I have a hard time with this month's topic for The Session. Not because I have no experience with home brewing but because I assume everyone involved with beer has had a hand in it. It's like I assume everyone who went to college went to high school first.

That being said, I am a bad brewer. I don't care about most anything when I brew except that the ingredients have to be good and every thing has to be insanely sterile. Other than that, I don't give a rat's ass about hitting the expected gravity, IBUs or BLTs. I like a surprise. Well, I like a good surprise. Like that one cask I made that was blessed by the angels and drained in one sitting.

But it's rarely that good. I have one last bottle of anise pale ale from a batch that really sucked. And, for me, that is the real glory about home brewing. It is where I expect the future pro brewers who earn our hard currency to have made their mistakes. It is error's playground. It is where you dump the stuff out because you never should have made it, let alone served it to guests.

Which is why when I find a brewery with lingering infections, with dulling water composition, with a habit of taking the easy path of massive hopping or adding more dark malts to cover up stuff, well, that is the brewery I figure is run by the guy whose pals didn't have the heart to tell him how his home brew sucked. I am not interested in paying for craft brewers' experiments even if they are called "extreme" or the hot new trend from Italy. Work that stuff out on your own time.

So, back to the question, all craft beer should be inspired by home brew in that it should create the bench made for what is appropriate to sell. If your pal wouldn't drink it for free, why do you think I should pay for it?