The fast food nation thing cracked me up.  Motherfarkers make  beer, the beverage that teenagers with no training and 50$ in equipment from a junkyard have made themselves to get around age restrictions since longer than the country has existed.  Comparatively a sandwich is a goddamned work of the finest high art.

// This doesn't mean beer isn't great.  Sandwiches are great, too.  It's just that being cheap, fast, and the specifics of the manufacture not actually mattering much that  makes them great, so getting up your own ass about it is even dumber than getting up your own ass about most other things.

wildcardjack: Ehhh, if you're going to brew something to get you drunk, you don't fark around with beer. It's much easier to make moonshine. Triple distilled, then run it through a four foot pipe filled with activated carbon and you get Skyy for about $10 a gallon.

Then at some point you give in and just buy Svedka. Much easier.

No, it isn't.  Making beer is about on par with making the mash for moonshine, and the additional steps done wrong can outright kill you.

Much easier to up the quality by farking around with flavoring ingredients (like messing with the amount of hops) with a beer than with a hard liquor, too.

Again, not talking down beer, or saying that there aren't some beers that are better than others, but being quick, easy, and cheap is part of the fundamental appeal so diminishing returns on adding additional expense in order to up the quality hits hard and fast.  Likewise, the design isn't really a big deal, they're typically designed by your basic guess a recipe, see if it's good process.  Which, y'know, nothing wrong with that, but you can go from barely-have-an-idea to complete finished product in six months of experimenting with a few hundred bucks of equipment.  You can't even make a single batch of anything cask-aged in the time it takes to invent a perfectly workable beer verified by taste-test.

// The 'anybody can' aspect of making beer is sort of illustrated by the fact that anyone with passing interest  has.