Home Brewing - Brew Local - supporting your local home brew shop.

You’ve undoubtedly noticed I talk a lot about the Homebrewery in Ozark. It’s our local home brew shop, or LHBS to those of you who like acronyms. I think it’s important to not underestimate the importance of having a home brew supplier close to home.
I spend a gratuitous and sometimes even obscene amount of time online researching home brewing, craft beer, and beer in general. I know. I lead a hard life. In my research, I’ve come across a few interesting things that make me particularly grateful for having a very good local shop.
For starters, it’ll save you a fortune on shipping. While plenty of home brew shops online offer flat rate shipping, which is nice, you really can’t beat free. OK, so it costs you the gas to go and get it, but that sure beats paying to ship 15 pounds of ingredients across the country.
The ingredients are fresher. While this is depends a great deal on who runs your LHBS, I’ve been shopping at The Homebrewery since I brewed my first batch over 11 years ago, and I’ve never had a bad experience with their ingredients. Todd Frye, the owner, does an excellent job of rotating his stock and making sure they forecast demand as well as possible. The result is that you make better and more consistent beer. Get to know the practices of your local shop, and ask the owner how they maintain their inventory. If they do a good job, they’ll tell you all about how they manage it. If they refuse to tell you anything about it, you might be careful.
It’s an instant knowledge base. Call, email, or visit, and they can give you advice. Not all employees of the homebrew shop are expert brewers, but The Homebrewery crew will give you sound advice or honestly tell you if they’re not sure. I can’t tell you how important this is. I’ve heard horror stories of people asking their LHBS a question and getting tragically misinformed answers. If you aren’t sure of the reliability of the answers you are getting, try asking someone else there, or check out some online resources, like homebrewtalk.com.
It saves you an incredible amount of time. Here is that shipping again. No matter how fast you can get it from that online store, you can get it faster from your local shop. If you call your order in ahead of time and go pick it up? Even faster. This is great for those days you catch yourself thinking, “What am I going to do today?”
It’s greener. In order for that online order to get to you, it has first been shipped from the distributor to the retailer. Then it goes from them to you. This adds a lot of miles in that truck.
You’ll meet fellow brewers. This is very important. For a long time, I tried to operate in a kind of brewing bubble, where I did my own research and learned as much as I could from the web and books. This is exceptionally useful, but having others to bounce your ideas off of in person can be incredibly helpful. This is also how I found the homebrew club of which I am a longtime member, The Zymurgists of the Ozarks.
Overall, it’s important to support your local homebrew shop because they support you. As a brewer, they are there with that part or ingredient or hose that you didn’t know you needed until you got stuck without it. They help you make better beer because they honestly want you to make better beer. It’s good for business when their customers love making beer.