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Here you are, happy brewing!

Darn, they still don't have a recipe for hot pepper beer. Nor for chocolate, Framboise, or other fruit beers. Neither does the Open Source Beer Project. But at least my supplier Midwest Homebrewing & Winemaking Supplies has forums where brewers share recipes. And there's Google.

Falcon

Beer is doable, but not all that easy to make at home.

Beer sure is easy to make at home. I started making beer, at home, more than 20 years ago.

You have to build at least a minimal apparatus

The minimal equipment needed to brew beer cost about $60 for a compleat kit. You can assemble the equipment for less though.

you have to employ some fairly stringent (for a home environment) anti-contamination protocols.

Again not really. To sterilize the equipment and bottles wash them with a solution of sanitizer like sodium methabiluphite. Unless it's dirty most any home kitchen should be clean enough to make beer.

It takes time, and the end result usually ends up tasting a little better than horse piss.

With the exception of my first batch every batch of brew I made people told me it was good. Those who tried that batch didn't want to try anymore, but did and liked it. Many wanted me to show them how they could make beer themselves. If a brew tastes bad it's usually because the equipment was not properly sanitized, the mash was mishandled, or it was not properly transfered from the primary fermentation vessel to the second or from the second to the bottles. One wild strain of yeast can turn a batch bad.

It's fun (and mine quit tasting like horse piss after a few tries)

It probably got better because you got better with sterilizing and bottling.

but not something that will ever be common

That's how beer and wine used to be made. There weren't any centralized brewing facilities, instead there were literally hundreds, thousands, of what we call today microbreweries. When I was in Germany in the early '80s each city, town, and village had it's own breweries. Sure there were brand name beers but there were also a number of local brews.

Food is food. Apart from subsidies, the growth of food is not very regulated

Ah, if you want to cut government spending cut farm subsidies. I don't know what they are this year but last year the US congress passed a farming bill with nearly $300 million in farm subsidies. Passed it by a veto proof margin.

There are a number of reasons why cannabis was illegalized - and most of the common ones you hear are actually true to one extent or another, but none stand out much on their own. Taxation, immigrant paranoia, easy enforcement results, propaganda, and actual honest public health issues.

There were no health issues when hemp was made illegal. Dr. James Woodward testified before congress for the AMA saying "there is no evidence that marijuana is a dangerous drug". Drug warriors promptly ridiculed him and the AMA.

Falcon

Beer is doable, but not all that easy to make at home.

Beer sure is easy to make at home. I started making beer, at home, more than 20 years ago.

You have to build at least a minimal apparatus

The minimal equipment needed to brew beer cost about $60 for a compleat kit. You can assemble the equipment for less though.

you have to employ some fairly stringent (for a home environment) anti-contamination protocols.

Again not really. To sterilize the equipment and bottles wash them with a solution of sanitizer like sodium methabiluphite. Unless it's dirty most any home kitchen should be clean enough to make beer.

It takes time, and the end result usually ends up tasting a little better than horse piss.

With the exception of my first batch every batch of brew I made people told me it was good. Those who tried that batch didn't want to try anymore, but did and liked it. Many wanted me to show them how they could make beer themselves. If a brew tastes bad it's usually because the equipment was not properly sanitized, the mash was mishandled, or it was not properly transfered from the primary fermentation vessel to the second or from the second to the bottles. One wild strain of yeast can turn a batch bad.

It's fun (and mine quit tasting like horse piss after a few tries)

It probably got better because you got better with sterilizing and bottling.

but not something that will ever be common

That's how beer and wine used to be made. There weren't any centralized brewing facilities, instead there were literally hundreds, thousands, of what we call today microbreweries. When I was in Germany in the early '80s each city, town, and village had it's own breweries. Sure there were brand name beers but there were also a number of local brews.

Food is food. Apart from subsidies, the growth of food is not very regulated

Ah, if you want to cut government spending cut farm subsidies. I don't know what they are this year but last year the US congress passed a farming bill with nearly $300 million in farm subsidies. Passed it by a veto proof margin.

There are a number of reasons why cannabis was illegalized - and most of the common ones you hear are actually true to one extent or another, but none stand out much on their own. Taxation, immigrant paranoia, easy enforcement results, propaganda, and actual honest public health issues.

There were no health issues when hemp was made illegal. Dr. James Woodward testified before congress for the AMA saying "there is no evidence that marijuana is a dangerous drug". Drug warriors promptly ridiculed him and the AMA.

Falcon

hops for a single brew cost about $8

I can buy hops as low as US$2. Or as much as $40.

add in about $4 for CO2 and gas

Why in the world does anyone who homebrews need to pay for CO2? Fermentation creates the CO2 for you. Yeast takes it's food, broken down starches and sugars, consumes it and makes alcohol and CO2.

there is an initial outlay, lets be generous and say you got a keg system with 2 kegs a filter CO2 regulator and all the bits and pieces.

I can buy a basic kit for starting brewing for $60 and it last for years. My "new" kit, which includes a glass carboy as a second fermenter, is more than 10 years old. As for kegs, I bottle which I can get for $2 a bottle, I can buy a keg for $30. Of course the kegging eq costs more.

Falcon

hops for a single brew cost about $8

I can buy hops as low as US$2. Or as much as $40.

add in about $4 for CO2 and gas

Why in the world does anyone who homebrews need to pay for CO2? Fermentation creates the CO2 for you. Yeast takes it's food, broken down starches and sugars, consumes it and makes alcohol and CO2.

there is an initial outlay, lets be generous and say you got a keg system with 2 kegs a filter CO2 regulator and all the bits and pieces.

I can buy a basic kit for starting brewing for $60 and it last for years. My "new" kit, which includes a glass carboy as a second fermenter, is more than 10 years old. As for kegs, I bottle which I can get for $2 a bottle, I can buy a keg for $30. Of course the kegging eq costs more.

Falcon

hops for a single brew cost about $8

I can buy hops as low as US$2. Or as much as $40.

add in about $4 for CO2 and gas

Why in the world does anyone who homebrews need to pay for CO2? Fermentation creates the CO2 for you. Yeast takes it's food, broken down starches and sugars, consumes it and makes alcohol and CO2.

there is an initial outlay, lets be generous and say you got a keg system with 2 kegs a filter CO2 regulator and all the bits and pieces.

I can buy a basic kit for starting brewing for $60 and it last for years. My "new" kit, which includes a glass carboy as a second fermenter, is more than 10 years old. As for kegs, I bottle which I can get for $2 a bottle, I can buy a keg for $30. Of course the kegging eq costs more.

Falcon

hops for a single brew cost about $8

I can buy hops as low as US$2. Or as much as $40.

add in about $4 for CO2 and gas

Why in the world does anyone who homebrews need to pay for CO2? Fermentation creates the CO2 for you. Yeast takes it's food, broken down starches and sugars, consumes it and makes alcohol and CO2.

there is an initial outlay, lets be generous and say you got a keg system with 2 kegs a filter CO2 regulator and all the bits and pieces.

I can buy a basic kit for starting brewing for $60 and it last for years. My "new" kit, which includes a glass carboy as a second fermenter, is more than 10 years old. As for kegs, I bottle which I can get for $2 a bottle, I can buy a keg for $30. Of course the kegging eq costs more.

Falcon

1. In a large stainless steel pot, boil X gallons of water (3 is good) and 6.6 pounds of malt extract (two 3.3-pound cans, I believe I used amber but don't have my brewing notes with me at the office today) along with a muslin sack of cracked specialty malts of barley, in this case some "chocolate" malt and some 50L crystal malt, plus the boiling hops for bitterness
2. In the last 5 minutes of the boil, add finishing hops for aroma and flavor
3. Put a few gallons (5 - X) of water into a 5-gallon glass carboy, and add the boiled "wort"; add cool water to fill carboy to not far below the base of its neck
4. Allow to cool below 80F, preferably down to 74F
5. Pitch the yeast, which you may want to have cultured to get more active yeast cells into your beer right away
6. Affix a hose to the top of the carboy, with its submerged in a small pail of water (a sanitizer solution is better; see Star-San product)
7. After a few days, the blow-off hose will be done doing its job of allowing crud from the top of your beer to blow off during the kraeusening phase of the yeast's job, so you can replace it with a fermentation lock
8. After a couple weeks total fermentation time at room temperature, your beer will be done; three days in a row of the same hydrometer reading will confirm this
9. Boil a pint of water and 1-1/2 cup of dried malt extract (or 3/4 cup corn sugar if you don't want as firm of a head on your beer) for a few minutes, put it in the bottom of your sanitized plastic bottling bucket with its spigot closed, siphon all the beer out of the carboy into the bucket, leaving the yeast sediment on the bottom of the carboy, and use a bottle filler (with a valve that opens only when you press it against the bottom of a bottle) to fill your bottles, leaving about an inch of air space and capping them with caps that you've boiled in water to sterilize them
10. Wait 1-2 weeks for bottle conditioning, including carbonation, to finish
11. Chill, pour into a glass, leaving the yeast sediment in the bottle, and enjoy

Note that I put my finishing sugar into the whole batch instead of into each bottle. This ensures consistency from bottle to bottle and reduces the number of opportunities to introduce the beer to an unsanitary environment.

It's a simple process and you can get all the equipment you need for $80 and all the ingredients for a 5-gallon batch of beer for less than the cost of buying 5 gallons of Bud Light. The results will usually be good and there is truly no end to the tweaking you can engage in to make your beer. Pretty much everyo

Brewing software? Other than a logbook or recipies what brewing software? That is if you're not talking about brewing Java but are talking about Homebrew beer, mead, and wine.

So you'd rather people set up radio stations on police/ambulance/coast guard frequencies or the frequencies of their rivals and created a system whereby its impossible to listen to any single station over distances over 5 miles ?

There's plenty of radio spectrum available without using emergency frequencies. I don't recall the frequencies for am or fm radio but radio stations can withstand frequencies a lot closer than they are now without interference. The standards used now are based on technology available in 1934 when the Communications Act of 1934 was signed which replaced the Federal Radio Commission. Today's much better tech means there can be more stations in the same frequency spectrum, however the mass media doesn't want more competition, they don't like the freemarket.

Or you'd enjoy eating in restaurants where to save costs the owners didn't give a damn about any pesky food hygiene issues and killed you with food poisioning ?

One, restaurants depend on returning customers, if they serve bad food people won't eat there. And two someone who becomes ill because of something they ate at a restaurant they can sue the owner. A restaurantier can easily be driven from business. Now I'm not saying there shouldn't be any regulations of restaurants, there should be some health regs, however I also mentioned bars. Maybe you missed it. But bars require a license to sale alcohol, the only reason to require one is to control the distribution of alcoloholic drinks. At the same tyme what most people don't know is that a person can legally make alcohol, up to 100 gallons a year of beer and/or wine and if someone wanted to they can distill it as well. Though it's been some years, I have made both beer and wine myself, and I plan on getting back into making then again. I just need to make space to setup my equipment. Now I'll probably have to replace some of it but there's homwbrew shop near me, Midwest Homebrewing and Wine making supplies. In some circles homebrew is getting popular again and brewpubs, where beer is made onsite, are booming.

The so called barrier of entry you're referring to is, practically speaking, no more a barrier to entry than being required to pony up an equivalent amount of cash to start a vending route or to beer making equipment

Sorry, er actually not, neither beer making nor the equipment to make beer, is expensive. Not far from where I live, if I didn't already have one, I can get a Brewing Intermediate Kit for $100, a starter kit for $73, or a basic kit for $55. Throw in another $40 and I can get a beer kit to make 5 gallons of BOHEMIAN DARK LAGER. And I don't need a license!!! With the same equipment I can make some wine or saki, which was fun making, now I'd like to try making some uzo (sic), Greek liquor/wine.

The so called barrier of entry you're referring to is, practically speaking, no more a barrier to entry than being required to pony up an equivalent amount of cash to start a vending route or to beer making equipment

Sorry, er actually not, neither beer making nor the equipment to make beer, is expensive. Not far from where I live, if I didn't already have one, I can get a Brewing Intermediate Kit for $100, a starter kit for $73, or a basic kit for $55. Throw in another $40 and I can get a beer kit to make 5 gallons of BOHEMIAN DARK LAGER. And I don't need a license!!! With the same equipment I can make some wine or saki, which was fun making, now I'd like to try making some uzo (sic), Greek liquor/wine.

I guess it's going to be a long weekend of explaing WTF is up with the pinapples slices in my hefeweizen.

If you brew maybe you can do what I think I'll try, adding some pinapple to your mash. I like how the Dutch brew using different fruits like strawberries and such and have wanted to try it myself. Now I've got a good reason to try pineapple.

Heading off to the Brew Shop