The Beer Hacker: Brewing On The Cheap

Various other mailings in this collection.

Design Prices
Modify offer
Whole Grain vs. Serum Development
The $20 beer barrier

Obviously, beer prices hacker have actually been going up over the past few years:

 unless you’re drinking alcoholic macrobrews or have a large microbrewery nearby, you’re likely to pay $7 to $12 for a six-pack, and may pay 

extra if the beer is more difficult to obtain or special in some way. 

(For example, many breweries, such as Dogfish Head or Maui Developing, offer four-packs starting at $11 to $12.) .

The possibility of developing your own hacker high-quality beer at a price well below retail has tremendous appeal, especially today. 

There has been some debate recently about whether developing your own beer is really more affordable (in the long run).

Straight away, I think home brewing is the lower cost option – but I’ve never actually made the effort to fully discover this claim. I want to definitively answer the question, “Is home brewing really an additional cost effective way to maintain your beer supply?” .

Let’s consider some numbers to get a gauge of how much you can spend on quality beer.
I’ve found that a 5 gallon set of homebrew usually returns about 48 12oz containers, 

or 2 cases of beer.
Right here in Oregon, craft beer sells for $8-$12 per six pack. At that rate, that’s about $64 to $96 in both cases.
At Costcoclaim, comparable or identical beers hacker are purchased by instance for a balance of $25 per instance, or $50 for 2 instances.

For the really affordable big brew, Pabst Blue Bow State, I think you can buy it for about $14 per instance or $28 for $2 depending on sales.

Check out this breakdown and it quickly becomes clear that buying a six pack of beer is an incredibly expensive way to go if you want to cut back and save cash. To do this, you need hacker to look at acquiring wholesale – simply put, by example.

(Of course, not every craft blend is conveniently hacker available from instances, and Costco doesn’t offer it that hacker way – i.e., warehouse – costs. For simplicity,

 I’ll use these numbers; typically, if beer prices are higher in your location, then you have more flexibility after that.) .

Based on these numbers, my estimate for the back of the napkin seems to indicate that the “magic” cost of a micro-boiled premium beer

 (the value in 2 cases, which is the value that an average set of homebrewers would produce) is appropriate at around $50.
We have an “affordable cost factor”.
[adsense] Let’s determine the base cost of some of the active ingredients in the beer. Some assumptions:.
I’m completely ignoring the startup costs hacker associated with home brewing (this may be a future post) and assuming we are working with a 5 gallon component cost.

I’m just analyzing extraction based development (at the same time). The numbers adjust as you get into mass grain costs (this is definitely a future post to summarize).