One cool thing about beer vs wine...

One pays a much smaller premium for really, really fine beer than for really, really fine wine.

Your typical $7 a six pack microbrew is probably roughly equivalent to a $12 bottle of wine.

For convenience, we'll call 12 oz a beer serving a 5 oz a wine serving.

So the $7 micro is $1.17 per serving. The $12 wine is about double that at $2.40 per serving.

The next tier, I'd say, is micro+: beers like, say, Great Divide Titan IPA, that sell for more like $9 per sixer. Thats $1.50 per serving. The equivalent jump in wine is maybe to a $25 dollar bottle ($5 per serving).

You can buy world-class beers for say $12 per 25 oz bottle. That's $6 per serving.

World-class wines are more like $100+ per bottle. That's $20+ per serving.



So at the basic microbrew level, the wine was not quite double the cost per serving.

But at the world-class level, the wine is 3-4 times (or more) as much per serving.

STOP! You are making it waaaay too easy for me to justify buying a case of Orval or something like that

Wines would be just as cheap if you didn't have to age them... if they could just slap a cork on it and ship them on out the door. And, what's more, there's a virtually endless supply of grain, whereas the terroir for really fine grapes is limited.

I like beer as much as the next guy around here but wines aren't expensive just for the sake of being expensive. A lot more goes into them. And, if the work is equal, the cost is about equal..


Remind me again what a bottle of Sam Adams' Utopias sells for? You can get the same effect from two glasses of wine....

Toot said:

Wines would be just as cheap if you didn't have to age them... if they could just slap a cork on it and ship them on out the door. And, what's more, there's a virtually endless supply of grain, whereas the terroir for really fine grapes is limited.

I like beer as much as the next guy around here but wines aren't expensive just for the sake of being expensive. A lot more goes into them. And, if the work is equal, the cost is about equal..

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I'm not dissing wine...

In fact, I was a lover good wine before I became a lover of good beer. But I can only afford a certain tier of wine. I just think it's cool that almost anyone can splurge occaisionally a truly world-class beer if they choose to.

And what's cooler still is that it's not that hard to brew at a similar level. I know people don't believe me when I tell them it is quite easy to brew beer that is as good as or better than the microbews they are drinking. Then they taste my beers and are very surprised. (And I am absolutely confident that there are folks here brewing at a much higher level than I am.)

I can't buy a Belgian Saison at any price in my town. But I can brew an amazingly good 5 gal batch for about $30 or less. Life is good.

cweston said:

I know people don't believe me when I tell them it is quite easy to brew beer that is as good as or better than the microbews they are drinking. Then they taste my beers and are very surprised. (And I am absolutely confident that there are folks here brewing at a much higher level than I am.).

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Heck yeah! That's why I'm cranking out IPAs now. Dogfish Head 90 Minute, while fantastic, is pretty pricey. I can't wait until I'm drinking my own IIPA for much less per bottle.