For few years now I am going sometimes to cinema that is part of the Europa Cinemas network.
It is partly run by my city and one of the university. It is quite cool to be able to watch some art films from around the world, documentaries but they are still showing the big American blockbusters.
They don’t sell popcorn or cola but they have craft beers on tap that you can take with you to the screening room - my French friend really like that part of the experience ;-)
The tickets are really affordable ~6-10€ but I usually spend bit more on the beer.
Back in the day some beer categories were impossible to find and brewing or round trip airfare was the only option to try something. These days you can get pretty much anything other than a Westvleteren 12 or Pliny as long as you have enough money
If I wanted 5 gallons of the original Killian’s Red recipe before they turned it into a lager I had to new it myself and as a side benefit I could do it for about half the cost.
Most people don’t have a five gallon pot, carboy and 48 bottles and 20k BTU. They definitely don’t have a wurt chiller to avoid excessive hop isomerization and self regulating temperature control to make sure their DT clone doesn’t taste like bandaid. Basic beers don’t need much stuff but try to brew a specific IPA or most any beer above 9% and things start getting expensive real fast.
For me it is still quite hard to find specific product or something which doesn’t exist yet - for example last year I brewed beer with wine grape juice and because I doubled it as school project I found out it is quite hard to tax it so nobody is making it.
So yes I get the point but for me it still offers some added bonus compared to commercial beer.
There are definitely advantages if one wants something specific. 20+ years ago it was a very different game. It felt like everything changed after the 2007 hop shortage. Throughout the whole industry distribution systems changed, suppliers merged things that used to be rare were suddenly available within days. The hop shortage and those events are only slightly related but they happened at the same time.
After that breweries started popping up everywhere. Suddenly there were more local options available than anyone could possibly need and with it the need to brew your own to try something completely different. The brew-curious could buy things they hadn’t even dreamed of before so the need to home brew decreased. And the prices to brew went up as there was more competition for ingredients.