Earlier this year, my wife and I signed up for Winter Green Farm’s Community Farm program. How it works is: we buy a share in the Community Farm, then every week from mid-June to mid-October, we pick up a box of fresh produce; our share. Lately, I’ve been thinking that the same concept could be used to create a Beer Share, thus lessening the cost to home brew. Let’s look at some numbers.
I usually pay around $1.20/lb for base malts and anywhere from $1.50-$2.00/lb for specialty grains. Hops consistently run me $2.00/oz. Yeast is the biggest variable, ranging from $0.00-$8.00, depending on whether I use liquid, dry or re-harvested yeast. This puts my cheapest 5 gallon brews around $20.00 and lands the expensive, heavily-hopped ones a biscuit over $40.00.
Using some bulk prices from Brew Brothers and Hops Direct, and assuming I harvest my own yeast, the price to brew a 5 gallon batch with 12 pounds of grain (75/25 base/specialty) and 2 ounces of hops drops to $11.00; about half the price of my current low. Of course, there is a reason people don’t buy in bulk; variety. I could make a 2-Row/Cascade SMaSH every weekend for less than a ten-spot, but the repetition would have me eating the lead out of my hydrometer in no time.
This is where I think the Community Farm concept could be applied. You could plan out a year of brews, let’s say one per month; crafting recipes that would allow you to efficiently order bulk hops and grains. “Beer Shares” could then be sold; each share entitling its holder to enough ingredients to brew a 5 gallon batch of each month’s beer. Using my patented finger math, I came up with $15.00 per month, or $180.00 per share for a year of brews, including a few high ABV and/or heavily hopped ones. Assuming you have enough people buying in, $15 per month should also be enough to purchase a specialty yeast strain each month and cover the supplies necessary to culture it for the group.
So, that’s my little idea. I’m sure it’s probably already being done somewhere, but my Google-fu wasn’t strong enough to find mention of it. Then again, since there isn’t really a way to make money off from it, maybe not. While a Community Farm is usually a for-profit business, a Beer Share would be strictly a labor of love, or perhaps community service if that term better sells the idea of a garage, piled full of grain sacks to your significant other.
If anyone is interested in exploring the Beer Share concept further or is already doing something similar, let me know. Or, if you would like to see a mock-up year of recipes, I could knock one out. I’m not ready to spearheading a local Beer Share program myself, but I think it is an interesting idea.
Cheers!
Kevin