CraigTube Is Gone! Why Can’t We Have Nice Things?

I’ve been brewing for 23 years, 6 months and 24 days. I’ve also been active in the internet brewing community for that whole time. While most of the old-time resources are gone, there has been one fixture for well over half my brewing “career” – CraigTube. CraigTube was the creation of a fellow Canadian homebrewer, Craig Farraway, from Toronto. Over the past 14 or 15 years, Craig posted innumerable videos on homebrewing, beer and other related topics.

Craig was (and still is) an advocate for the simpler forms of home brewing – extract and kits as two examples, but also didn’t shy away from more complex brewing processes. He was one of the most frequent “Homebrew Wednesday” posters on youtube. His videos motivated a lot of people to try brewing, and helped a lot of new brewers get started. As you may imagine, someone with such a long and public involvement had a big footprint in our community, as you can see in the huge number of posts referring to him in one single on-line forum.

Craig wasn’t without his detractors. He took the DWHAHB philosophy to an extreme, which for some reason rubs some people the wrong way. And – of course – there are those pseudo-purists out there who hated him for showing people that you could make decent beer from canned malt kits, or using extract. For me, it was his relaxed attitude and view that “any beer you like is good enough” view of brewing that kept me watching his channel for more than a decade.

So, of course, without warning YouTube has deleted his channel. Literally hundred of homebrewing-related videos have forever been lost to us. And for no clear reason. Here’s Craig (in one of his other channels) explaining what he knows about the deletion of his channel.

Craig also lost his second channel, dedicated to vinyl and music. Craig is (or was) a professional musician, and often featured live performances on his videos. With both of these channels closed, an amazing amount of original content has been lost. So once again, the internet giants take away a valuable resource. Hopefully the channel will be restored, but things don’t look good at this point.

Should CraigTube return, it will be found at