Saving Fail #1 — Home Brew

Since I stopped working, we’ve had to make adjustments to our lifestyle and spending. I contribute no money to our household now so we have to spend less. Here’s one of our money saving experiments with the results…

I was drinking plenty of beer before I decided to stay at home full time. I really enjoyed it. It was part of the routine. Get home from work, make some din din, pop a bottle, bath time (every other day), put the kids to bed, drink wine, bachelorette and chill. Sarah and I had already done the tough analysis behind our spending habits and there was no way to ignore the fact that alcohol was a decent chunk of our “entertainment” budget. We had to come up with a solution to spend less on booze. The solve…home brew. We would no longer buy beer or wine at the store to save money and instead we would brew our own. The average six pack of craft beer at the store is $10 ($1.70 per beer) and that seems to only be increasing. The average brewed beer is around $.50. So we’d save on a per drink basis and in all likelihood we’d drink less.

The economics take a little while to kick in. Here are the startup costs…

• Brew kit: $150
• Bottles: $25
• Ingredients: ~$25–50 per brew depending on styles

So for the first batch you’re looking at around $200 which yields around 50 beers ($4 per beer) and probably around $25 for each subsequent batch if you go with something like a light german pilsner ($.50 per beer).

I won’t expose Sarah’s drinking habits/history here but I’m going to estimate that I was drinking around three 6-packs a week on average which equates to around 1k beers a year. Yeah yeah yeah. Add yours up sometime.

If I kept up the same volume, accounted for the startup costs, realized savings of $1.20 per beer then I’d save $900 the first year and about $1100 each subsequent year which is pretty good. It would mean that I would spend 60% less on beer. Plus, I would need a factory-like process to sustain my habit and that’s unlikely given some of the other smaller commitments that I’ve made.

BUT, I discovered something along the way that changed everything. Bottling beer is one of the true pain points to home brewers. The capping process sucks and bottles can be expensive. Yes, empty bottles are expensive. Empty. Bottles. Which I’ve thrown away consistently my entire life.

I needed to think through this a little. I’ve always liked those Grolsch bottles with the little pop tops and figured those would be great for brewing. Apparently, I’m not the only one. A 12-pack of empty bottles on Amazon goes for around $30 bucks. Used empty Grolsch bottles are going for $26 for an 8-pack on ebay. What has the world come to?

So I asked the question that any normal person with a moderate drinking problem would ask, “Why don’t I just buy full bottles of beer, drink the beer, then reuse the bottles?” DING DING GING DING GING. You goddamn genius. And at $9 a 4 pack I’m actually spending less on full bottles of beer then I would have had I bought the empty bottles.

So off I went to the market. I bought every 4-pack of Grolsch that I could get my hands on. I had a crazy look in my eye and the sense of paranoid urgency of a lottery winner. I had to ask the clerk if they were hiding more Grolsch in the back. I ended up having them do a custom order to fulfill my needs. I’m confident that I’m the only person that has ever done this (I was also confident that I was the first person to take the bottom half of a cupcake off and put it on top of the icing to make a cupcake sandwich until I saw a girl do it on that show Nashville a few weeks after I came up with it which meant they filmed it before I invented it). Anyway, twelve 4-packs later and I was onto my next task. Bottling day was only 2 weeks away. These bottles weren’t going to empty themselves.

Then it hit me. And this I consider to be my crowning insight over the course of the first 38 years of my life. No other thought that has crossed my mind has been more valuable and I will now share this with you.

As I guzzled Grolsch graciously for 2 weeks straight I realized that I had discovered a way to not only save money and drink beer, but I had found a way to make money and drink beer. Full Grolsch beer bottles were going for $2.25 cents per bottle and empty Grolsch beer bottles were going for $2.50 per bottle. I know. You’re mind is a little fuzzy right now with all this math so I’ll repeat that. Full Grolsch bottle costs $2.25. Empty Grolsch bottle sells for $2.50. What does this all mean? It means that I found a fucking black hole in our economy is what it means. Now do with it what you will.

In the end, we just decided to stop drinking because this was all too much.