> If it's just homebrewing / for personal, family / friends consumption, how would they even find out? A lot of laws are only there to enforce if they actually uncover a big operation.

True and that's kind of the joke. They aren't even allowed to do visitations without evidence of malpractice. But the laws surrounding it are even stranger: The beer produced should only be consumed at home, any outside consumption would require taxation, therefore homebrew competitions ask you to tax your submissions. They've actually went to homebrew competitions and busted people on the grounds of 10€ pP at most (But remember if I self report/pay it would only be a few ct - so even less). Homebrew meetups have never had problems before.

The background of the law (at least in folk telling) is that the big guys were worried about malt-extract making homebrewing so easy as to make commercial brewing superfluous.