As others point out, contract brewing is definitely a thing, but a better comparison than cloud computing would be shared hosting: you're stuck with whatever stack they happen to have installed, no admin rights, and you get the same dismal bandwidth as all other tenants. Or back to brewing: yup, the process is fairly standard – and how could it not be – but great breweries tend to be great not just because they have good recipes, but often because they have mastered their gear and have perfected their processes across the board. Only very few contract breweries are that good.

Why are only few breweries that good ?

And is that something that can, with the right investment be scaled, and offered affordably ?

Or is it inherently expensive ?

contract brewing is huge. Usually it's used when a small brewery wins a national award (GABF Gold is a popular category) or if they want to start distributing outside of just the taproom.

http://www.sleepinggiantbrewing.com/ is an example of one such contract only business.

It’s not uncommon for craft brewers to contract out the brewing of bigger runs. Evil Twin (and I think his brother, Mikkeller as well) was exclusively a “phantom brewer” who developed recipes and then had other breweries brew them on contract. Sometimes it’s bigger established breweries that do a few batches on contract for them, but there’s also explicit contract breweries like De Proefbrouwerij

Cloud brewing is definitely a thing, but I think the name for it is "contract brewing." A larger brewery will allow a smaller/startup brewer to rent their facilities to make a few batches.

In Chicago, I’ve started to see “co-brewing” spaces where a few smaller breweries share a single brewing and taproom space.