Why do I Brew ???

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JacktheKnife

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Location
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Why do I brew?

An interesting question it is...

All the reasons given by others, were very good reasons.
The reasons 'I brew my own' are ...
All the reasons given above, and also basically:
The reason I learned how to cook food.
Control over my own life, to not be a slave!
I remember when I was a kid, I asked Mom how to cook.
She said:
Men don't cook food,
they get married and have their wives cook for them.
Oh Mom, your cooking is so good I want to learn how you do it, I told her.
When actually I wanted to learn how to cook food,
so I didn't end up with a {censored} like her,
but if I told her that... she wouldn't show me how to cook.
It was one of my first tactical lies.
But it worked.
I am single and a good cook.
Life is good, now to the subject at hand:


One homebrew of mine costs about .40 cents.
But it is half again as strong as store bought beer, 25 cents
huh.gif

I don't have to get in a truck with tags, inspection sticker, insurance, expensive gas and all and drive to the beer store, dodging cops,
idiots and accidents all the way there and all the way back.
In order to pay a dollar + tax, for a beer.
I just walk in to my brewery, {the former pantry,}
and 'select' or just, 'get me' an ale.
I have 200 full, green glass bottles on the shelves.
6Lb Hammerbier, -7, -8 Lb Hammerbier.
Different batches different flavors and amounts of alcohol.
I gives me control over my life.
It gives me Power!!!


A friend of a friend was over bumming my homebrew.
'Mikey' was lots younger than me and hadhad a severe head injury too.
I was trying to inspire him and show him the value of brewing your own buzzzz...
I took him into my brewery, {the former pantry}
We looked up at the shelves filled with rows and rows of full,
clean, green glass bottles with my special brews in them.
A beautiful and inspiring sight it was.
{And thats why I bottle rather than keg ya'll}

I told Mikey about the wino who came up to two friends as they were opening the door to a rooming house, 'room', they had rented just to have a place to smoke pot in back in the 60's. Here the old wino came with his broom as he helped out around the old house to help with his rent.
James was saying hurry, hurry open the door, while Steve was fumbling with the keys. The wino came up to them and opened his mouth and with his scratchy old wino voice said:
"Cherish your youth boys, cherish your youth."
Whereupon the old wino started coughing and hacking and grabbing at his chest. He wheezed and hacked and staggered around and collapsed in the hall as Steve got the old door open,
and they went in and locked the door.
The wino was gone when they came out.
I have always remembered the old wino's admonition.
And said you can learn something from anybody.

Then I was telling Mikey about 'wealth'.
Some men view 'wealth' as owning lots of stuff.
Two or three beautiful women with the biggest tits.
The fastest car and the biggest house.
Others view wealth as land.
Thousands of acres of grassland, mountains and lakes,
owning a ranch is owning a piece of the earth,
a place to spend your life improving,
to plant grasses and trees, heal gullys and erosion,
build fences, to make it more fertile and raise animals.
To leave it better than it was when you found it.
Its your land and "land is the only thing that lasts".

But Mikey, the poor old wino would go for a bottle of wine.
That was wealth to him.
All that property and those women are just a big hassle.
I looked up at my shelves filled with the aforedescribed rows and rows of clean, green glass bottles, filled with my special precious homebrew.
I took a deep breath and held up my hands.


Mikey dude, this...

This is wealth.


J. Winters Knife
' Sandymay got two coon last night ya'll '
' Thats wealth too '

 
Well here in Canada it is about 38 dollars for 24 big brewery beers - even more for small brew or microbrewed beer - so we save a ton of money home brewing here. 25$ -30$ depending on the style for a batch. So I hear ya! :)
 
Knifey!
It's good to see ya on the board!I never did make it to the 1000 bottles of beer on the wall but tried like hell to.Was up to about 650 and then got the kegging bug.Still brewing like mad though,now SWMBO and I do 12gal batches!
Cheers:mug:
 
I WISH I had room enough just to store 1/2 as much as ya'll. Even with extract brewing, it's still cheaper, and waaayyyyyyy better, than the store bought garbage except for Sam Adam's, but that stuff is like 8.50 a sixer here so I only get it in emergencies. With propane and the price of an extract kit, I calculated a case (24 bottles) costs me about 12 dollars. A case of the BMG is around 18 to 20 here. Laid all my calculations out to SWMBO and she said, "brew on!" To me, that is WEALTH. Just wish she'd let me drink it as I'd like without getting the "eye."
 
JacktheKnife said:

One homebrew of mine costs about .40 cents.
But it is half again as strong as store bought beer, 25 cents

Dude, what's your secret? I brew extract and it costs me $30+ (shipping is the real killer) to brew 45 bottles of beer. That's 66.67 cents per bottle. Does going all grain really drop your cost to brew by that much?
 
ryan_boc said:
Dude, what's your secret? I brew extract and it costs me $30+ (shipping is the real killer) to brew 45 bottles of beer. That's 66.67 cents per bottle. Does going all grain really drop your cost to brew by that much?

YES!

Let's take a recent beer of mine...Fuller's London Porter. It was an All-Grain batch with 11 total pounds of grain. Now, to normalize everything, let's say that you're buying your ingredients from one place...Midwest in this case. I buy my base grains in bulk, which is Maris Otter, at $45 for 55lbs...or $0.81 per pound. 9 of my pounds in this beer were Maris Otter, which comes to $7.36 for my base grain. The rest of the grains I buy by the pound, which Midwest sells for around $1.45 per pound...meaning, 2 lbs at $1.45 is $2.90 for specialty grains. So my grain bill for this beer was a grand total of $10.26.

Now let's replace the 9 lbs of Maris Otter with 6 pounds of DME (about the right conversion assuming 75% efficiency on my mash, which is actually lower than what I usually get). For extra light DME, if you buy it in 3-lb increments (the cheapest without spending a ton of money on 55lbs), is $3.75 per pound. That's $22.50 for the extract alone, plus the specialty grains at $2.90, and you're looking at:

$10.26 for the AG grain bill
$25.40 for the extract + grains grain bill...

Or, almost 2.5x more for extract.

:(
 
Helluva a read there, knife. I agree 100% ...

As far as AG dropping price, it's unbelievable how much it drops. Buy 55lb bag of grains for $40, hops for $10 a pound (well, at least this last time I stocked up) and wash your yeast. I drink beer everyday, I'm saving a $hitload.
 
Even with current hop prices, it's still pretty damn good.

Here's the breakdown for a 15 gallon batch of the pale ale I'm brewing this weekend:
(prices from my AHS order early this week)

Water: $6.25
2-row: $31.00 (compare with $54.78 for LME or $70.22 for DME)
Specialty grains: $4.65
Hops: $36.63
Whirlfloc: $0.65
pH 5.2: $1.85
30g dry yeast: $1.98 (from a bulk buy, not AHS)
Shipping: $6.99

Total: $90.00

Cost per AG 12 oz: $0.56
Cost per LME 12 oz: $0.71
Cost per DME 12 oz: $0.81

If I were brewing a less hoppy beer like a brown ale, the hops price would be cut by about 2/3. That gets me darn close to Knife's $0.40 per bottle!
 
I just figured the approximate price on the 10 gallons of EW's Haus ale.

2 row domestic at .50 per lb
specialty gains at 1.00 per lb
hops were free because I picked them :)
I use tap water
yeast was around 1.00 (I wash and use starters)
fuel was around 6-8 dollars


I'm at around 25 cents per 12 oz. :D
 
ryan_boc said:
Dude, what's your secret? I brew extract and it costs me $30+ (shipping is the real killer) to brew 45 bottles of beer. That's 66.67 cents per bottle. Does going all grain really drop your cost to brew by that much?

Ryan-boc,

Howdy, about the price of my homebrew...
.40 is a figure I came up with years ago.
But I buy a 55 Lb sack of D.M.E. { = 7 - 5 gallon batches}
Once a month during the brewing season.
I never figured shipping-{gas to go get the stuff} in the .40 price.
It costs about $210. each trip and the resulting 7 batches,
7 batches x 5 gallons = 35 gallons.
5 gallons = 46 - 12 oz bottles
46 x 7 = 322 - 12 oz bottles of 'Mien Acht Pfund Hammerbier'
$210.00 for 322 - 12 oz ales...


Hmmmm... you are right!
I am spending .65 cents on my damn brew man!
and that does not count store bought water!
of course it is 6 3/4% alcohol...
Once one had all the gear, whole grain
would be cheaper if a lot more trouble...
and at .65 and more alcohol,
it is about half
of what a good store bought beer costs...
Hmmmm, I feel stunned and confused,
like a duck what's been hit on the head...
I thought my homebrews were .40
and they ain't.



J. Knife
 
Evan! said:
$10.26 for the AG grain bill
$25.40 for the extract + grains grain bill...

Or, almost 2.5x more for extract.

:(

Plus, more hops (maybe 50% more) to get the same IBUs in a partial boil extract batch as you'd get from the equivalent AG batch.
 

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