The owner of my LHBS tried to sell it about 2 years ago, saying that people these days just aren't taking up the hobby like they used to.
I doubt, however, that the price of craft beer has anything to do with people trying homebrewing. I've never met a homebrewer who took up the hobby to save money.
Personally, I see a very tight connection between craft breweries and homebrewing, in the sense that while not all craft-beer enthusiasts are homebrewers, I think it's safe to say that all homebrewers are craft-beer enthusiasts, and frequent breweries in their area.
What I'm curious about is whether there is a correlation between the number of homebrewers in a region and the number of breweries in that region. Are there more homebrewers in areas where there are a lot of breweries, or fewer? (Or maybe there is no correlation, which would also be interesting...)
I feel bad the way I give my LHBS much less business than I used to. But they simply did not even attempt to compete with the online distributors in terms of quality and selection. The only thing they had going for them was that I could phone in an order and pick it up that day. They stagnated big time.
I know some people in poorer parts of Canada whos parents homebrewed presumably to just make crappy pale lager equivalents for less money. My grandma apparently made beer and wine and I know she did it to be frugal. This would have been 1940s to 1960s i believe.
There definitely must be a correlation between craft beer or style availability and homebrewing. I will always remember my first real "wow this beer is something more than i expected from a beer" experience was unibroue maudite. started researching other "great" beers online, and noting i didn't have access to a lot of styles at all, i considered how they might be made and yeah. If I had extreme access to more beers I might have been slower to get into homebrewing. We have never really had great access to the great american microbrews you guys have known for 20 years now and still barely do.
What Brewbama might have added in his answer to his Granddaughter is that he probably makes a number of beers that can't be purchased for any price. I know that is the case for me, hardly anything I brew has a comparable option available to be purchased locally.
I also am a die-hard Maker/ DIYer, and frequently more frugal than I might ought to be. FWIW, I recently added up everything I spent over the previous 12 months in order to brew [including a new, larger BK], and divided by the number of bottles or beer that produced and discovered that it cost me just < $0.59 @ bottle, not including the cost of natural gas and tap water . Most of my beers have an O.G. of 60ish or higher, so it's not like I'm making a lot of cheapy NAILs. My guess is that if I were to go back and add up everything I've spent on equipment, ingredients and books since I resumed brewing ~ 5 years ago the per bottle cost would be pretty close to last year's cost. The last batch I bottled put me over 9,500 bottles to date, which at $0.60 @ bottle would be $5,700 spent - I'm pretty sure I've spent less than that. Of course if I assumed that my labor had even nominal value the cost per bottle would go through the roof.
That's a really cheap price you have there, those are 330ml(12oz?) bottles i assume? i go with 500mls and my price is usually about $1.05-$1.50 per 500ml bottle for cheapest to most expensive beers i make. i'm actually focusing less on unit cost as i get older, but i always record it, as i love bragging "yup this imperial stout was only $1.25" would be 5 bucks at the store, etc.
re: "cheap" nails. i tried doing some math on how cheap i could potentially go while making a beer that was still possibly drinkable and purposeful (has alcohol), and it just wasnt that much savings to make a decidely bad beer vs making an actually decent one.
to save money and still make good beer:
-low ibu or very high AA hops
-dry yeast
-low OG but good speciality grains to cover up 2row
Topic: considering the increasing price of craft beer, its amazing that... (Read 4961 times)
