A word about 'home' brew.

In doing my homework in establishing this (ahem) brewery ........I stopped into a local brew supply shop to round out my thoughts. Turns out it used to be a brew supply shop, now they are a wine bottlery (If that's a word). The expertise is still in house, they know their beer making, but I was a little disappointed by the shift in focus .....I might be looking for a new brew shop to rub shoulders with fellow brew masters. Ha!


One thing that I found fascinating is that even at this, the smallest of scale - making beer at home (from a kit) is still very much influenced by the major beverage conglomerates.

We all know that there are a small handful of companies that own almost every commercial beer that you and I consume. Anheuser-Busch InBev, for example (AB InBev, for short, traded on the New York Stock Exchange NYSE: BUD) owns almost all of the beers peddled in most of my local pubs. If they don't, Molson Coors own the rest (I'm in Canada, eh). There are precious few beer options that don't boil up into a larger entity.

Same applies to home brew kits. Turns out that all of the brands of do it yourself suds at the brew shops, are all owned by Constellation Brands. My box of wort, branded www.TheBrewHouse.com opens up a page on the RJS Craft Wine Making website. The About Us link, clearly shows the corporate lineage.

Never heard of Constellation Brands (New York Stock Exchange NYSE:STZ)? They are the worlds largest wine company. If' you've enjoyed a glass of wine in the U.S., Canada, Australia, or the UK, a Constellation Brands shareholder says Cheers! Turns out they also dabble in beer.

Is this Good? I think so. Shareholders have standards, quality control, and experts. Apparently teams of world class brew masters work together to craft the bags of wort that are peddled in boxes to home brewers like me. It was produced in a "German style 3 vessel brew house" with the finest natural ingredients sourced from around the world ............Irish moss is listed as an ingredient in my Mexican Cerveza? Who knew.

Is this Bad? Probably. With out question small scale anything is better, to me. I'd rather buy and support local if given the choice. For this style of home brewing though, I don't think I have a small scale local option.

Looking back at my high level take on the 3 options for brewing beer at home, 2 of them boil up into the bellow of Wall Street. If you want to clear your conscience and not support these kinds of enterprises, you have to brew from scratch. We here at the bracieRSS will get to there, but not off the hop.

NOTE: If anyone knows of a small scale purveyor of malt or wort type products, please let me know.

Onward.