For me, it was that, at the time, pretty much any beer I wanted was available, and I could afford to spend the money on the rarer things. Had better things to do on days off. I was making as much cider as beer the last couple of years.
As I've said before, I was an inaugural member of the Lawrence Brewers Guild in 1995 because I couldn't afford to buy the expensive imports I wanted to drink as well as the higher-alcohol, adjunct-loaded styles that simply weren't around at the time. Fast forward a decade into the mid 2000s and not only did I have the finances to afford any imports I wanted, the craft/micro brewery explosion had gotten to the point that I could (and still can) walk into a store and identify so many of my old homebrew recipes (or a close approximation) that back in 2005-6 when I gave up brewing due to the time, cost and availability of similar brews, it just wasn't worth the time & cost to homebrew something I could easily afford in the stores. Now add onto all that the storage space of all the equipment, the routine sanitization hassles, the fact that you didn't know until weeks after all the effort whether or not you'd brewed a good beer or drain cleaner, etc., & it just didn't pencil out, cost-wise or effort-wise. Let alone the fact that as I said, not only could I afford to buy anything I wanted in the stores but so many new craft/micro breweries were putting out the extreme, intense styles & varieties that got me into homebrewing in the first place.
