A few questions for those who have tried homebrewing (and general thread on homebrewing in general)

• Have you ever tried homebrewing?
• What were lessons learned?
• Did you regret the up-front investment?
• Do you bottle or keg?
• What are your favorite recipes?
• What is your setup like?

Feel free to answer only one question, all of them, or none of them and share an anecdote!

I'm now T-1 to 2 days from having my sourdough starter that was created from nothing but natural yeast around where I live (and obviously generous amounts of flour or water) to being ready to bake/cook with. This is my first time working with starters, and dough in general, so I'm really looking forward to baking my own sourdough bread in the oven, or making a classic sourdough pizza with mozzarella and a marinara sauce (this is first on the list!).

I've been feeding it twice daily for several days now, and am getting close to the doubling-within-a-day metric many use as a baseline for when it's "ready", although I haven't tried the float test quite yet It's got an almost fruity, alcoholic aroma to it—with no funky, displeasing notes.

Here's the first recipe I'm planning, unfortunately our oven barely goes above 500°F, and I don't have any handy sources of thermal mass to properly cook a pizza, so I'm hopeful a cast-iron approach to really crisping the base on the stove first will pay dividends.

Seamus Blackley has also been a bit of an inspiration.

Anyone got any tips? Recipes to share? Surely I'm not the only person on Tildes trying this (for obvious reasons).