove the art from. So, saying something like this takes the art of it is either wrong or pointless. You might as well say that using a thermometer or hydrometer takes the art out of it as well. If you measuring everything you can, tweaking to keep it rigidly within predefined parameters... that isn't art. That is science. That is mechanical. Arguing that it is art just because a human is doing exactingly boring things which a machine could do better is just nonsense. It isn't art in any way which matters.
As long as I can control the recipe to the reasonable degrees I would desire, I think the true art is still there.
BTW, if they made a unit at that price which would handle making the starter and go through to the end of fermentation, then it would be even more reasonable to me.
If you could make one half the price (even if it meant sacrificing volume to a reasonable degree) that would even take it to the point of serving so that I could get two for the price, I would buy one tomorrow.
At the end of it, brewing is a long, multi-step process which takes weeks (or even months) to take it to the point of drinking it in a glass, not to mention a variety of different equipment and processes, which inadvertently consume a lot of space. For someone serious about this, $1600 isn't necessarily an insane amount of money. But it is still a lot for most. Do I think the device is worth it? Like I said, it partly depends on reliability. It gives you back hours on brew day, the footprint looks WAY smaller than the myriad pieces of equipment it replaces. It takes the stress of the mechanical processes away and it does so a reasonable multiplier of the cost of the equipment it replaces (provided it lasts reasonably long in comparison). There is definitely value there. And possible enough to justify the price tag.
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