Adding up the costs of brewing

[superstock]

Would it though? All grain brewers generally use completely different ingredients so why would it be more expensive?

It's volume sales that keeps the doors open on your LHBS.

 

[MastersBrewery]

When I started brewing, I was in the money and time poor, buying craft beer was a non issue for two reasons one was my budget the other I had to be 0.00 BAV to start work and I was working 12 days in 14. Since becoming a stay home dad, I'm money poor, and time rich, especially if my son can join in. If I wasn't brewing I probably wouldn't be drinking more than a case of two a year and none of that would be near the quality of what I can make. If I won lotto I'd still be brewing my own.(just with shinnier gear!)
Like some have said above, brewing is a personal journey of flavours and experimentation, and like me for some, the search for improvement on equipment and setup and tinkering.

some people fish some chase a white ball from one hole in the ground to the next.

Give me malty nectar any day.

 

[MastersBrewery]

When I started brewing, I was in the money and time poor, buying craft beer was a non issue for two reasons one was my budget the other I had to be 0.00 BAV to start work and I was working 12 days in 14. Since becoming a stay home dad, I'm money poor, and time rich, especially if my son can join in. If I wasn't brewing I probably wouldn't be drinking more than a case of two a year and none of that would be near the quality of what I can make. If I won lotto I'd still be brewing my own.(just with shinnier gear!)
Like some have said above, brewing is a personal journey of flavours and experimentation, and like me for some, the search for improvement on equipment and setup and tinkering.

some people fish some chase a white ball from one hole in the ground to the next.

Give me malty nectar any day.

 

[TimT]

Would it though? All grain brewers generally use completely different ingredients so why would it be more expensive?

So, Truman came up with the price of around $0.059 a stubbie.

It's pretty easy to work out the costs of a kit beer - all the ingredients come with the kit, and the only extra specialty expense is a carboy. But let's keep those extra expenses out of it to make it simple. Coopers English Bitter, for instance, has a cost of around 25.87 according to this google search I did. Round down to $25 for nice round numbers.

Assume the amount of beer brewed is 23 litres, so divide by 23, and assume you'll get 3 stubbies per litre, so divide by 3.

So I get $0.362 - significantly more than $0.059!

(Then again - also assume I've made some error in my figures somewhere. Happy to be proved wrong, so have at it!)

 

[fletcher]

Would it though? All grain brewers generally use completely different ingredients so why would it be more expensive?

So, Truman came up with the price of around $0.059 a stubbie.

It's pretty easy to work out the costs of a kit beer - all the ingredients come with the kit, and the only extra specialty expense is a carboy. But let's keep those extra expenses out of it to make it simple. Coopers English Bitter, for instance, has a cost of around 25.87 according to this google search I did. Round down to $25 for nice round numbers.

Assume the amount of beer brewed is 23 litres, so divide by 23, and assume you'll get 3 stubbies per litre, so divide by 3.

So I get $0.362 - significantly more than $0.059!

(Then again - also assume I've made some error in my figures somewhere. Happy to be proved wrong, so have at it!)

make a template for us to work with mate! so we can plug in our figures into it and see what an average beer costs

 

[zeggie]

Enjoyment and satisfaction of brewing a good beer, PRICELESS.

^^^^^^ this

 

[slcmorro]

I just did a brew and it cost me the following...

3kg of JW Pils @ 1.70 per keg = $5.10
500g of Long White Rice @ $1 per kg = $0.25
1 x W34/70 packet @ $5 = $7
10gm of Magnum @ $8 per 100gm = $0.80
40gm of Saaz = $2
Starsan (estimate) = $0.05
Bottled Gas (estimate) = $3
CO2 (estimate) = $0.25

Total = $18.45.

That's just over 2 slabs worth of a great drinking Pils for under a quarter of the cost of 1 slab of Pilsner Urquell. Even less for the next time I brew and reuse the yeast.

 

[Sully]

I'd rather pay $30+ for a great steak than $25 for a crap steak, same goes with beer. If it's cheaper and better it's a bonus. Won't ever do the math on how much it is costs per batch.

 

[Grainer]

I shudder to think the cost of my setup..but its my brew... thats the point..I don't give a flying F*&^ what it cost me.. I enjoy drinking my own brew and making it on my MAN rig!!!

4 v customised electric brewery at the moment something like $30 a stubby LMAO..

 

[booargy]

hobgoblin is $8 for 500ml which works out at $800 for 50L
A hobgoblin type AG beer kit from MHB costs me $115 with 3 wyeast packets. so even with 15hrs of work i'm still in front.

 

[brewtas]

It's volume sales that keeps the doors open on your LHBS.

That's not quite the same thing as kit beers making AG cheaper. Without kit beers there'd be more demand for grain and the industry would look very different. It's not a simple equation of kit brewers subsidising AG brewers.

 

[MartinOC]

I shudder to think the cost of my setup..but its my brew... thats the point..I don't give a flying F*&^ what it cost me.. I enjoy drinking my own brew and making it on my MAN rig!!!

4 v customised electric brewery at the moment something like $30 a stubby LMAO..

Maybe you should talk to LRG about the whole "amortise" thang & see if you can get a good deal on leasing a machine that goes "Ping!"??

 

[MAX POWER]

Excise is the big killer for commercial beers.

I can't remember the exact figures but a friend - Geordie who now lives in Australia but visits the homeland occasionally - came up with a quite startling comparison of beer prices here in Aus and there in the UK. Something like $3 for a pint over there - closer to $10 over here. If it's excise to blame for that here in Australia, then it's way too much.

Excise here is $32 per litre of pure alcohol. In the US it's $2 approx. The uk I believe was around $6-$8. I saw it in an article recently when they were going to raise ours again.
It's a killer here. A yank mate keeps telling me you can never save money homebrewing. That may true over there, but it's not an even playing field.

 

[TimT]

Wow. That's really bad. How'd it get so big - legacy of our temperance movement? (Could be - ours dragged on and on, whereas in the US the national experiment with banning alcohol was such a fantastic failure that it must have killed off a lot of the enthusiasm about temperance).

 

[SmallFry]

So, Truman came up with the price of around $0.059 a stubbie.

I suspect he may have inadvertently moved the decimal point.

 

[TimT]

Ah. True.

 

[adryargument]

There's wanker beers and then there's -
http://www.amazon.com/Semenology-The-Semen-Bartenders-Handbook/dp/1482605228/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y/178-9212232-1476247

And no, it's not a typo and they're not referring to bartending by jolly nautical types.

Thankyou,
Just purchased it.

 

[pcmfisher]

Haven't I read a thread like this before? It just seems so familiar.

 

[TimT]

It's possible - this site is pretty old now so I'm sure a lot of topics have been covered plenty of times.

I got the idea for this while reading another thread about getting into professional brewing and thought about all the accountancy that would be involved.

 

[Lord Raja Goomba I]

Home brewing has caused me to develop a taste for really expensive wanker beers.. so no cost savings there either.

This is the problem. And I suppose, where we might save some money. Our expensive commercial beers are spread out (well in my case) by brewing equal or better quality beer at home. But yeah, who grabs a stubbie for $6 or a tallie for $12 plus and thinks nothing of it? That's the cost of a 6er of Megaswill.

I'm really strongly of the opinion that homebrewing has been a massive part of the reason craft beer has an upsurge in Australia, not just following (outdated) US trends.

My god!! An accountant with a personality! I always thought they had that surgically removed once you qualify..?

Any bloke that can use the word "amortised" in a sentence & still remain interesting is revelatory!!

Yup, there are about 60% like that (and are usually partners/owners of a practice), the rest actually have a personality. It's funny when you're in an open office and the smack talk starts. Funny as.

As for "amortised" - as has been mentioned here, some don't care about the cost at all - because it's a hobby.

Those that do (or need to justify it to themselves, SWMBO or mates), it's the simplest method of spreading the cost of the equipment over your beer, and still seeing if you finish ahead of the cost of commercial beer.

I could do so (with the ghetto 2 pot stovetop method - plug!) over one batch and already finish ahead, compared to 3 cartons of VALE/IPA (I brew in 25L lots) - which is about the lowest level of commercial beer cost wise, that I would actually buy a carton of.

Excise here is $32 per litre of pure alcohol. In the US it's $2 approx. The uk I believe was around $6-$8. I saw it in an article recently when they were going to raise ours again.
It's a killer here. A yank mate keeps telling me you can never save money homebrewing. That may true over there, but it's not an even playing field.

The other thing with excise, it continually increases in Oz along CPI lines twice a year. So, it's not like the GST, which is a flat rate thing all the time, it's a per litre thing that continually increases.