How Cheap Can You Go?

CornyKegs 728
Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
The best way to save money on beer is to make friends with home brewers. :)

There are gallons of beer that I just pour down the drain after a couple months when it starts to stale because I don't drink it fast enough.
 
bracconiere said:
motorcycle in your avatar, you know their dangerous?
Click to expand...
Dangerous? They can be. It depends on how much common sense one uses, basically. Also, the safety measures to be taken are made well known to potential riders; some just don't choose to apply them. The vast majority of riders who get whacked don't follow these basics.
 
RPh_Guy said:
The best way to save money on beer is to make friends with home brewers. :)

There are gallons of beer that I just pour down the drain after a couple months when it starts to stale because I don't drink it fast enough.
Click to expand...

i'd even make it easy for you, and just bring some 2-liter soda bottles to fill! ;)
 
@GrowleyMonster , keep us posted. did you get a hold of neil at jeferson feed? and how much was a sack of whole barley, if you did?

and i've had my feed store order 5 gallon tubs of molasses too!
 
RPh_Guy said:
The best way to save money on beer is to make friends with home brewers. :)

There are gallons of beer that I just pour down the drain after a couple months when it starts to stale because I don't drink it fast enough.
Click to expand...
You are doing it wrong. Supposed to be pouring it down your gullet not the drain.
 
bracconiere said:
@GrowleyMonster , keep us posted. did you get a hold of neil at jeferson feed? and how much was a sack of whole barley, if you did?

and i've had my feed store order 5 gallon tubs of molasses too!
Click to expand...

No I spent the day trading and working on GF's car, trying to chase down some hard to find parts or better yet find someone who would do the work. Other than a dealership. Finally found an ebay seller so I don't have to hit the junkyards tomorrow, so I will call or visit.

Feed grade molasses would probably be just the thing for some home distilled rum, that is, I mean, ethanol fuel. Probably cheap enough.
 
bracconiere said:
@GrowleyMonster , keep us posted. did you get a hold of neil at jeferson feed? and how much was a sack of whole barley, if you did?

and i've had my feed store order 5 gallon tubs of molasses too!
Click to expand...

Neil said the last time they bought any, it was in 40lb sacks, and they sold for $39.95, and that was three years ago. I am pretty sure I can beat that elsewhere. At a buck a pound, I don't think it is worth it.
 
GrowleyMonster said:
At a buck a pound, I don't think it is worth it.
Click to expand...

holy jesus! you can get malted barley shipped from more beer for a buck a pound or less, if you go with viking! i've got 3 feed stores around here, 2 carry it in stock, for either 12.99 a 50lb bag, or 13.99....i think the other one quoted me something like 9 bucks, but i'd rather not trouble them to order it....even when i was in N.Cal..the feed store would order it for something like 15....

i called double m too on my journey, they just said S.O.L.....so i think you're out a luck with home malting....we gotta start thinking, adjuncts....i'd say at this point brew a few batches with viking malt, then see how much rice you can get away with, without having trouble with the sparge.....or find a garden shop that sells 50lb bales of rice hulls, i used to be able to buy a 50lb bale at the garden store for $8....but sounds like you're not living in brewing friendly territory....

edit: what's your brewing equip like? when i brewed my rice beer, i'd put the rice in the sparge water and leave my 15 gallon pot in the oven overnight at 200f...because rice doesn't gel as low as barley starch, look into cereal mashes....

edit 2: this is what i expect...

https://nrsworld.com/products/barle...-2-viJLZ9h37vh30xeBCbqmGoNmrMJoIaAl6QEALw_wcB
 
Last edited:
You should also try the local brewpubs and nanos - the smaller the better. Our local brewpub will sell me sacks at his cost so it's $30-$35 for a 50lb sack. The bigger brewers are too busy to bother. It also probably helps that I don't have a LHBS so they know they aren't stepping on anyone else's toes.
 
Last edited:
bracconiere said:
holy jesus! you can get malted barley shipped from more beer for a buck a pound or less, if you go with viking! i've got 3 feed stores around here, 2 carry it in stock, for either 12.99 a 50lb bag, or 13.99....i think the other one quoted me something like 9 bucks, but i'd rather not trouble them to order it....even when i was in N.Cal..the feed store would order it for something like 15....

i called double m too on my journey, they just said S.O.L.....so i think you're out a luck with home malting....we gotta start thinking, adjuncts....i'd say at this point brew a few batches with viking malt, then see how much rice you can get away with, without having trouble with the sparge.....or find a garden shop that sells 50lb bales of rice hulls, i used to be able to buy a 50lb bale at the garden store for $8....but sounds like you're not living in brewing friendly territory....

edit: what's your brewing equip like? when i brewed my rice beer, i'd put the rice in the sparge water and leave my 15 gallon pot in the oven overnight at 200f...because rice doesn't gel as low as barley starch, look into cereal mashes....

edit 2: this is what i expect...

https://nrsworld.com/products/barle...-2-viJLZ9h37vh30xeBCbqmGoNmrMJoIaAl6QEALw_wcB
Click to expand...

Yeah that's what I figured. For the extra work of malting I want to be rewarded with savings, not punished by paying extra. So for now, malt and adjuncts in the mash are the way I will go when I switch to grain, though next time I go up to TX I will check around the ranch supply shops for grain by the 50lb and maybe then make some malt. For now, ordinary 2 row barley malt and adjuncts. Rice, oats, corn, wheat, whatever.

For brewing equipment I have a 5gal stainless kettle, no spigot. Two 6gal plastic fermenting buckets. Two 6.5gal Big Mouth Bubblers. A good hot gas stove in the kitchen, a coonass cooker type propane burner out in the shop and I think about a 30 gallon crawfish pot, if I need it. No mash tun yet. I got time to come up with one cause I still got 5 jugs of LME left and a couple of recipe kits in the closet. Thinking about a water cooler and a false bottom setup. No wort chiller but thinking about a pump and jockey box type arrangement with 50' of 3/8" copper tubing. Or maybe no pump, single gravity pass through jockey box and 1/4" tubing. Salt in the jockey box ice bath to take the temp down to about 30deg or so in the ice bath. I will throttle the flow to adjust the temp if it gets too cold at wide open. Currently I just add ice and soak the kettle in an overflowing deep sink.

GF pays the gas bill. I have to buy propane, so there is a strong financial incentive to keeping batch size down to 5gal and doing it on the stove. She tolerates it cause I do all the cooking. She can't cook worth a damn and still works full time. I am retired and have lots of time on my hands, supposedly LOL.

I have bottling gear but it is easier to just keg it. I have two corny kegs and thinking about getting one more, so I can fill two for the wedding and still have one in the fridge for drinking at home. A trailer-size fridge with freezer on top, gives me room for my yeast, CO2 tank and two corny kegs and my LME down below, and my hops and beer glasses in the freezer up top. Tap faucet is mounted directly on the keg's out post, inside the fridge. GF knows how to operate it. So that's all my gear at present. Trying not to buy too much more stuff.

<EDIT> I just looked at the link. Yeah that price is more like it. Works out to about 36 cents a pound plus shipping. I bet I can beat that up in the hill country though.
 
Anybody tried using this yeast for ales?
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Star-980...ords=yeast&qid=1570989281&s=industrial&sr=1-4

A pack of US-05 costs about three bucks. Saved yeast costs nothing but has a slight risk attached to it. This is ten bucks for a POUND. Should be enough for about 75 to 90 gallons of beer, right? Yeah it will age out before I use it all, but it would still give me a year supply of yeast for ten bucks instead of $36 or more. The US-05 has worked well for me, but if I go all grain then the yeast costs start to become significant at $3 per pack.

Reviews are mixed, but none of them awful. Some report using it for beer, cider, etc and no complaints about taste. A couple say oh no, it is for distilling only, and gives beer a bad taste. These might just be parroting conventional wisdom.
 
i've used baker's yeast...$10 for 2lb's....flocculation was my problem, wouldn't settle out of the beer....ended up pouring and dumping half my beer out the glass, because it was yeasty....decided going back to re pitching nottingham was the best bet....
 
Not just for fun. For beer. No, I am seriously considering it. It is distiller's yeast, not baking yeast. Not bred for use in undistilled drink. The distillation process can get rid of a lot of methyl-ethy-hydroxy-badstuff made by a yeast. In beer, everything bad that the yeast poops or pees out into the beer, stays there. Anyway, no, having tried to make wine with bread yeast and ending up with some stuff that was very drainworthy, I have no intentions of ever trying to make beer with bread yeast, even though beer is basically just decomposed liquid bread. I know that the conventional wisdom that the parrots will all give me is no, just no, don't do it, but I would rather hear no, don't do it, from someone who has actually tried it. There are a lot of see-n-say parrots on the internet just repeating each other in a roundy-round circlejerk fashion. Sometimes they are right as rain, though no credit to them for originality. Sometimes they are not exactly right.

Meh. I will try it later, after I have my recipes working out consistently, unless someone chimes in with actual experience.

TBH, I am actually leaning slightly away from home malting. I am thinking big sacks of 2 row and some adjunct grains will be the cheap but still practical way to go, for me, for now.

Too bad the back yard isn't big enough to plant a barley field. LOL!
 
Discounted hops in bulk around a dollar an ounce and 50 pd sack of malted grain for 34. That makes grain 70 cents a lb and hops 1 dollar an ounce. So for a beer with 10blbs 2 row and two oz of hops it would be

7 grain
2 hops
5 yeast

Thats about 14 dollars for 5g and 9 if yeast is reused. Basically a light beer. After doing the math the savings if you malted yourself and used feed grain would save 4 dollars on the above. And hops homegrown would save 2. I decided the 4 dollars savings of grain a batch wasnt worth the work to malt, and that wasnt another fun hobby i wanted to take on. I also decided that living my life by how much everything cost was ruining and diminishing my life. I learned that a lot of times the savings didnt overcome the problems associated with being cheap like bad food quality, meth lab motel rooms, terrible flught times and logistics, buying twice cause first failed or was inadequate, lack of functionality, breaking out from razor burn, bad service, bad experiences, and on and on. If someone wants to go through life eating the cheapest food, staying in the cheapeast hotel rooms, going out to the cheapest restaurants, waiting in the longest lines, etc...have at it, im out. Ill be at the restaurant next door that costs 2 dollars more a burger and has 120 beer taps (true story of a switch i made) and has amazing food and views. I have not regretted the switch in paradigms one bit. My only regret was it took me to long to figure this out. One of the things i am most grateful to hbt for is helping me see that the cheapest option wasnt always the best for me (it rarely is).
GrowleyMonster said:
How cheap can a 5 gallon batch be made for? I mean, pulling out all the stops, going all grain, homegrown hops, all that. Maybe even malting the barley. No more than two fermentables in the bill. Keeping it simple, but drinkable.
Click to expand...
 

Similar threads

Clint Yeastwood
Can you Make a Really Good Lager with Corn?
Replies
15
Views
2K
DuncB
D
gjolivo
Fermentation loss with fruit puree
Replies
11
Views
792
gjolivo
gjolivo
J
How much water is needed to make your wort
2 3
Replies
89
Views
3K
balrog
balrog
B
Terrible brew
Replies
25
Views
1K
Craiginthecorn
C
C
Ugh. Some how I managed to add 0.75 lbs acid malt, not 0.75 oz. What is this going to do to my milk stout
2
Replies
46
Views
2K
Christoff
C

Latest posts

Back
Top