Brewing: How Cheap Can You Make Your Own?

Soon to be roadkill hops

Sometimes people ask me how cheap could they make homebrew beer. In one sense, I'm the wrong person to ask because I spend lots of money to homebrew. Amortizing all my equipment, educational trips, etc. into the ingredient costs would make my homebrew into some pretty expensive beer. But if we are talking about just the ingredients that go into a beer and forgetting fixed or sunk costs, then well...you get this story.

One day a co-worker who knew I made beer announced that he wanted to grow some barley in his back yard. So, we being scientific types, we discussed it with a state extension agent and he agreed to send us some low-nitrogen barley samples (for free). This my co-worker cast in his backyard plot and didn't fertilize (I wanted low nitrogen) or add anything except some water that came from the yard sprinklers when he watered the rest of the lawn. He harvested it, and rough threshed the barleycorn. This he delivered to me---no cost so far.

I used an old bucket and some parts around the house to malt the barley and dry it in a fruit dryer---no cost so far (except house water, which is fixed cost and some electricity that I can't break out from the house).

After letting the malt rest a month, I brewed the beer using triple decoction in case I undermalted a little. For hops, I used some that fell off a truck (see above picture, did I mention I live in hop-growing country?). The trucks just have the hops laying across the top, and the trucks are in a hurry to get to the hop kiln. A drive down a back road in Yakima County during harvest time will usually net a wide variety of roadkill hops. Dried in fruit dryer. Still no real outlay.

For yeast, I reused some from a previous batch. Free yeast.

I kegged the beer and let it naturally carbonate. No caps or bottles or sugar added.

So, it's not exactly free beer. But it's really handmade beer, and pretty inexpensive.