Group Purchase/Bulk Buy

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Homercidal

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Ok, describe what is typical in a bulk purchase, or group buy. Say I know a few people who are into AG and we wanted to save some money on our grains, so we pool together, and....

How much are we going to have to purchase?
Packaging?
Shipping?
Place of purchase?

How much can we save if 10 of us went in together to get a skid, as opposed to just buying a bag each at the LHBS?
 
Having just done this in October, you get up to 42 bags per pallet, it will cost somewhere around $1700 and end up averaging $.55 / lb with freight. You can look at the spreadsheet I made to manage our orders to get some ideas. I had to get a truck with liftgate as I didn't have a dock and I bought more grain than anyone else, I couldn't transport it all in one trip. That added to the cost of freight, if you have access to a dock it will save quite a bit. Its really worth it, we'll be doing it again once the group starts running out of grain. Not to mention, how cool it is to have a huge a$$ pallet of grain in your garage. :D I ordered from North Country Malt in NY, I think they have a distro in the midwest somewhere as well. Ignore the homebrewer pricing, call and talk to them about ordering a pallet to get the bulk pricing. They sell hops too, but in 44lb blocks for about $900 each. =P They also have additives and cleansers, etc, we got some star san.

- HomeBrewTalk Gallery

http://packetpimp.org/grainbuy.html

http://www.northcountrymalt.com/index.html
 
Homer,
I have never done one on grain, but I can give you a rough idea on it.

Minimum purchases are going to be determined by where you buy from. The local place I buy my grain from brings it in a little over 1000 lbs at a time.

Packaging is "typically" included as part of shipping when dealing with truck freight.

Shipping is likely to be roughly a couple hundred bucks - the big cost is to get the freight truck going from point a to point b, the amount of stuff you order doesn't alter it a whole lot. For instance, me truck freighting in 8 recliners cost almost the same as a friend who truck freighted in a grill. Both around $175.

I can't help much with a place of purchase, but check out North County Malt Group.

I recently saw a bulk buy where they had the per bag cost down around $25 or so for 50lbs. I am pretty sure it was bigger than a 10 bag buy though.
 
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