Excuse me if stepping into an ongoing discussion without reading to closely the whole thing.
On buying hops from the US I
feel (a loaded word I know) it's like any other bulk buy at home.
My 2c on bulk buys tend to compare the LHBS to a consulting firm:
I work in IT, we hire consultants every now and then.
Consultants are used when we do not have the skills in-house, and it would take too long to get the skills. Or if we have the skills but not the capasity.
Consultants cost from $27/hour from your basic help desk guy if you want him for a week, to $250/hour for buying the skills only from some high-level exchange/sql girl/guy.
So someone came in on Friday, helped us harden a linux server in the DMZ and charged us $200/hour to do the security audit.
But we didn;t really pay some guy we didn;t know $600 for stopping by and saying hi, we paid for the time he has spent learning the necessary skills so he could do what we wanted, in the time we had available.
We realise skills cost money. (
probably the short version of this entire post?)
( That's why we IT guys don't appreciate being called by someone we spoke with 5 years ago, and after 12 seconds of dry chatter they want free IT support. Sorry, yet another discussion)
Your local home brew shop is kind of like a consulting firm.
You go there and buy some grains, a bit of hops, that one little vial of specialty yeast they accidentally had in the fridge, etc. While there you ask for advice on the recipe, the grain bill, would they mind selling you 140 grams of some specialty malt rather than having to order 25 kg from somewhere, etc.
(if this does not seem like an advantage you want to pay for, try asking someone at BigW/K-Mart about their DME selection..)
Most of us do not expect to pay for this (the advice, the availability of special stuff).
Why? You would pay for a plumber to stop by and give you advice on what you have to do about your leaking pipes. You would pay an electrician stopping by to give you advice on how best to wire up your garage/brew shed.
So why do we not pay for the skills and experience from the LHBS?
Very simple view:
3 ways to get what you want (let's pretend for now you didn;t need the LHBS to go from kits to AG).
-LHBS
-Internet/bulk buys, wherever you can get it cheaply
-retail (BigW./Woolworths, K-mart, etc)
Now, the person running that (often) modest business of a LHBS is a die-hard brew fan,right? What would it take to get you to drop your job and convince your wife you would make enough selling cracked grains and cans of malt extract.. So they are generally not your Wall-street die hard capitalists, but someone who is trying to make a living from their hobby/obsession (sorry, yet another discussion!)./
I join a bulk buy every now and then.
It pains me a little, I feel we should support the local homebrew shop because they provide more value than they charge. Not because I am an idealist or have a romanitc view of the poor, struggeling shop owner. But because they consult our (mine) needs without question. Help me with a recipe, suggests options, supplements or replacements, ALWAYS order the special yeast or grains I want to test without any questions or demands of minimal orders or depostis.. Generally the LHBS does a LOT more than what I expect from the professional consutling companies I deal with professionally. .
As I 'admitted" I do the odd bulk buy, I don';t mind getting the odd bag of grains a bit cheaper to help my budget go further a couple of times a year. But I definetly feel we need to understand what we are buying from the LHBS. We are buying
consulting, and the availibility of their warehouse of stock items..
So when buying 150 gr of Carafe II and 80 gr of Chocolate malt plus that WLP002 yeast, let's acknowledge what they are doing to be able to offer you that service.
If you want to be able to continue asking questions, getting specialty malts and getting that one yeast you wanted, let;'s agree that homebrew shops can charge whatever they need on a bag of hops, ok?
If they mark up hops 300% that means they do whatever ANY CLOTHES STORE DO every day of the week, but I don;t hear many people ordering white cotton t-shirts from Thailand and slagging Mayers off.. And if they did, good on them. In our case, though, we need the experience (and willingness to bind capital in funny yeasts and grains, and other little pieces of "important stuff" so guys like us can drop by last Monday when my yeast starter smelled funny and I wanted another one
)
And to be fair, to cover rent and sending kids to school in clothes probably does require a bit of salary (much like the rest of us) so making $5 per 100 gr of hops can't be a capital offence, surely?
Not trying to kick off another whole bag of snakes here(doesn;t sound like the right phrase but I have had a beer and can't be bothered looking it up right now
) , just feel that some times people not used to dealing with consultants do not consider the value of having skills (and stock) on hand, and that the LHBS is some times made out to be a mean, fat guy making millions by being greedy, hehehe.
Bjorn
