Recipes

[LiquidLunch5211]

New home brewer here,
I was wondering, for the future, if it is cheaper and wiser to buy ingreadiants in bulk from my local brew store? I have only made 2 home brews at this point and I purchased the clone recipes, to get my feet wet, and the prices were between $45-$55. Is this expensive? I was wondering how other home brewers plan their recipes out or am I safe in brewing it this way for a while?
Cheers!

 

[msa8967]

Are you doing all-grain recipes, partial mash or extract recipes.

 

[LiquidLunch5211]

Are you doing all-grain recipes, partial mash or extract recipes.

I think extract

 

[the_bird]

You can buy extract in bulk. If you do, you probably want to buy dry extract, it holds up better than liquid.

You may still want to buy your specialty grains (crystal malts and whathaveyou) as-needed. If you've got a mill, you can buy in bulk but once they're crushed you really should use them up in a few weeks.

Hops, you can buy those in bulk if you've got storage, you want to keep them cold and ideally vacuum-sealed although I've just kept mine frozen in ziplock backs and been fine. That commits you to using one mostly one or two hop varieties in your recipes, which is probably not what you want to do right now.

But, extract is the bulk of your cost, I'd price out some bulk extra-light DME. You'd want to get an extra-light DME since that can be used as the base malt for any recipe (you'll get the color for darker beers through the specialty malts).

 

[LiquidLunch5211]

Like you said the DME grains irish moss and bittering all come in the clone kit. I know I am new and should stick to something easy but I keep thinking if I don't buy a clone boxed recipe it could become a bit cheaper for me. Agree?

 

[msa8967]

I don't have a local homebrew store near me but the local liquer stores does sell some items and their kits start around $40. If you want to try to save some money but continue to do ready preparred kits until you get more experience I would recommend looking at doing some online buying. I have bought from Midwest Brewing, Northern Brewer and Austin Home Brew Supply. All of these are very good merchants in my opinion. Both Northern Brewer and Austin HBS charge a flat rate of $7.99 for shipping which means it is best to buy multiple kits and/or supplies in one order. Austin HBS has a deal that if you buy $100 or more then shipping is free. Most of the extract kits from these dealers are less than $40 and htey have many clone kits if you are interested.

This is not meant to say you should not support your local HBS, but I did want to mention an alternative to buying from them. If there was a good HBS within 30 min of where I live then I would buy more from them then I do mail order but there is no solid HBS w/in 75 miles from where I live.

 

[LiquidLunch5211]

I don't have a local homebrew store near me but the local liquer stores does sell some items and their kits start around $40. If you want to try to save some money but continue to do ready preparred kits until you get more experience I would recommend looking at doing some online buying. I have bought from Midwest Brewing, Northern Brewer and Austin Home Brew Supply. All of these are very good merchants in my opinion. Both Northern Brewer and Austin HBS charge a flat rate of $7.99 for shipping which means it is best to buy multiple kits and/or supplies in one order. Austin HBS has a deal that if you buy $100 or more then shipping is free. Most of the extract kits from these dealers are less than $40 and htey have many clone kits if you are interested.

This is not meant to say you should not support your local HBS, but I did want to mention an alternative to buying from them. If there was a good HBS within 30 min of where I live then I would buy more from them then I do mail order but there is no solid HBS w/in 75 miles from where I live.

Thank you for the advice, I do like to support my LHBS I just thought if they might charge more b/c it is a clone brew already put together. If I could buy everything I needed seperately I would try that instead of buying the pre-packaged clone. Just thought I would throw it out there and see what other people did when they started out.

 

[mfraier]

I would look at AHS. If you are already brewig extract kits with specialty grains you can also step up to mini mash kits and save some $$. The main difference is that you have more grains to steep for a longer time in the mini mash, and you need a pot to sparge the grains.

If you order about 3 kits at a time you get free shipping from AHS, and the quality of the kits is very good.

 

[msa8967]

When I started ordering kits from NB I noticed that the ingredients in the kits were about $1 less than the kits themselves. You could order some bulk ingredients from an online merchant (like dried malt extract, corn sugar) and then buy particular yeast strains and hop varieties from LHBS. This will give you the flexibility to alter a recipe to your own tastes.

 

[birvine]

If you have a Brew-on-Premises nearby you might be able to find LME for a fairly reasonable price and possibly quite fresh since you can buy it as you need it, but make sure their turnover is fairly quick in the store and not sitting there for months and months. You can probably also buy the hops and specialty grains from them, too. In my experience, if I use a kit to brew, the batch of 20 to 23 litres costs me $30 to $40; if I brew from bulk LME the equivalent recipe costs $20 to $30. So yes, a savings. I could save more with all grain recipes, but I'm not to that point yet.

B