If only I knew how to do the quoting thing as well as others...
I suppose there are instances where things I've said may have come across a way other than I intended. I'm not sure that's avoidable. Not to get to defensive, but I spend a considerable amount of time overtly telling people that my data is not the final word, that other methods are just as good, and to do what they enjoy most. I absolutely appreciate less time consuming processes, especially when it has no noticeable impact on the quality of my beer, but I will never insinuate that people who do it differently are wasting their time.
Because I don't care.
It doesn't bother me or hurt my feelings that people do things differently than me, I actually sort of like it. Makes things interesting.
All the talk about Brülosophy being a business got me. Not just because the whole "making money off of a hobby" argument is extremely banal, but because... well...
I'm not really profiting off of it. Allow me to briefly explain:
We (Brülosophy) are 4 dudes who publish 2 articles per week, 1 xBmt and 1 of something else, nearly all of which involve beer that we made... and paid for. At least half of all the beer we make is given away to participants. Occasionally, a shop will offer to sponsor an article by providing ingredients, I love these people, but 90% of the time we are covering the costs ourselves.
Now, I do generate some revenue off of affiliate links, nearly all of which goes to pay my guys a paltry fee for their contributions, website crap (don't even ask how much I just spent on server migration), and other non-luxury expenses.
The shirts, when I sell enough, are great, in fact it's the only source of revenue that allowed me to save enough to finally cover the aforementioned website changes.
I've amounted exactly $0.62 on ads so far today.
Care to guess how much time is invested in each article?
Brewing: 4-5 hours
Data collection: 2-5 hours usually over a few days
Writing/formatting/editing: 6-12 hours over 1-2 weeks
Responding to emails/comments/forum threads: 15+ hours per week
And what have we to show for it? I wake up at 4AM to drive 1.25 hours to a job I can barely tolerate and have to drive home from 10 hours later.
Call it what you want, but to me Brülosophy isn't a business, it's an almost self-sustaining hobby that I do because I love learning, I love homebrewing, and I love this community. If ever the opportunity arises for me to turn this into something more, you better believe I'll jump on it without hesitation! To those who view this negatively, I can't help but assume it's for reasons other than that which you openly state.
Cheers!