AKA “Can I save money homebrewing my own beer?”

Where I live, in Ontario, Canada, the average price of a case of 24 beers is $34.95 or roughly $1.46 per 355ml beer. If you want to drink some craft beer instead you need to be prepared to pay quite a bit more. So ever since I started this fun hobby I’ve been interested in tracking my homebrew costs so that I can compare those to what buying the equivalent amount of commercial beer from the store would cost. That way I can definitely answer the question “can I save money homebrewing my own beer?”.

Homebrew costs over first 10 11 brews

Before I begin I feel like I need to add a few caveats to my numbers.

When I jumped into this hobby I dove in pretty hard and so I ended up buying quite a bit of the optional, quality of life, pieces of equipment that you don’t technically need to make good beer. I would put things like an immersion chiller, extra fermentation bucket, magnetic stir plate, and even a mash tun on that list. This means that my “sunk” homebrew equipment costs aren’t the absolute lowest they could be.

Not only that but I was also fortunate enough to receive a substantial amount of this equipment as gifts and so my true out of pocket equipment expenses are actually much lower. However I wanted to track my numbers as if I had purchased everything at full price so that I could make a somewhat accurate comparison against buying commercial beer.

So with all that said in order to make things a bit more clear I’m going to show some of the numbers below with and some without the upfront cost of the equipment.

The Highlights

Overall Totals Equipment Cost $674.72 Homebrew Cost $393.19 Total 355ml Beers Brewed 419

My total spend over my first 11 brews was $674.72 for equipment and $393.19 on homebrew ingredients (gain, hops, yeast) and consumables (StarSan, muslin bags, etc.).

Per Batch Averages Average (Ingredients) Cost $26.52 Average Yield 38 x 355ml bottles

I personally find it difficult to understand exactly “how much” beer a gallon is so I’ve been tracking my production yield in terms of something more manageable: a single standard bottle of beer.

Per Bottle Averages Average 355ml Bottle Cost (With Equipment Cost) $2.55 Average 355ml bottle Cost (Without Equipment Cost) $0.70

As you can see from above with the upfront costs of all of my equipment (again this includes the full price of things that I’ve gotten as gifts) my per bottle cost is currently around $2.55. However if you ignore the equipment costs for a moment that actual beer cost drops significantly down to about 70 cents!

Other Tracked Items Reused Harvested Yeast $13.49 saved

I’ve only recently gotten into overbuilding my starters and washing yeast. So far I’ve only been able to reuse the yeast a small number of times but even that has saved me from having to buy $13.49 worth of new yeast.

Breaking it Down

Interested in seeing what these numbers look like on a per batch basis?

Comparing it to the Big Guys

Alright so with all of that out of the way how do things compare against the “big guys”? What would it have cost me to buy the equivalent amount of beer from the store? What, if anything, is my break even point?

# of 355ml Bottles Homebrew Commercial 0 $776.17 $0.00 30 $808.15 $43.69 70 $830.00 $101.94 105 $870.65 $152.91 140 $893.20 $203.88 177 $916.21 $257.76 221 $939.70 $321.83 259 $961.55 $377.17 307 $1,002.81 $447.07 339 $1,023.71 $493.67 376 $1,048.74 $547.55 419 $1,067.91 $610.17

So when will I break even? Well according to Excel’s handy FORECAST function it looks like it’ll be around 1,137 x 355ml bottles of beer. And just for fun I decided to figure out what the “break even” point was if you take out all of the equipment costs. That’s obviously much lower at only 127 x 355ml botles of beer.

Conclusions

So what did we learn? Well I’ve learned that in general the materials costs of homebrewing beer so relatively low that the only substantial deciding factor on the question of “can I save money homebrewing my own beer?” is how much equipment you end up buying. Even in my case where the upfront costs of the equipment were relatively high I will still break even and end up saving money in the long term, it’s just a matter of how quickly you can get there.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading through this post and I plan to continue this series going forward as I keep tracking my homebrew costs. If you have any questions about the numbers I’ve presented above please feel free to ask 🙂

Update: A follow up post to this, titled Economics of Homebrewing Part 2, can be found here.