I've posted a couple of times on this before, but i reckon you can make pretty good AG beer for less than $15 for a 23L batch, ie. on par with K&K brewing for a much better result.
How you ask?
- Reuse yeast, even dry yeast can be repitched, split into starters, shared with mates, stored in vials, etc. If you re-use a packet of us05 even 3 times you have got down to less than $1.50 per brew for yeast
- Bulk buy your grain. A simple 1042 OG recipe, which is the normal OG for a kit and kilo brew, at a decent AG efficiency which is not too hard to hit of 80% will require about 4kg of grain or so. Buying off the 1kg prices at your LBS isn't a great start at normally about $4 to $6 a kilo for basemalt, but bulk buying means about $2.50 per KG of local base malt, buy some specialty malt somewhere cheap (like online) and that is about $4 to $6 for the specialty malt. A little bit of specialty goes a long way.
- Bulk buy hops (ie 450g+) and use sparingly - don't bother using heaps of low alpha hops to bitter your beers, just get a smallish amount of high-alpha clean hops (Magnum, Simcoe, B Saaz, Super Alpha), bitter with that and then use your low alphas for 30m to flameout/FWH/late hop/dry hop only. Still works fine. Of course there are going to be some examples where you will want to bitter with the real thing (Boh Pils, Altbier and a couple of other styles benefit IMHO) but most beers don't need it.
- Take a page out of the K&K book and use some sugar as part of the fermentables. Sugar is a lot cheaper than malt at getting your OG up, and will not cause an issue with "cidery flavours" at less than 15% of the grist in my experience. Malt, even at 80% efficiency or so, contributes 64% of its own weight as extract potential (roughly 80% lab spec extract multiplied by 80% brewhouse efficiency = .64) whereas Sugar contributes 100%. Sugar costs $0.80c per kilo in the 3kg packs from the supermarket, malt costs about $2.50 per kilo at its cheapest (and factor in the extract potential and you are paying about $4 per equivalent measure of sugar).
Putting all this together, you can make a simple "house ale/lager" that should keep everyone including yourself happy and will cost bugger all to make. You can just keep going on a recipe like this - every time you make it, save some yeast from the bottom in a bottle and repitch up to 5 times, or just dump it on the yeast cake. Something like
3kg Aussie Pilsner/Ale malt
0.2kg light crystal malt
0.5kg Cane sugar
Mashed at 68C (little high to compensate slightly for the sugar, you could also use a bit of carapils, <150g)
Hops - Super Alpha/Magnum/Simcoe 13% AA, about 8g at 60m to give 15IBU
Finishing hops - whatever you like, about 0.5 to 2g/L at 5m only gives a nice balance of flavour/aroma
Ferment with dry yeast (us05/s33/k97 for ale and s-189 or 34/70 for lager), or reuse/culture/swap/whatever some liquid yeast
Total cost would be about $7 or 8 for the malt, 40c for the sugar, about $0.60 for the bittering hops and $2 for the finishing hops. Add on $1.50 for dry yeast reused 3 times and you're up to $11.50. Add in some cost for sanitiser, gas/electricity cost and you're at about $15.
I reckon most of the time i brew a batch it'd be under $20...
