Homebrewer Survey

[Beer-lord]

I find some of this interesting but not for any particular reason. 2 things stood out to me though they really mean nothing and that was the income and religion graphs. But when you look at things like how many keg, then I wonder a bit about this survey. I remember taking it but don't remember when.
Just for reading fun, here it is:
http://brulosophy.com/2017/08/24/2017-g ... y-results/

[BlackDuck]

Interesting reading. Thanks for posting it.

[MadBrewer]

I found intersting was the income rates and ethnicity. I took the survey but I swear I dont remember seeing some of the more detailed questions.

[BlackDuck]

Yea...the income rate was surprising. Unless people answered that as a combined income. Which might make more sense since 79% of respondents were married.

[ScrewyBrewer]

So homebrewing is still pretty much a male dominated obsession, not too surprising. Our MCHA membership consists of 1 women per 40 members.

[Dawg LB Steve]

I kind of remember taking it too, I do recall I mentioned beerborg.com as my go to forum!!!! How many had started as the extract/partial boil then the next question was the majority All Grain as the type of brewing they are currently doing.

[LouieMacGoo]

I found this survey to be amusing. I had to laugh at the question about facial hair where it said (Men only)!!! LOL I've know some woman that have considerable facial hair and were proud of it.

The other thing I found interesting was that nearly 1/3 of "All Grain" respondents said the use BIAB. More than any other method of all grain brewing.

Lastly, regarding online communities about 18% is other which means BeerBorg right? Maybe we can pack the ballot box for next year and influence the survey. Resistance is futile you will join the BeerBorg!

[Beer-lord]

I found the last graph funny and surprising at the same time.

[berryman]

I fall into a lot of them averages but not most, I think it is a close representation of home brewers.

[mashani]

So one thing I noticed, is that although lots of folks admitted they used extract at one point, the survey says 94.1% of the respondents now brew exclusively AG.

Now I know there are plenty of people who brew exclusively AG if they can (hell I would if I could, but that's not my reality right now), but at that proportion, what this really tells me is that extract brewers are a lot less likely to be willing to fill out a survey like this. Probably for the same reasons they are less likely to participate in some of the forums out there (intimidation, fear of the flamer/elitist dude because there always is one, etc.). But really not that there are that few people who "still" use extract sometimes.

Otherwise I'd never be able to find fresh extract. It would all be old and stale canned shit. And there wouldn't be as wide a variety of boxed extract + grain kits and types of extract available, because they couldn't turn around enough of them to make it worthwhile (IE LD Carlson kits you can find at many LHBS). My closest LHBS has 50 or more of those things on the shelf at any given time. They couldn't do that if they didn't turn them around.

Also, I'd like to think that there are actually more women homebrewers out there too then represented on that survey. After all women were many of the old world homebrewers, IE for sure we know that Viking women and Elizabethan women made many of the house ales, etc.

I think there are a good number of people who just brew and drink it and share it with friends, and don't go out onto the interwebs and participate in forums for various reasons.

I also know there are a vastly huger number of Asia/Pacific homebrewers out there (in the real world) then that survey suggests. There are lots of people who brew various things in rural areas in Asia. In India the village brew huts are set out away from the village proper because sometimes the smell attracts elephants and they smash the crap out of the brewery trying to get at it. I've been to some of those places. But these people don't go around posting on internet forums, they don't have time or technology to bother with it, they just make beer and/or other alcoholic things. Brewers might make up a small portion of the population in some places there, but they exist, and a small proportion of billions of people is still a hella lot of people.

[Beer-lord]

I can only say that Brulosophy is just now getting well known so the sample of likely brewers who took this survey if probably limited. I bet if they took this survey again next year, after having a year of podcasts under their belt and aligning with a few other, well known homebrew affiliations recently, it would be a bigger and better sampling of the homebrew population.

[BlackDuck]

Great points from both of you Mashani and Beer-lord. Especially this from Mashani

what this really tells me is that extract brewers are a lot less likely to be willing to fill out a survey like this

. There is so much truth to this. In addition, extract brewers may not even care about the hobby enough to even know there was a survey like this, or that Brulosophy even existed, or that there are forums out there that discuss home brewing. Some of these extract brewers just want to make beer, and that's it.

When looking at the numbers from the survey, it's important to keep one phrase in mind, which is, "the number of respondents". This does not necessarily relate to the entire population of home brewers. It only relates to those that responded to the survey. He only had 2,570 respondents. To put that in perspective, there are over 20,000 members on the Mr Beer Forum. I know, not all of them are active, but still, his sample was only 12% of the Mr Beer Forum. There are over 224,000 members on HomeBrewTalk. My point is, his sample is very small, and may not equal accurate information of the home brewer population as a whole.

[berryman]

Ok I just had an Idea. Why don't we do a Survey here on the borg with just about the same questions and see what results we could come up with. Would have to let it run for a while because right now posting is slow in the summer months. I know we can take poles here but not sure of the workings for a survey. Who is the best writer and who is the best number cruncher on here? Need to get them involved, it would be a fun game.

[LouieMacGoo]

Ok I just had an Idea. Why don't we do a Survey here on the borg with just about the same questions and see what results we could come up with. Would have to let it run for a while because right now posting is slow in the summer months. I know we can take poles here but not sure of the workings for a survey. Who is the best writer and who is the best number cruncher on here? Need to get them involved, it would be a fun game.

I've actually thought about doing this but didn't know exactly what question to ask but If I use this survey as a model I can actually do this fairly easy using Google Docs Survey function.