Hi Alexia.
Further to my comments on the forum (it's easier to e-mail, it looks like I'm working rather than trawling forums...)
I can also only speak for beer brewing and not wines or ciders.
There's two separate sects within homebrewing. There's homebrewing, which is making beer for the sake of it, usually as cheap as possible using kits and tins of gloop. A lot of people are happy with this as it makes reasonably good beer. Most of us started doing this. Not necessarily just to make beer on the cheap though. Unfortunately it also had a bit of a bad name due to ingredients of dubious quality and downright awful practices from the 1970s and 1980s. Ingredients these days are pretty much spot on.
The other sect is what's known as craftbrewing. Designing your own beers from raw ingredients. The ability to reproduce any beer style in the world. Most people who take this form of brewing are passionate about beer and brewing. Half the time, not all the beer gets drunk as it's more about the experimenting than the drinking. We're not all a bunch of pissheads who like to get off our rockers everynight!
The recession has definately brought a lot of people into brewing. As I said on the forum, for some people it's a means to make beer cheaply - as little as 16p a pint compared to £3 in the pub. There's usually a small minority of people who just want to make loopy juice, but they're usually discouraged from this because the ways of making strong beer without putting more money, time and effort into it result in a rather disgusting tasting brew. The majority of people just want to be able to have a drink now and then without having to take out a second morgage to go to the pub, or drink the cheap fizzy tasteless offerings from the multinational breweries on offer at the supermarket. A lot of people do get the bug and progress onto more advanced methods of brewing and become extremely passionate about the whole thing.
There's also a lot of people who used to dabble in brewing 20, 30 years ago returning to the fold, mainly for the same reasons.
Hope this helps.
As a bit of background; I started brewing from kits as a student 11 years ago so I could have some cheap booze. As my tastes changed and my love of beer increased, I migrated onto doing it from scratch with raw ingredients and proper processes and I'm now part of a commercial microbrewery in North Wales. You might say that I just love brewing.
You might want to contact the Craft Brewer's Association (
http://www.craftbrewing.org.uk for more information.
