Thanks Toxxyc. That's my end goal.
Thought i would pay my school fees on a few brew kits first. It has been very interesting.
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Don't discount the value of time and additional costs like heating, bottling equipment etc to get to the point where you can compare it to a store bought craft beer.
I don't count the value of time. For me it's a hobby, something I enjoy doing. Just like you don't count the cost of hours spent in the bush.
When you go all-grain and you work "sustainably", you can brew for very very cheap. I can break it down easily. For me, the average brew day, brewing an average beer like a Vienna lager, would go and cost something like this:
1. Buy malt. I buy malt in bulk so it works out really cheap. Let's say I want to make an all-Vienna lager, slightly stronger, so I'm going for 4 kilos of Vienna malt. I get around 80% efficiency in my current system, so I'll be looking at around 20 litres of 5% ABV beer. The malt costs me (looking at previous invoice) R78.20.
2. Buy hops. I'm a cheap brewer so I like to use cheap hops for bittering and save the expensive stuff for flavour and aroma additions. Let's say I'm adding a cheap hop like Admiral for bittering. A packet costs R64.77, but I'm only using 12g of that, so cost would be R7,77 for the hops. Flavour/aroma additions will be more hops, and more expensive hops. Something like Saaz, for example. A packet runs for R86.25 and I'll use around 20g for a nice flavour batch. So R17,25 for that, making the total for hops R25.02.
3. Water. Some people (and I've done it as well) use store-bought water like RO water, but I just use tap water. I'm not going to calculate what 25l of water plus another 20l or so for cleaning costs me.
4. Electricity. I run 2 x 2000W elements separately for around 2 hours in total across both. Let's say power is hella expensive at R2,50 per unit, and that the units pull full power when in use and work on worst case scenario, that'll work out to R10 for electricity per batch. Let's double that for the fermentation fridge's work and make it R20.
5. Yeast. I re-use my yeast, usually between 4 and 5 batches per packet. Let's work on R50 per packet (I paid half that for my current lager yeast) and say that's R12.50 per batch.
6. Equipment, consumables, etc. I only sanitize the fermenter and my bottles. A 500ml bottle of Acidisan cost me around R60 many moons ago, and I'm still using it. Let's say it's R10 per batch, worst case, because this stuff is re-usable and and and. Gelatin finings are R26 for enough gelatin to fine 10 batches so that's R2,60 per batch. I don't cap (I use swingtop Grolsch bottles) and a 1kg bag of dextrose for carbonation costs R26,45. I use a bag about 10 times before it's finished, often more, so let's say another R2,65 per batch.
Total cost:
Malt: R78.20
Hops: R25.02
Power: R20
Yeast: R12,50
Misc: R15.25
TOTAL: R150.97 for 20l of Vienna lager. That's a good beer.
That works out to about 40 x 440ml bottles of beer, or around R3,77 per beer, ready to drink. Can't drink more, because health is a thing and getting drunk all the time is stupid, so it's a massive, massive saving. For the price of 12 Castles, I can brew 40 x 440ml bottles of my own beer.
And I can do it cheaper as well. If I drop to a cheaper malt for a more plain beer (like a regular blonde ale) and drop the hops, I can get it in to more like R120 per batch. That's not bad at all.