The day I’ve been waiting for has finally arrived! The sun, which has been weakly shining for weeks, has finally gained enough strength to make it feel like Spring outside. I’ve been hard at work cleaning out our backyard and prepping it to be our summer oasis, and at the end of a day of gardening, there’s nothing I look forward to more than a cold beer (or the landscaping and the beer usually happen concurrently).
One of the appealing features of Halifax is the lively craft brewing scene. I literally have two breweries, a cidery, a distillery, and an independent beer store within a fifteen-minute walk of my house. Unfortunately, as delicious as these various beer are, they’re also expensive, and my budget does not have enough room to indulge in these local purveyors’ wares as much as I’d like.
A reasonable person would just not drink if they couldn’t afford it, but I’m a Maritimer, and beer is kind of a regional pastime here. So instead of spending hundreds of dollars per year on beer, we brew it ourselves for a fraction of the cost.
Brewing Beer to Save Money
First, math!
Beer in Nova Scotia is expensive. According to the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission, a six pack of my favourite beer, Boxing Rock’s Hunky Dory Pale Ale costs $14.50 plus a 15% HST, or $16.67 total, which equals about $8.33 per liter. While we don’t drink as much as we used to, if there was no other alcohol in the house it would be easy for two of us to polish off two six packs per week.
Extrapolating out over 52 weeks, and an innocent penchant for beer could cost us $866.84 per year. If you included parties, special events, camping, etc., that total would probably be even higher.
My husband and I have been making alcohol at home for a long time. We started out making wine back in 2009 (and even made all of the table wine for our wedding) so taking the leap to beer wasn’t a huge jump. Brewing beer ourselves did require a slew of new equipment.
We needed to buy all of the equipment to get started, and we also had grand plans to keg our beer instead of bottle it. That required the purchase of two kegs, two taps, and line sets. We also needed a tank of carbon dioxide to carbonate the beer. All in all, the start-up costs were around $500.
The beer kits themselves cost money too, a typical beer kit costs in the range of $40 – $50 and yields 23 liters of beer, for a price of about $1.95 per liter.
Finally, the kegerator, which is a refrigerator that we use to keep the kegs cold. You could use a small mini fridge and a “picnic” tap which requires you to open the door to pour yourself a cold one. We took things a little further and retrofitted a stand-up refrigerator to have lines exiting the side of the fridge and connecting to two taps mounted on the wall. It’s a more efficient way to do it, but it does require you to hack apart a refrigerator. The fridge we used was in the basement and came with the house, so there was no upfront cost there.
The kegs inside the refrigerator in our basement. The C02 tank is behind them out of sight.
Our taps.
Below you can see our complete set-up in our basement. On the far left, you can see the refrigerator peaking out past the wall. Next to that are the two taps, and on the right are two glass carboys filled with two different types of beer.
So far we’ve made about ten batches (the best being an Oatmeal stout – the perfect winter beer) for an average cost of $4.13 per liter. That cost will decrease as we amortize the start-up cost over more batches. In a few years, we’ll get the cost down as low as $1.95 per liter, which means we’ll have saved about 75% on our beer costs. Brewing beer does save money!
Washing, Mixing, Bottling, Kegging
The most significant downside to making beer ourselves is that it’s a lot of work. My husband must sterilize the carboys, fermentors, kegs, lines, taps, and bottles before every use. We use kits that do not require any boiling, just mix the ingredients, stir well, and wait. Sometimes there are additional ingredients that my husband needs to add at specific times (like hops), and we use a calendar specifically to keep track of the process.
The beer is ready to bottle or keg in about three weeks. At that point, my husband pours 20 liters into the keg, which is put under high pressure for three to five days to carbonate the beer, and then turned down to serving pressure.
The remaining three liters is bottled using our stash of reusable swing-top bottles. This beer is carbonated using priming sugar sprinkled into the bottom of each bottle. The bottles are more convenient for travel, and it’s always interesting to taste how the bottles age differently than the keg.
The kegging/bottling process.
Is It Worth It?
For two beer aficionados, brewing beer to save money is definitely worthwhile. My husband likes the brewing process, so the many hours he spends in our basement making this beer is not considered labour. If he hated it, it might be less worthwhile.
The downside to my husband actually loving his beer brewing hobby is that, like all hobbies, it’s enjoyable to upgrade your skills and equipment. My husband will occasionally splurge on upgrades, but he pays for them from his personal spending allowance, so it doesn’t directly impact our finances, but it would be easy for him to get swept up in the homebrewing scene and spend a lot of money upgrading our current equipment. These upgrades would wipe out any cost savings.
Fortunately, my husband is more frugal than I am, so I don’t have to worry about him overspending.
Overall, brewing beer ourselves has become an excellent way to enjoy a cold beverage on a hot day, without blowing our grocery and entertainment budget to do so.
The final product.
Do you make anything at home? I want to know!
Photo Credit: Adam Wilson