Since Pepega Brewery is running on fundraiser basically and you guys are main investors technically, it makes sense to post a financial report about its work, not gonna implement any lootboxes or microtransactions to increase profits btw, making it clear straight up.
But seriously many were interested in costs of making your own beer, so this will be a useful post, even though obviously prices are russian, but many things are imported, so it should be somewhat similar and will help you to plan what you need to buy in general. Let’s go…
First thing I bought was a “bundle” that contains everything necessary to make your beer, that bundle was around 40-50$ in our currency and consists of:
- Fermenting “tank” aka big ~30-40 liters plastic bucket (like for paint etc) with two holes for tap and for water seal (air lock that lets CO2 to get out of bucket and prevents air from getting in). Lid for that bucket should be pretty tight or have o-ring to make it air tight. Cost separately of bundle here is around 8.5$
- Water seal air lock with o-ring – 1.5$
- Tap – 2$
- Thermometer sticker that you put on your bucket to have some idea about temperature inside – less than 1$
- Chlorine pills to disinfect everything (5pcs) – 0.5$ (get Star San or similar no-rinse liquid if you buying stuff separately, will be like 4$ per 100ml flask, but it will last long time and it’s way more convenient to use)
- Glucose (dextrose) 1.25kg for fermenting and primer that you put in bottles for carbonating your beer – 2.2$
- Measurement spoons – 1.5$
- Spanking spatula to stir everything well – 1.5$
- Areometer to measure density (step that I skipped basically) – 3$
- Measurement cylinder to measure with areometer – 3$
- Malt concentrate, aka main thing, Muntons Pilsner 1.5kg – 23$ (any works, Muntons is from UK, so should be possible to get in other countries most likely, for 23 liters of beer you need 1.5kg of it and 1kg of glucose, can replace glucose with more concentrate – will be tastier, but more expensive)
Basically bundle didn’t get me much discount (it’s actually on sale now in different store, so that would be better value), but at least was convenient and with delivery. Can skip some minor things here, but that’s pretty much what you NEED to make some beer (areometer is still useful and I need to use it more next time, guess spoons you don’t need and spatula can be replaced even though it’s nice and specifically designed for wort + cheap, so good shit). Oh yeah, water was my regular tap water, we’ll see how that will perform, if you have bad tap water can consider getting bottled or preparing tap one by adding extra salts etc, but that’s quite 5Head already.
Then next step is something you start thinking about way later – bottling equipment:
- Bottle spraying rinsing thingie, one that I was putting bottle on and then doing some fapping with that bottle making disinfecting liquid spray inside the bottle and cover it’s surface – 9$
- Drying rack for 50 bottles – 18$
- Bottling pipe with valve that makes beer flow in the bottle only when you press it against its bottom and filling it from the bottom too, decreasing aeration of your beer since new beer arrives under the layer of beer that is already inside of bottle – 3$
- Star San disinfecting liquid that I mentioned before, for bottling I’d say must have if you don’t want to turn it into super long and tedious process – 4$
- Bottles with flip(swing) top, 24pcs, 1litre each – 48$
Now that’s it, other than that you need some dark place that is not too warm, below 24C preferably, but can get a bit higher. Also in general quite a lot of space for the whole process and storing everything, because equipment is quite bulky and process can get a little messy, but overall nothing hard.
So currently expenses were around 130$ total for me considering bundle was still a bit cheaper than separate buying, but also need to pay for shipping of some stuff. Out of all this everything will be used for future batches of beer/other brews, except obviously malt concentrate and glucose, disinfecting liquid will eventually run out (will last for a while though) and fermenting bucket might need new lid or tightening of old one (new lid is like 1$ actually), so basically bigger investments first time and 15 liters outcome for 130$ is quite expensive, but after in perfect conditions it will be just 23 for concentrate and few bucks for glucose. Bottles are reusable and you can even save by not throwing away some of the store beer bottles, just wash them well, but some probably would be gone because gifting beer to someone and they would throw bottle away etc, so I’d say ~30$ per 15 liters batch should be doable no problems with this setup and some extra expenses once in a while. Can get different concentrate, I already ordered one that is a bit cheaper, around 18$, local production, will be my next batch, we’ll see when exactly, summer will be a bit more tricky to plan things around, but I’ll try.
As you can see nothing crazy and you can see on stream it wasn’t anything insane in terms of difficulty, even though we yet to see the final result, in a week it will be time, hope it’s good. Wholegrain brewing will be even cheaper and even better, but that’s for later, stuff is more complicated, will practice current processes before adding a whole new layer of complexity to it. Overall in total I’m at around 150$ with next batch of beer almost ready, just need glucose to order, so 25% of initial funding for Pepega Brewery is already invested. More brewing streams and more different types of brews coming later, really excited to learn more actually, great feeling, hope it will last long and work well.