You have to figure in the cost of water…and lot’s of it! Not just for the beer, but for cleaning equipment, and for the chilling of the wort. It takes 45 minutes or longer of running water through our copper immersion chiller to get 10 gallons from boiling to 70 degrees.
At 5 cents/gallon (our cost) it adds up real quick!
If we figure 5 gallon batch sizes, it costs us right at $30 for the base ingredients. Time is money, and even though we enjoy brewing, the time has a dollar value.
Figure in equipment costs, and we are at $100/gallon, or roughly $12.50/pint. That cost will be amortized the more we brew, bringing the per pint cost down in time. Hope I live long enough!
I was simply adding raw materials. (I included 8.5 gal strike+sparge water). Sure, you can go to the Nth degree and figure all costs like a business would but I was just spitballing. It’s a hobby. It’s not meant to be cost effective.
When I played golf avidly, I did not amortize the cost of clubs, balls, tees, shoes, beer, food, my time, gas to get there, vehicle maintenance cost, etc. into the cost of a round of golf.
My brew partners, and part owners, are anal about costs. They are always joking about the $100 gallon of beer. Yes, it is a hobby. Aside from that, the real reason we brew is to have good, fresh, European lager on tap. We don’t brew just for the “fun” of it. Brew day is a “work” day, consuming a lot of time. Getting fresh kegs from Europe can be a challenge, so we decided to brew our own. Actually, getting fresh domestic kegs is not always easy.
My partner also owns a Cessna 310, often referred to as a “Poor Man’s Lear Jet”. When he flies up to an airport restaurant for a good burger, that burger had better be really good, as it costs around $170 just for fuel. We call that the $100 Hamburger…of course it’s much more expensive than that!
Right now (after 18 batches) my cost per beer on my Picobrew is about $4 per 12 ounce beer just to cover equipment. I had hoped to continue to amortize my initial $1800 investment over at least a few more years. We’ll see since Picobrew went out of business. I assume hacks will be successful and I will be able to keep using the machine.
Reminds me of This Old House, you’d always see the “$300 bathroom remodel!” that included the free $400 sink from a neighbor, the $20/sqft tile they found at a garage sale for $0.10/sqft, etc.
Most of my water I reuse for laundry or watering my garden, which I’d do anyway. My rough per batch is below:
12 lbs base malt-$14
Specialty malt (Wheat, oats, roast, etc.) 2 lbs $5
Hops 8 oz $8 (Hop Heaven, typically under $1/oz)
Water RO or distilled 8 gallons @ $0.42/gallon $3.56
Minerals ~$0.25
Cleaners & Sanitizers (~$50/annually roughly 15 batches/year) $3.50
Yeast (Propper Starter $3.50+ Repitch ~$1 ($9 initial cost/7.5 batches))=$4.50
Total: $41.81/5 gallons or $0.84/12 oz
Cheapest craft beer for me is usually New Belgium or Sierra Nevada at $9/6 pack, or $1.50/bottle. That gives me ~$32 per batch to amortize my equipment. I’m salaried and am not picking up a 2nd job, so I don’t see the point of including the cost of my time. I wouldn’t be able to work at my current pay rate, and most employers aren’t interested in someone who can work 5 hours randomly throughout the year. Gig work comes with it’s own costs. I switch between PBW, Craftmeister alkaline, and oxyclean free, and recirculate cleaner. I moved to recirc/spray bottles of sanitizer as well.
Equipment I’m figuring about $2k for kegs, brew setup, pH meter, keg/draft line cleaners, kegerator, etc. It’s about 63 batches to break even, so it only took 5 or 6 years. This is obviously with my “This Old House” scrounging math, which may not work for everyone.
[emoji106] I figure I am ~ $3,000.00 all in for equipment all the way from milling, to ventilation, to boiling, to mashing, to cooling, to fermenting, and serving. I am currently at 125 batches with this equipment so… ~ $24 per 5 gal batch for equipment cost.
If I Brew 10 more years at my avg ~17 batches per year, I can spread the cost to ~$10.00 per 5 gal batch.
The more we brew the cheaper it gets! [emoji23]
[emoji15]. We pay less than .008 per gallon. …but I use a submersible pond pump for most of my chilling. …and the initial chilling from the tap doesn’t go down the drain. It is reused. For example, the initial hot water is used for brewhaus cleanup post brew.
To be honest, I don’t include my equipment costs. Conveniently for calulation, I bought almost all new equipment as I had moved to a different continent. It cost about 400 dollars in total. I basically do a converted mashtun (2nd one of the same design), an 8 gallon stainless steel pot (used to use aluminium), homemade copper wort chiller and have 3 carboys. I rack it using a tube and cane without an autosiphon, as I’ve always done. I bottle and carefully keep all bottles at home and in good condition.
Don’t know how your water costs so much, if I buy distilled, which I use for extract, it’s $1.00 CAD per gallon. and if I really looked I’m sure it’d be cheaper. The second last brew (4% belgian pale ale) I made cost $33.50, not factoring in equipment costs as I intend to use this equipment for several years at least.
I’ve been doing it this way for more than a decade and I definitely save money on this task/hobby.
The last brew I made that hasn’t been bottled yet is the one I made a “most flavourless alcohol of 5%” thread about. it was less than 20 bucks I’m sure.
It’s probably well within a reasonable amount. I have a buddy that bought a $3,000.00 Stumps Smoker for his BBQ. …at least that’s what he admits to. It makes good BBQ. [emoji23]
“Not why I do it.” Exactly my sentiment. Early on I figured out I’d keep sinking money into equipment and I wasn’t chasing any cost savings, even just counting ingredients. For me it’s about love of the process and not worrying too much about expense. Whatever it costs I seem able to handle it in the budget.
I probably average 5 to 6 5-gal batches per year. I have weight and prescription interactions that limit my consumption to 5 to 6 pints a week at most. I had been sharing the a few bottles with an older gentleman ( the “saint” who taught me how to brew), but he died two years ago and had also been taking two or three bottles to monthly brew club meetings.
I had also recently invested in kegging equipment so that I could donate a keg occasionally to brew club fund-raisers, but with the virus that is now on hold.
My primary reason to brew is to make the kind of beer I like to drink year-round but can seldom find.
Counting the outlay for equipment and my limited consumption, I’ll probably never break even in terms of cost. Equipment aside, each batch doesn’t cost too much. I don’t use RO water, but treat tap water with camden tabs and a few grams each of calcium chloride and gypsum, buy 50 lb bags of base malt from a local brew pub at their cost with no shipping, use dry yeast and no more than 1 oz of hops per 5 -gal batch. My water utility has a set rate for minimum usage and most months I stay within the minimum.
I have however found one place I can save money by buying a beer at a commercial establishment. In the PCV days (pre corona virus) my lady friend would drag me to a casino that had craft beer on draft. Often that seat at the bar was much less expensive than the ones at the table games or in front of the slots.
I lived in Korea previously, where beer at restaurants and anywhere is very, very cheap, especially compared to Canada. But it is universally terrible, just very bubbly, very corny, awful 4.5-5% pale lager.
However, I wondered if I could make a kind of extract that I could bring with me and add to say a pitcher of beer. Hyper concentrated roasted malt, crystal extract liquid that is very heavily hopped. Add say 100ml to 1 litre of crap macro lager and it turns it into something.
Anyone ever considered this? Here, the beer is too expensive to bother contemplating this idea.
Perhaps this is just a kind of phrase the conjunction of “cheap AND easy” as a way of saying “simple to do”.
Anyway, the setup pictured there is VERY, very similar to what I use for the most part. Let me know if you want an approximate cost rundown, maybe I can help you out Denny.
Thanks, but it doesn’t really matter to me. If I ca afgord tp brew or buy equipment, I do. If not, I don’t. I brew for enjoyment, not economic reasons.
While I certainly agree based on my comment in #22 above: “It’s a hobby. It’s not meant to be cost effective”, …but surely at some point economics must have been a variable simply based on the term ‘cheap’ in Cheap n Easy. In addition, I recall being told I am doing something the most expensive way which also infers economic concern.
It seems we all evolve from “the simple, hands on approach to brewing.“. I know I certainly did because my initial all grain system was based on the Cheap n Easy system, Don O, old Northern Brewer videos, and others.
With automation like the “Pico stable” as Drew says on the podcast, or the Grainfather, or glycol chiller testimonial we read about in Zymurgy, the evolution from hands on to automation moves us all closer to “pro style systems”. Though my system is probably still more hands on than others, it does have more control points now. Flow control, mash temp control, boil control, ventilation control, etc. …which all come with increased cost over the initial basic system.
But, like you, I am extremely happy with how my brewery has evolved. Around here cost is an independent variable. …within reason.
When I started brewing, the choices for equipment were pretty much a cooler or a 3 tier converted keg system. I went with the cooler because I couldn’t afford the other alternative. Hence the “cheap”. I decided I was gonna batch sparge, hence the “easy”. I have a Grainfther and several Pico systems, but the cooler is what I use most often.
Very good point, yes. At one time there WERE NO grainfather/ glycol cooling type stuff, so ones pride in their brewing system was based on their actual skills, ie. electrical system rigging, welding etc.
It’s a very different world out there now for homebrewing. Do I have less respect for people I meet who have only started within the past few years?
Yes lol.
Can they probably make better and more consistent beer than me?
I think it’s a real canard to equate brewing expertise with how hard people work. After all, what’s the difference between a Grainfather and a 3 tier, PID controlled system? It’ all about the outcome. The journey is up to each of us individually. And I never had pride in my brewing equipment. It’s always been about what I can do with whatever I use.