[Saltheart]

Reading some of the posts , it came to mind what an advantage homebrewers and microbrewers have over the huge commercial brewers. Lets use a homebrew as an example. lets say you are doing 10 gallons. To the grain you ad say 6 pounds of specialty grains. they typically go for about $1.30 a pound. so 6 x $1.30 is $7.80. Now I can assuer you that adding say 2 ounds of carapils , 2 pounds of crystal dark, a pound of chocolate malt and 1/2 pound of Belgian special B and a half pound of Roasted Barley to the say 20 pounds of pale malt used to brew the most basic 10 gallons of beer will hugely change the style and taste towards the good side if you are a fan of full bodied , malty tasting beers.

10 gallons is 1280 ounces or about 100 bottles of beer. so $7.80/100 means .078 dollars or 7.8 cents per beer to totally change the beer to a more gourmet style. But the bottom line for the homebrewer is $7.80.

Now think about bud brewing 10 million bottles. At .078 per bottle X 10,000,000..the cost to bud to add the same ingredients to improve the taste would be $780,000. That's a lot of money. Now yes they will get a quantity discount on the ingredients but it is in fact hard for them to up the price against the other huge national brewers so its still a big cost to them and comes off the bottom line.

So for $7.80 cents , you can do to 100 bottles of beer what would cost a huge brewer about 3/4 of a million dollars.

This is one of the biggest reasons to brew your own. I hear people talk about how they can brew 50 bottles of a basic homebrew for less than the cost of 2 cases of Bud. This is true but to me , real pay off of brewing your own , is the ability to brew the best tasting beer for less than 10 cents a bottle more than brewing Bud yourself.

In the example above , if you replace the roasted barley (makes it a stout) with the equivalent amount of say malto dextrin for the same cost , you can brew a contest winning porter.

Now the next thing to look at is the total cost , not just the incremental cost. You can buy pale malt for about 80 cents a pound. so the 20 pounds above si $16. add the $7.80 for the specialty grain , add 4 OZ of the best hops Say genuine East Kent Goldings for a Porter) at about $1.50 per ounce and the cost of the beer is $29.80 for the 100 bottles.

That's 29.8 cents a bottle for an award winning porter. I don't mean like a winner in a 6 person local homebrew contest , I mean in a winner in a National Brewing contest or even the famous World Homebrew Contest. Now you cannot buy that beer anywhere and if you could buy it at all , it would be at least $3 a bottle , at the package store.

So for 1/10 of the cost of buying it , you can brew yourself an outstanding bottle of beer. Home brewing is definitely a hobby all beer lovers should look into. Now its not for everybody. Some people have no space , too many kids to watch , too busy at work , etc , etc. But if you have the time for a hobby , its a pretty good one!