Home brewing and "the product"

Homebrewing – a hobby, tradition, a search for the new taste?
So what do we need to brew our own beverage? Actually not much, in a nutshell, some malt, hop, yeast, one big pot, a bucket, thermometer, big spoon, some sugar, empty bottles, few liters of water and few hours in the kitchen. I’ll skip some details, and we can divide the whole process into few stages

1. First, crushing the malt – we can use coffee grinder or just buy the malt that was already prepared.
2. then the mashing – combining a mix of malt with water,
3. heating the water in the pot to 62-64degrees for 30minutes, then increase the temperature to 70dg for another 30minutes, and the last stage is 78dg for 5minutes.
4. After mashing and boiling the liquid is called wort and the next step is to separate this liquid extract from the scraps of malt found in the mash – the filtering.
5. We add the hops to the wort and again boil it for 75minutes.
6. After boiling the wort is preferably cooled to a room temperature and the yeasts are added, and the fermentation begin.
7. After 2 weeks we transfer our beer to bottles, add cup of sugar and wait another 2 weeks for final fermentation.


So whole process takes about 4-5weeks. Looks difficult? Well it's not. And buying homebrew starters kit simplify the process even more.
But is it worth to spend few hours preparing the beer and then waiting few weeks to actually taste it? In the era of mass production, where everything is based on providing the same standardized product where the quantity not quality matters people tend to search for “premium” products. Whole foods, good quality meats and sausages, breed etc. As for beers, small breweries don’t have a huge selling power, it’s rather unlikely that you find something besides big beer consortiums in your local shop. Major problem is the channel of distribution. What’s quite new for Poland is a brewpub which is a pub or restaurant that brews beer on the premises. There are sixteen different brewpub in Poland, and 2 in Warsaw – Bierhalle (Arkadia and Nowy Świat) and BrowArmia. Have you ever been to one?
Once you taste beer from small, traditional brewery which use old recipes and methods for brewing(especially unpasteurized and unfiltered ones) you will realize there’s nothing special about e.g. Żywiec. My question is, do you seek better products? Is everything what we see on tv, magazines etc is really that good? Does small, more natural manufacturers need advertising? Maybe you bake your own bread?

photo courtesy of browamator.pl