Home Brewing to Save Money (and have fun)
April 16, 2009 – 11:48 pm by Lindsay
If you have any interest in drinking alcoholic beverages, home brewing is something to look into for oh so many reasons….
First off, it’s fun and cool and lets you create a lot of tasty concoctions you can’t buy in the store. Second, it can actually save you money if you regularly purchase quality wine or beer. Third, if you believe the economy is collapsing, peak oil is coming, and the modern world as we know it is ending in your lifetime, knowing how to brew could be a useful skill. Reasons one and two are reason enough for me to pursue the hobby. Okay, just number one sold me.
What you can make at home?
Technically you could make just about anything, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can damage yourself trying to make something like vodka (apparently a lot of those old prohibition bootleggers went blind from their concoctions).
Beer and wine are the big things that most home brewers try (no danger of blindness or other evil injuries from this stuff–the worst that’s going to happen is you make something unpalatable). Hard ciders are also popular and a perfect use for all those apples on your fruit trees. Mead (honey-based wine) is also easy (perhaps the easiest) to make at home and the first thing I tried. If you’re thinking of becoming a backyard beekeeper, mead can be the perfect alcoholic beverage to make at home since the main ingredient can be acquired straight from the hive!
How much does it cost to get started, and will you really save money?
While home brewing can save you money, it is one of those things that does have a start up cost. Still, it’s not that bad considering most of the stuff can be used again and again.
For less than $200, you can find kits that include carboys, siphoning equipment, cleaning tools, sanitizers, and pretty much everything you need to get started. If you keep an eye on Craigslist, you may be able to find someone selling used equipment too. I’ve picked up a couple of big glass carboys at a great price that way.
As for the ingredients themselves, it doesn’t take much. For wine, you just need yeast (very cheap), sugar, and fruit juice/concentrate, or a kit (which is essentially juice concentrate). Okay, your recipe might call for a few additives (for inhibiting bacteria growth, clarifying the wine, etc.), but they’re cheap too.
Beer requires different but no less affordable ingredients (I’m gluten-intolerant myself, so I’ve never made beer, but you can find plenty of how-to videos on YouTube and forums online to answer all your questions). Considering how much you get from a 5 gallon batch (that’s 25 standard-size 750ml wine bottles or 60 12 ounce beer bottles!), it really can be a worthwhile hobby and save you some money once you have the equipment and hit your stride.
The whole process becomes even more economical when you grow your own fruit (beer people, you can grow your own grains and such too). Grapes grow in many climates (there are even some that can make it in my soggy Pacific Northwest), and you can use lots of other fruits for making wine too. A couple of apple trees can give you plenty of fruit for apple wine or hard apple cider (even if your apple varieties don’t taste that great for munching off the tree, they may be just dandy for cider). And those blackberry bushes growing alongside the bike trail? Take a bucket, fill it up, and make blackberry wine (awesome!) for nothing more than the cost of some sugar and a few ingredients you’ll have on hand anyway once you start making your own wine regularly. We’ve already talked about gathering your own honey for mead. People have even made wine from weeds (just Google dandelion wine if you don’t believe me). If you don’t have any fruit trees or bushes in the yard, maybe it’s time to plant some.
Another way to save money is to reuse old commercial wine and beer bottles (the beer brewers I’ve talked to suggest only using non-screw-top beer bottles). If you’re daunted at the prospect of polishing off 25 bottles of wine so you’ll have a place to put your exquisite strawberry wine, just tell your friends about your new hobby and ask them to save bottles for you. You’d be amazed at how many people will show up with bags of bottles hoping for a sample from your prize batch.
We’ll talk more about home brewing in future posts, so check back for more information!
Tags: beer, Home Brewing, mead, wine
2 Responses to “Home Brewing to Save Money (and have fun)”
Amazing post, I tweeted this for you. Very comprehensive – though I have to say I don’t drink much myself, but this is the way to go if you can do it well – I hear it takes some practice to do right.
By MoneyEnergy on Apr 17, 2009
Thanks, MoneyEnergy! It takes a couple batches to get everything down, but then it’s really pretty easy. There are some great how-to videos on YouTube (I’ll have to do a post linking to some of them at some point)–you can certainly learn from a book, but it’s helpful to see someone else doing it too.
By admin on Apr 17, 2009