Mashing Out

You may have a point there. The issue was mostly that we didn't have a base-line of knowledge as a comparison.

You stated that, "A brewer can make an excellent beer by rigorously following directions, just as a cook can make an excellent meal by following a good recipe." My comment was aimed at this. Simply following directions doesn't provide you with the necessary functional knowledge to branch out. Again, though, it's not that I'm disagreeing with you, it's just that the amount of functional knowledge necessary in your examples, as in mine, wasn't established.

Not that it's particularly relevant, but I have a wife and two kids. I am a stay-at-home dad, but that doesn't afford me anymore free time than most people working 9-5...in fact I would argue I have less time due to my wife's occupation requiring 60-70hr work weeks. I would also like to point out that I never agreed that you couldn't make good beer without the discussed advanced knowledge, but having tighter control and consistency in your methodology will make it easier to make good/great beer with greater frequency.

Here we're getting into new territory. If I missed where people were claiming that shelling out money for a bunch of equipment was necessary to make good beer, then I apologize. Personally, I believe that knowledge has a greater impact on quality, than expensive equipment...which is what I was discussing.

I agree, but hopefully we can discuss different viewpoints freely and civilly, as I believe we were able to.

 

Yeah, I agree with most of what you said there, and we may have just been two ships passing in the night on some of those "baseline" points you were noting.

Also, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth re: equipment. I was only including that to be part of the discussion re: the level of sophistication needed to brew good beer. And I do agree that to be good at brewing, like any hobby, some time educating yourself and practicing must be expended.

Thanks again.

 

FWIW, I consider myself as leaning pretty far to the scientific understanding side of the spectrum. But I am willing to bet that some folks here would find some of my equipment laughable. Don't get me wrong, I have dropped significant money on equipment, but before I buy something, I ask myself whether or not it will help improve the beer, or at least make some task much easier. So I have a pretty significant investment in temperature control, for example, but I don't use a brewstand/tiered setup, don't use pumps to move stuff around (expect for ice water for chilling), and have a pretty basic Coleman XTreme-based mash tun. If anything, I'd say that whatever technical understanding I have has influenced me not to invest in some things I would otherwise love to have from a bling perspective. Glycol jacketed conicals? Oh hell yeah! I drool every time I see one. But I can control temps just as well (and cheaper) through other means.

 

I don't think my original statement is off. Add what @jbakajust1 added earlier with his revision to my statement,
"the probability of making consistently reproducible exceptional beers is higher for those brewers that dive into the details of brewing theory".

 

"You can eventually make a decent beer brewing blindly, but you will need to modify the same recipe many times before coming up with something good/great."

OK, so you are saying that only blind brewers adjust recipes many times before trusting their taste buds?

 

Do you mean physically blind brewers, or my example?

If it's the latter, then the answer is obviously "no." The point was that trial-and-error brewing would require far more attempts than brewing with some idea of the chemistry and process at work. Not to mention that knowing what your adjustments are going to achieve, before making them, would be vastly more efficient.

 

More efficient...cyborg ejaculation...gaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Cheers

"some idea"...I love it!

 

Please nobody tell my wife that I do not need a brewing tier and glycol-chilled conicals.