The problem is scale and safety.

I can start a company tomorrow selling farm churned butter from the cows that operate at my farm. It is the best butter because every morning I go to the cows and tell them they are the best cows this side of the Mississippi. I churn the butter by hand and sell out a lot of product. However, when I max out the cows on my location, I need to buy more cows for my farm and increase the amount of land or I can ask Farmer Jed next door to talk to his cows in the morning and tell them that his cows are the best cows this side of the Mississippi. Farmer Jed churns the butter by hand, but he forgets to wash his hands after he goes to the bathroom, something I never did like about him, but he tells this great story about him and the milk maid over in Aberdeen.

Multiply my success more and more and finally I am needing thousands of gallons of milk, a centralized processing system to churn the butter and ensure quality control of my brand and then I have a knock on my door from a white glove butter churner. They have gone through the regulatory process with the FDA, have done butter churning for other companies successfully, and have a great track record. I will hand over that portion to them.

This is why the companies start out warm and fuzzy, but regulatory issues, meeting demand, and other fun things cause a drive to outsourced production.

I agree the real issue is the push to grow. there is an optimum size for everything and the irrational drive to make everything as big as possible has caused us to loose a lot of great things.

Marx would say this is what happens when you push for increase in profit year to year, quarter to quarter.

Do you think that beer recipes are not dependant on the brewing equipment you are using?

I don't think it is easy for everyone to take the recipe and replicate it.

I also don't think you can easily use the recipe with homebrewing equipment and obtaing the same output, maybe it could be done with professional scale equipment but I am not sure.

To me is a nice marketing stunt aimed at the homebrew community.

Ultimately there's nothing magical about brewing, if you hit the same temperatures, use water with a similar chemical composition and use the same ingredients and yeast you're going to get the same result. Hard to do as a homebrewer, for sure, but not so hard for a professional brewer with a good installation.

Also note that they're open-sourcing the recipes, they're not allowing anyone to reuse the names of their beers.

I've noticed the same reduction in quality when a brand scales, but I find it odd to call that a feature of capitalism. Really, it just seems like a feature of commerce, and there's no reason why a non-capitalist system wouldn't also have this feature.