Brew Supply Survey

[Mike]

Hi all, Mike here.

With the demise of Bootlegger, we're back to where we were years ago in terms of brew supplies. So I'm thinking of starting a small supply business and checking out the feasibility of the thing. I'd be most grateful if you'd consider filling in a small survey I've put together to try and figure out how well a homebrew supply venture is likely to work. Only 10 questions, it shouldn't take more than 3 minutes of your time, and I'll owe you a beer at the next Eden Brew meeting.

Please find the few minutes to help me out so that I can do something to help you all out. You'll find my questionaire at https://form.myjotform.com/92822980530560 - please pass the link on to any other brewers or wannabe brewers you might know in the Eden region or part Eastward where brew-supply shops are nonexistent.

Thanks in adv.

[Mike]

Thanks to all of you who participated in my little Brew Supply Survey. I thought it might be the polite thing to do to let y'all know the results.

Nine of you filled in the survey, but I'm not going to include Tony's (Sedgefield Craft Brewery) in the results because he skews the stats wildly. (Q: How often do you brew? A: Every day!)

• Most of you are All Grain brewers (5/8) who brew once every few months (5/8). I take that to mean we're really a bunch of beer lightweights here in the S Cape, and we don't really like beer all that much, since we clearly don't brew often enough! ;) A couple of you use more than one brewing system. That's interesting -- I wonder why?
• We love our American beers (IPAs, I'd guess) best of all (5/8) and also our English Ales (3/8), and we make most use of Munich and Crystal malts to brew them (4/8 for both) along with the other 'usual suspects'. It seems that we're not big on Wheat Beers (2/8).
• Hop usage follows (naturally) the styles we favour: mostly American hops, followed by local SAB hops, then English varieties. Interesting to me because I tend to favour the European noble hops, so my own guesses would have been wildly inaccurate!
• For sanitising most people use Perasan -- I guess that's natural for us being in Dairy Country, making Perasan easy to source.
• Mostly (7/8) we bottle our beers rather than kegging. 

Most of you didn't figure out that you can type whatever you want into the "Other" fields for malts, hops and such -- those are not just check-boxes. :)

Assuming I got about a 15% response rate (a pure thumb-suck tbh), that puts the number of active Eden Brewers at around 60ish -- a number that tallies well with the mailing-list membership, but can it sustain a Brew Shop?

Thanks again for taking part -- I'll be contacting the participants individually over the next few days to find out what's on your shopping list so that I can prioritise it in ordering stock (so start thinking about ingredient wishlists for those Holiday Brews you're dreaming about.) So far I've been frantically busy contacting suppliers and trying to squeeze prices out of them. Some of them seem strangely reluctant to want money.

If you're feeling left out and would like to add your R2-worth, the survey is still open at https://form.myjotform.com/92822980530560.