Why Blog?

So as I sit here on my flight to Atlanta (Cheers Monday Night Brewing!) I have been pondering the whole purpose of this blog. Why do we do it? This has come up in conversation amongst the brewing staff (all two of us, staff meeting are always hectic). My first thought was that I blog because I want to share what we are doing with everyone else. But let’s face it, for all the writing that goes up on this blog there are not millions of fans flocking to the site. I think then our purpose is primarily entertainment of sorts with a bit of education thrown into the mix.

Most people that would read this blog can be divided into two groups. One group is made up of the people that are just starting to get into homebrewing themselves and they are looking for more information on how it’s done. This is what I did and I imagine it’s what many people do. The internet is such a wonderful resource, making the details of homebrewing much more accessible to everyone. Case in point, we got a hit on the blog from someone who was searching Google using the terms “brew kettle” and “garbage can.” Now I don’t know if this is good or bad but apparently Google thinks highly of us when you search for homebrewing and garbage…. Seriously. I think it’s because I described garbage in the kitchen in one post. I certainly don’t think our beer is garbage, with the exception of the raspberry wheat. Now to you, the intrepid up and coming homebrewer out there trying to turn a garbage can into a brew kettle let me say this, don’t. Please. That’s just gross. Sure you may buy it new (thus hopefully relatively clean) and you are saving money on a better brew pot but seriously, why? Invest a little more money in some quality and in the long term it pays off. I would suggest the turkey fryer readily available from Home Depot.

The second group of people reading this I see as fellow brewers. I read several other blogs myself. It’s a great way to learn more about techniques other brewers are using but learning aside I think it’s just fun. I enjoy reading about the trials and tribulations of the Monday Night Brewers and Beaux’s. I don’t really know how I could put it any better.

That first group of people, the learners, raises another interesting point. Recipes. When we were first starting out brewing with our almost exclusively extract based brew how did we find a recipe? On the web of course. There are many, many sites out there with recipes for all different styles of beers. As it was those recipes posted online that got us our start should we in turn post our recipes? On the one hand it is nice to call a brew your own, a unique beer that only you know how to make. I would call this the “real brewery” perspective in the sense that it is the actual breweries that consider their recipes to be proprietary. On the other hand without the freely available information online we would have had a much more difficult time learning the process of brewing and eventually coming to a point where we could formulate our own recipes. This spirit of sharing information is true of most hobbyists and homebrewers are no exception. So what should we do?

On this question B brewer raised another good point. Although it would be nice to share our brew recipes with others, what happens when someone takes a recipe that we have not really perfected (I bring you back to the train wreck of a disaster that is known as the Midnight Brewing Raspberry Wheat), brews it and then discovers they have wasted their time brewing something that tastes like a mix of under ripe raspberries and windex? Clearly that reader would never come back to us for information or advice.

So I am back where I started on this question. Post recipes or not? We’ll decide in the next staff meeting.

Christmas is coming, have you gotten dad a gift yet? Perhaps you should consider an intro homebrewing kit! Cheers and don’t forget to drink a homebrew now as a reward for slogging through more of my meandering thoughts!