Raises Hand :blink:
When brewing beers, even the All Grain ones for my own consumption and not for a competition, I omit OG/FG readings as well. I'm still banal about control of fermentation for SNA-1/3rd Sugar Break Mead fermentations and throw all sorts of daily readings and formulaic evaluation into the mix. But if doing a simple Mead like JAO I take no readings either. Then again I can formulaically determine OG on Meads with no instruments.
That said, Refractometers and Hydrometers for most part are analogue instruments and have their own error rates. Even mathematical formulas have error rates, but usually out to the third of fourth digit following the decimal point. While in the formulas this is pretty damn good and all you can really hope to achieve, the tools have way higher error rates than my formulas.
This does not invalidate their use. But I see them as guideposts on a roadmap to tick off that you are headed in the same direction someone who created a recipe mapped out with their readings. You can factor in different brew gear, efficiency ratings, differing error rates among tools but if I wanted to try and gain consistency.
That and they give you something to talk about to other brewers and use as a way of building a mental description of the process you went through that they could then attempt to replicate and have a greater chance of succeeding than without readings. It also lets us more expediently diagnose potential wrong turns or problem areas if someone has a problem and not the first hand experience but has the sample data to evaluate that might clue us in on a list of most likely areas which could have created an end result thats up for analysis.
But are they necessary for making good tasting beer. I have to be honest and say no. I can see where Nick started from in his original post and is coming from but your dragging it a bit to far out if wanting to make an overarching judgement statement. For yourself yes its perfectly fine. But we must let others make their own decisions of what they want to put in effort wise in learning (or not) about their brewing.
Like BribieG I pretty much know my recipes and I do them from memory again and again. If I'm reading about something I have not done I will go into the additional sample readings and that helps me build in my mind the steps I will be going through to replicate. If the process is simple I'll usually omit, but if its more in depth I will.
You can make some great beer and it has been made for as long as the history of organised gatherings of humans and the only tools available for gravity readings a freshly laid hens egg near the tail end of mans history of making beer.
If you want to get started on something, my pet peeve is all these years above of beer brewing when you didn't get hops shrink wrapped with AA% ratings written all over the packet and how people survived and made great beer. Today a lot of brewers I meet are too chicken shit to make their beers bittering as well as flavour and aroma hopping using nothing but all the hops they grew themselves. What is this must use store bought hops for bittering malarky going around? You are making it for your own consumption right? Every batch isn't going into a competition event.
Cheers,
Brewer Pete
