I'd love to see a complete cost breakdown. Skip the equipment investment in your case.
Ingredients per batch.
Energy Cost to heat.
Water to chill.
Time spent planning.
Time spent brewing.
Time spent testing and bottling.
Well as I stated on the last page:
Even if I did consider my labor, every time I brew I probably only do an actual hours worth of work. The things that take the biggest time (boil, mash), I'm sitting in the other room studying. If I paid myself $20 (the cost of the batch) for that 1 hour of labor, I'm still saving at least $13 over store bought. Now of course everyone will say "oh but you didn't consider electricity and water!". My water is $15/month, and electric is about $80/month. I only brew 2 times or so a month, so it probably costs me $6 combined, tops.
So we're looking at at about $44 per batch tops for something less expensive and higher quality, which serves to just make it even less expensive comparatively. The $6 for electricity and water to brew 2 or so batches is a very, very liberal estimate as well, seeing as 99% of that water is taken up by showers/dishwasher/laundry, and 99% of the electricity is taken up by fridge, oven, laundry, dishwasher, computer, etc. As I've said before, you might be able to get some Pearl or Lost Lake for cheaper than you can brew, but who wants to drink that? I don't drink that, so you can't bring that up as a point in your defense....I'm not going to drink horse piss because it's cheaper. Last time I checked anyway, after taxes, even PBR is $12 for a 12pk. The point of the argument is, you can drink much higher quality stuff for the cost of horrible beer that you otherwise wouldn't be drinking anyway.
The argument that you need to "pay yourself" is totally irrelevant for a multitude of reasons. Like I've said multiple times, you don't "pay yourself" for cooking dinner as opposed to going out. You don't "pay yourself" to cut the lawn as opposed to hiring someone to do it. But hey, since there is some issue with seeing that it is asinine to apply that concept to brewing only and not to
everything else, I'll play. I'm med a student, so I don't have a job. Since I'm not otherwise employed, I won't be making any money regardless. I guess technically I could go sack groceries, but even with that, you can't set your own schedule for whenever you want, not working for weeks, then just showing up for 2 hours, etc. The flexibility just isn't there. Not to mention, say you have a PhD and you teach, so you work set hours. Are you going to go sack groceries? I don't think so. You're time is more valuable than that if you're that accomplished. Now I'm doing something more important; I sacked groceries when I was 15.
I can tell no matter what, this is just going to get further into the minutae. Someone is just going to be complaining to consider more and more and more, even when it is totally irrelevant. It's like telling a brewery they aren't calculating the "real" cost because they aren't taking into account the everchanging mental state of every single one of their employees, which at times decreases productivity and costs them more than accounted for, or that since they buy their grain in massive bulk, some of it is really bug parts and other non-grain things that they really need to figure out the exact percentage of to know how much it's really costing them. Use your imagination.