Your local breweries and equipment upgrades = better beer?

I don't think it's the equipment so much, as the ability of the brewer. There's still plenty of great beer coming out of cobbled together systems, and some sad beer coming out of the latest, greatest, fancy-ass systems.

 

Better equipment can make better (more consistent anyway) beer but it still requires a skilled hand to use it.

 

Oh sure, but who's gonna cook a better meal; Mario Batali over a Coleman stove camping, or me in the finest kitchen on the planet. Hint, it ain't gonna be me. A good brewer, with good equipment, can make more beer of a more consistent quality, but a better brewer on a crappier system could make a great beer. Goes both ways, too. Somebody learns with the newest, best stuff, and makes great beer, maybe they make worse beer on a strange system.

 

So true. You seriously wouldn't believe the low tech system at a brewery many, myself included, think makes the best wild ales and saisons in this state.

 

I agree that it is the ability of the brewer. Any 'newish' brewery that makes good beer on starter equipment and then upgrades to larger equipment will try to match their existing beers' characteristics so as not to disappoint their customers with something worse/different. If the brewer happens to upscale the recipe to the larger equipment and produces something better/different than the original, he has the option to keep the existing beer's name and call it new and improved, or come up with a new name and add a new beer to the portfolio. And the answer to that choice will probably depend on how close the new beer is to the old one. If the choice is to introduce a new beer, then the next task is to go back and try again to clone the beer that was the original target. But still, it is the brewer's skill that is being challenged by the new equipment, but not the new equipment itself that creates this beer.

 

They do great IPA's too, and their stout is to die for, but there are other breweries in this state doing those better to my tastes. Funny thing is the two brewmasters just accepted new positions at a new, much larger and more high tech brewery slated to be open to public in Late summer, so we will get a chance to see what genius brewers can do with way scaled up high tech.

 

That reminds me of: "the more I practice the luckier I get".