Can you buy beer as good as your homebrew?

[adrianmole72]

Jaipur is vastly overrated, IMHO....

 

[lukehgriffiths]

Yes... but living in Derby we have decent ale pubs coming out of our ears. Also locally we have Derby Brewing Co, Deventio, Dancing Duck, Shardlow Brewery and slightly further Blue Monkey and Castle Rock.
To be fair what I have produced stands up among beers available to buy but some available brews are just amazing take Derby Brewing Co Dashingly Dark at the brewery tour the head brewer pointed out that he used 12 different malts to perfect it let alone hops and I can't afford to buy such a range let alone spare the time to experiment the flavours etc.

Jaipur is nice but a lot of folk rate it for strength Lord Marples by same brewery is nicer IMO

 

[adrianmole72]

Yes... but living in Derby we have decent ale pubs coming out of our ears. Also locally we have Derby Brewing Co, Deventio, Dancing Duck, Shardlow Brewery and slightly further Blue Monkey and Castle Rock.

The pale ale I made with Marynka hops is bloody lovely...

+1 to that - was in Derby last week; found yet another great pub; Five Lamps - 14 beers on !!

 

[RobWalker]

Jaipur is vastly overrated, IMHO....

pffft - cracking beer! could drink it all day if it wasn't so strong :drink:

 

[adrianmole72]

In YOUR opinion

Vive le difference..

 

[boozy_shoes]

I prefer Kipling to Jaipur from Thornbridge, it seems to have a more tropical fruit hop flavour to it. St Petersburg is my favourite Thornbridge beer though.

I find I can make British style ales that can match or beat most commercial examples with the notable exceptions of Pictish, Marble, Thornbridge and Pot Belly Breweries but mine always taste like an immitation when it comes to most of the craft US, German wheat and Belgian beers.

 

[alanywiseman.]

I have only brewed one beer that I think could stand up against the beer I buy. I only brew kits at the moment (should be moving to extract within the next month :party: ). I really hope that as I progress to AG brewing that the beer improves causes I do not think the kits are as good as everyone claims they are with a few exceptions.

 

[Brewbob]

So far yes, but I'm only starting out, though I have to say I prefer my beer to the usual bottled ales, Marston's, Speckled Hen, Hobgoblin, Greene King etc, over carbed and all samey. I'm not impressed with the range from the (not-so) supermarkets, Morrisons used to do a good deal with Summer Lightning 4 for £5.50, but they don't even do Summer Lightning anymore. I've had a few of Sainsbury's IPA, though it doesn't touch Jaipur.

But the pub I worked in Bath had/still has Summer Lightning, RCA Pitchfork, RCA Santa Fe (which we'd keep for an extra 2-3 months to dry out a bit), Danish Dynamite, Bath Ales, Abbey Ales, Otter, plus regular guests, such as Roaring Meg, Froach. Now, every now and then we'd get something special from the Blue Anchor in Helston, Cornwall - Spingo, you know when you've been Spingo'd!! A firkin would just about last the night when word got round it was in town. Doesn't often travel far out of Cornwall, but I have tried it in bottles from a specialist bottle shop in Plymouth

 

[Plumber79]

Yes... but living in Derby we have decent ale pubs coming out of our ears. Also locally we have Derby Brewing Co, Deventio, Dancing Duck, Shardlow Brewery and slightly further Blue Monkey and Castle Rock.

Derbyshire does seem to be a haven for brewers and they produce some real quality ales too. I live just outside mansfield and the real ale shop in the town centre (hops in a bottle) has a great stock of the majority of them. Will be paying a visit to the old poets corner at Ashover in couple of weeks to sample some of the Ashover brewery ales, heard some really good things about their beer.

 

[RobWalker]

So far yes, but I'm only starting out, though I have to say I prefer my beer to the usual bottled ales, Marston's, Speckled Hen, Hobgoblin, Greene King etc, over carbed and all samey. I'm not impressed with the range from the (not-so) supermarkets, Morrisons used to do a good deal with Summer Lightning 4 for £5.50, but they don't even do Summer Lightning anymore. I've had a few of Sainsbury's IPA, though it doesn't touch Jaipur.

But the pub I worked in Bath had/still has Summer Lightning, RCA Pitchfork, RCA Santa Fe (which we'd keep for an extra 2-3 months to dry out a bit), Danish Dynamite, Bath Ales, Abbey Ales, Otter, plus regular guests, such as Roaring Meg, Froach. Now, every now and then we'd get something special from the Blue Anchor in Helston, Cornwall - Spingo, you know when you've been Spingo'd!! A firkin would just about last the night when word got round it was in town. Doesn't often travel far out of Cornwall, but I have tried it in bottles from a specialist bottle shop in Plymouth

Speaking of supermarket IPA's, I had the Tesco Simply IPA the other day. very boring, about the same as Greene King Gold? is it. bleh. I'll stick with oakham citra and sierra nevada...

 

[mrbisback]

Spingo, now thats a beer and a half, bottled is bloody awful mind.A
day spent at The Blue Anchor is a day forgotton

 

[RokDok]

Yes you can.

But the vast majority of beers you buy in bottle are pasteurised, yeast is killed off and then they are gassed up- masses of the flavour is lost and it would have to be an amazingly stunning beer to survive that process.

There are lots of small breweries producing live beer in bottles and that would be a bit harder to compete with.

Compared with cask beer in pubs there have been a few mentioned but I would say that it is a minority that are better than home brew .

For stouts there is no contest, there are very few commercial stouts that have not been through the industrial process outlined above and it would be hard not to make a stout that would be superior to any commercial offering

Cheers

RD

 

[Hirsty]

Yes you can buy beer as good as a homebrew. After all, how many professional brewers started out as homebrewers? I can think of several.

 

[Duxuk]

There seems to have been an interesting shift in opinions on this thread. Initially the AG/extract brewers were favouring the homebrew, as do I. But later posters are favouring the professionals.
I had my standards in bottled beers from the commercial sector, which I aspired to. Now even my very sceptical wife now believes I'm bettering them. That's good enough for me. :

 

[mattrickl06]

I would say living in the UK that mainly HB is better, however I think if I lived in Belgium / Germany / France then I would be struggling to compete with the Schneider-Weiss's, Duvels, Orvals, Paulaners etc.

But compared to Tetleys, Greene King and Marstons - i think i do pretty well :

 

[BarnsleyBrewer]

If it's in bottles NO, but I like Black Sheep ale and bombardier when it's a fresh cask on hand pull.. :thumb:

 

[fbsf]

It sort of depends what style for me.

I don't live near enough a decent pub to have hand-pulled ale - I won't drink anything when driving - so I tend to base my comparisons on bottled.

Traditional pale ales, ruby ales, no. There is just so much more flavour in my brews. In fact, I'm salivating at the thought of my Ruby Pearl. Hmmm...beer.... :party:

Uber-hoppy IPAs (a la Brewdog etc), yes. I always end up with a cloudy brew when I dry hop the **** out of it, and don't have access to the filtering and carbonating process they do - it wouldn't be worth investing in it on a 25L scale. So if I need a mental hop hit, I'll get a couple of bottles of BD or SNPA in from a supermarket at £2 a go which normally satisfies the craving.

Lager? Well, I'm not a huge lager head, but the Coopers APA did turn out to be quite lager-like. I'm hopefully getting the kit to turn my garage fridge into a brewfridge for my birthday later this month, so might have a go at a proper lager to see what it turns out like.

 

[anthonyUK]

I went on the local CAMRA walkabout in our town recently and was dismayed at just how bad most of the pub ales are.
If not kept well they all just taste the same and watered down so in this respect even my kit made brews are significantly better.
There are a few decent pubs though and I cannot match the best these have to offer....yet e.g. Triple fff, Bowmans, Ballards and Andwells but my first two BIAB are conditioning so we'll see.
On the bottled front I would be happy to match something like Proper Job or Summer Lightning.

 

[Rukula]

I'm still trying to brew a stout that beats The Nøgne Ø Imperial Stout. God damn thats a great pint...

 

[critch]

you'd be suprised if you knew how much the same batch of comercial beer can vary from pub to pub, i see it all the time, some pubs think line cleaning and adequate stilaging/ venting dosent apply to them! bottling is hard, inadequate carbonation, the beer spoils quickly, too much and the co2 prickle changes the taste, filtering fecks beer, thats why brewdog and thornbridge will use centrifuges. im proud of my bottled conditioned beers, but i know they taste different to the cask beer from the same batch.......