Is it about brewing good beer or being overly friggin cheap-a$$?

To me, like most things in life, they don't come together. Yes, there is cost-effectiveness, but when someone wants to brew with a $15 budget it's like comparing BMW to Lada. You get what you pay for (sorry about ending a sentence with a preposition).

Just my 1199 cents.

B

This should be in drunken ramblings.

I think it's about brewing the best beer you can working inside your individual budget constraints. Not everyone can spring for a 14 gallon Blichmann conical, some of us have to use a couple platic buckets...

Reasons vary by individual. Me? I just spent $2500 on a new brew rig and maybe drink 6 pints a week. It's about good beer, and love of the process/hobby, in my case!

It's about doing whatever you want really. For me it's about brewing the best beer I can, while on my poor college student budget.

For me its brewing good beer cheaply.

BWN said:

For me its brewing good beer cheaply.

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Exactily. I like $9.00 a six pack beer and can brew it for the price of Bush

Great beer for self, friends and potential convertees

It's a little bit of both for me. I just want to make as much as I can and learn and get as good as I can. I never cheap out on ingredients or anything but I also enjoy the fact that I can have this nice beer at my house without spending a mint. Some do it to save money mostly. Sure. Nothing wrong with that either imo.

For me, it's always been about making good beer. These days, it's about making much better beer than many of the craft beers available today.

With craft sixpacks averaging 8 bucks these days, it's nice to be able to brew 10 gallons of Bavarian Hefeweizen for under $15 that's better than any domestic in the store. That's a big plus these days as beer prices continue to rise.

For $15 I can make a large volume of a beer that tastes better than some beers sold at $15 per six pack. That's a win/win.

Depending on how much one brews and drinks, the cost of equipment and other things would make brewing almost any type of beer more expensive than buying it but we could crunch those numbers all night. Id prefer not to.

I know my ingredients costs look cheap, but labor and equipment and it prob costs me like $20 a six pack or something ridiculous like that.

It's a hobby, who knows why I even track costs. I guess for when a buddy asks me how much it cost to make a pint of x. They have never asked.

Well all have our own reasons for getting into this. Some people prefer cheap beer and some people like to make their own beer. And some people just want to make really good beer.

We all found our own reason for doing this.

I do it to make real good beer. The savings is just an added benefit. When I have to buy beer at the store and spend $25 for a case, I always think "I could have made a 10 gallon batch with that money and had a beer that I really love".

It's a hobby for me and the cost really doesn't matter. I've spent thousands on equipment, so I'm sure it would be cheaper and easier to buy beer. This gives me something constructive to do on the weekends, and as a side benefit, produces great beer.

I want good beer at a cheap price, and if it means another hobby then great! So it's a balance of the two.

After 5 brews it's probably cost me 50 bucks a case if I quit right now but of course I have no such plans.

I like beer
I brew what i like
no downside
pete

Its a hobby, not a money saver. Thats all.

My beer and equipment are better than your beer and equipment.

"Brewing good beer" vs. "being overly friggin cheap-a$$"? That's the choice? If so, then I choose "brewing good beer."

But if the choice were put to me differently...

"Throwing good money after bad because you confuse sweet equipment with mastery of process"

vs.

"Making more happen with less"

...then I choose the latter.

For me, it's impossible to separate the idea of skill from that of thrift. If you're not thrifty, you're wasteful, and there's no skill in that.

Only one example in brewing is the practice of washing yeast. I'm excited to be brewing with washed yeast for two reasons: first, because it's thrifty, and second, because if I brewed with a fresh smack pack every time, I'd never get to witness the yeast's performance in its third or fourth generation. That's the kind of magic that attracted me to this hobby.

My #1 goal with this hobby is to make beer that is better than some of my favorite commercial beers.
My #2 goal is to do it with as little money as possible.

As long as #1 is unmet, I will continue to put more money into it wherever I need to. That will make #2 harder to accomplish, but I'm pretty sure that I can accomplish both goals.

I've already made APAs that are comparable to Mirror Pond PA and Sierra Nevada PA, but I still need a little work doing it consistently without mistakes to get the price on my homebrews down.

Now, I've got my sights set on Chimay Tripel. If I can make a tripel that is even close to as good as Chimay, then #2 should be no problem, and I will be extremely happy since it is such an expensive commercial beer that I love to drink!

its gotta be about brewing great beer. even the well known craft brewers lose that "lil' sumthin' extra" that a fresh beer brings to the palette. Even though I buy most things in bulk I still buy from the LHBS when necessary to support local businesses. However, I won't pay $2/lb when i can buy my base grain at $0.50/lb. That's a no-brainer.

I definitely have those "man... i could brew two batches of dank beer with this $" when i spend it on commercial beer. But it's also about the experimentation that comes with being an engineer, and my work is processing material much like a brewery (even though it's human blood plasma).

It's finding that "just right" combination of hops or dialing in the perfect fermentation chamber to give your hefe an awesome profile. Have fun, don't spend tooo much, and enjoy... and always always document your recipes and findings.

Irishpenguin13 said:

Its a hobby, not a money saver. Thats all.

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This!

My buddies always bug me about not taking up golf. But my addictive personality would have me spending thousands of dollars before I could even hit a straight tee shot. Then I'd be paying to drive balls at the range. And spending my Saturday mornings on the links. And have nothing to come home with except aggravation that i couldnt hit the green and a bad tan line.

With brewing as a hobby, I get great beer out of it, get to spend time at home, and even go for a swim sometimes during a brew session!

given those two choices, i'd have to say good beer. but really, it goes beyond that right now. my wife and i are new to brewing, but we were hooked from the start because we're both experimenters. she likes to experiment with different ingredients, different flavors, like a chef. i like to play scientist. brewing brings out the nerd in me. for example, i decided to harvest some yeast from a smuttynose ipa this week just because i read that it was possible. sure enough, the yeast are multiplying, and i'm chubbing up a bit. it's like having a grade school chemistry set that yields beer!

and this pic says it all.

kpr121 said:

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I would say you can do both. You can brew some mighty fine beer for far cheaper than you can buy it. I brew because I am a synthetic chemist who loves beer. I enjoy the process of synthesizing things (be it beer or molecules) and it helps a lot that I can make quality beer for far less than I can buy it for in the liquor store.

All about the beer. I want to see how good I can get at brewing. Total hobsession.

EdWort said:

For me, it's always been about making good beer. These days, it's about making much better beer than many of the craft beers available today.

With craft sixpacks averaging 8 bucks these days, it's nice to be able to brew 10 gallons of Bavarian Hefeweizen for under $15 that's better than any domestic in the store. That's a big plus these days as beer prices continue to rise.

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thought i was doing good at 5 gallon for $20. what are you doing to get 10 for $15, and how can i do that?

To me this is about good beer. I get to have craft beer on a tight budget. If you have money to burn then "fire it up."

Huh? What are you asking?

If you got into brewing to save money you are fuct.

-cheers

I do it cuz I am too lazy to go to the store and buy beer

For me, it's about getting styles that I usually have trouble finding in the store. DC is surprisingly sparse for micros, and what is here are all the same - APA, IPA, American Wheat, Stout, and Bock. With homebrewing I can get ESB's, Wee Heavies, Bavarian Weizens, Saisons... the possibilities are vast.

Chia said:

thought i was doing good at 5 gallon for $20. what are you doing to get 10 for $15, and how can i do that?

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Bulk ingredients, reusing and banking yeasts. I can make a hefe even a bit cheaper than that, but I wouldn't manage anywhere near that if I didn't belong to a homebrew club and participate in group buys - grain is dirt cheap when you're able to order 400 bags (50-55lbs each) at a time, and even the fact that the distributor sponsors us with free delivery helps!

That being said, I don't do this to save money. It's an obsession for me, and my goal is to brew the best beer I possibly can, regardless of the cost. Obviously I only have a certain amount of discretionary income though, and if I CAN save money and still get the exact same thing (eg buying in bulk vs buying grain by the pound, participating in group buys, doing - and learning to do - stuff on my own if it's cheaper, etc), then I will... but only because that lets me buy even more homebrew stuff with the same budget!

Heck, I've spent thousands on equipment just this year alone. The guy talking down at people for "confusing shiny equipment with mastery of process" can bite me, because they are nowhere near mutually exclusive. I love the art and creativity just as much as I live the science and engineering, and I feel equally geeked out when I get some shiny new equipment as I do when I'm able to control another part of the process on my own. I've been a gadget geek all my life and DO sink a lot of money into my brewing stuff, but I've always enjoyed doing and solving on my own, as well deliberately working to improve and perfect my methods and processes when it comes to anything I do. I love homebrewing so much largely BECAUSE it's has a strong mix of all of these things — nothing else comes even close, as far as I'm concerned. Ultimately, as I said, my aim IS to brew the best beer I can, and you can nail your process down as perfectly as humanly possible, but your beer can STILL improve with the right equipment, and anybody that suggests otherwise is clearly speaking out of some sort of jealousy.

I suppose that when it comes to the money I spend, I really don't have problems spending a ton of money on fixed costs. Not that I have much of a problem spending money on variable costs either, if I want it for my beer. But I'd RATHER spend on the former than on the latter - ie, putting together a yeast lab/yeast bank instead of buying yeast that I've already bought before, or buying a grain mill in order to save on grain.

Chia said:

thought i was doing good at 5 gallon for $20. what are you doing to get 10 for $15, and how can i do that?

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All grain, buying everything you can in bulk and washing yeast.

Irishpenguin13 said:

Its a hobby, not a money saver. Thats all.

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Exactly.

I found it amusing that this morning when I logged on this thread was number one, and "How to keep it cheap?" was thread number two.

I found it amusing that this morning when I logged on this thread was number one, and "How to keep it cheap?" was thread number two.

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+1 hahaha. I got into this hobby to make and drink good beer. I really do enjoy the process and science of the craft. Finding ways to save some money is an added bonus IMO. I did just build a stainless steel rig so I guess that pretty much shows how much I'm worried about brewing cheap beer.

Clann said:

All grain, buying everything you can in bulk and washing yeast.

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I buy bulk grain and hops to increase my chance of having a fresh properly stored product. It also assures that I can brew what I want, how I want and when I want.

I harvest yeast because the latter generations can produce better beer.

Saving money is at the bottom of the list of “why I brew.” To me, this is the same as the efficiency pissing contest. Just a silly number to hang your hat on. If at the end of the process I have a quality beer in my glass and I had fun getting it there, I’m a happy brewer!








edit to say:
How do I remove the "Cost" column from BeerSmith2?
I don’t even want to look a that $hit.