At the end of my last post, I went through a short description of the brewing process and the equipment required. In this post, we’ll take a look at the equipment and ingredients I’ve gathered, their cost, and do some math to see what the per bottle price will work out to be.

Let’s start with the ingredients kit. Eventually I hope to experiment with sourcing my own individual ingredients, but of course it would be foolish to not start with a kit. I quick google brought be to Northern Brewer’s website, and specifically to their Zombie Dirt recipe.

Now would be a good time to mention that I tried home brewing one time before, a couple years ago. That time I also started with an ingredients kit. As I’m a big fan of brown ales, and so I figured I would give that a go. Unfortunately, it ended up being very much a no-go. It didn’t carbonate well, and the flavor just seemed off. It wasn’t spit-out-of-your-mouth bad, but not enjoyable or something to be proud of. I’m not quite sure what the issue was, but not having a working thermometer probably had something to do with it.

Fast forward a couple years, and for my second attempt I wanted something with a higher likelihood of tasting at least good enough to drink. I settled on an IPA, with my thinking being that mainly it just needs to taste hoppy, and that seemed easy enough.

From my previous attempt, I had the following equipment:

• 2 Gallon BrewDemon Conical Fermenter: $45.00
• Bottle Filler and Hose: $5.00
• Hydrometer and Testing Jar: $13.5
• 13″ Stainless Steel Spoon: $6.18
• Kitchen and Food Scale: $14.42
• Bottle Cleaning Brush: $7.99
• 12 Quart Stainless Steel Stock Pot: $14.92
• 2x 6.5 Gal Buckets: $20
• 120 ct bottle caps: $6
• Bottle capper: $15.99
• Starsan sanitizer: $3.99

This time around, I added the following:

• Deep Fry Thermometer: $12.99
• Outdoor Fryer Cooker Stand: $34.97
• Zombie Dirt Citra IPA 2 Gallon Beer Recipe Kit $36.99

All of these items were used this time around. I will break them up into two categories. Equipment and supplies. Supplies will be anything that is used up in the process (i.e. bottle caps, ingredients,etc).

Equipment total: $190.96

Supplies total: $46.98

I will brewing two gallons, which equates to just about 24 12oz bottles. Given this, I will prorate the bottle caps, and Starsan (assume I used 1/8 of the bottle) for an adjusted supplies total of $38.69.

This works out to $1.61 a bottle, or $9.67 a six pack. This is probably a pretty average price for a six pack of craft beer you can buy at the grocery store. But remember, this doesn’t take into account any of the equipment cost.

There are a couple ways you could look at the equipment cost. One way would be to divide the cost over a certain number of brews. It’s not obvious what the useful life of the equipment is, and obviously it could vary from item to item, but I don’t see any reason it couldn’t be good for 100 brews. That’s $1.90 per brew, which bumps the per bottle price up to $1.69 and the six pack price up to $10.15.

However, I think it’s highly unlikely I would brew two gallons at a time with this fermenter for 100 brews in a row. Likely after a dozen or so, I would want to upgrade the fermenter. But rather than get into the weeds on all the different ways to apportion the equipment cost, I prefer to look at it a different way.

I prefer to view the equipment as a sunk cost, and only concern myself with the marginal cost of every brew. In other words, the equipment is a capital expenditure, and the supplies are cost of goods sold. Of course, none of this takes into consideration my time, which alone would make this the most expensive retail beer in the state.