How much does a batch of homebrew cost?
More than the grain, hops and yeast — which is where every published figure stops. Here is the site's default profile (5.5 gal into the fermenter, a 60-minute boil, batch sparge) brewed as an ordinary 1.050 ale, with every line that actually leaves your wallet, at this page's default prices:
| Line | Cost | Who counts it |
|---|---|---|
| Grain — 11 lb at $2.00/lb | $22.00 | counted by everyone |
| Hops — 3.5 oz (99 g) at $2.55/oz | $8.92 | counted by everyone |
| Yeast | $8.00 | counted by everyone |
| Extras — water salts, finings, kettle adjuncts | $3.00 | usually |
| Energy — 7.1 kWh at the meter, electric at 17 ¢ | $1.21 | CraftJacks asks you to guess; the rest skip it |
| Water — 53 L incl. cleaning | $0.05 | CraftJacks only |
| Packaging — 130 g priming sugar, 50 caps | $1.89 | sometimes |
| Consumables — sanitizer, cleaner | $2.00 | AHA case 2 only |
| Batch, before equipment | $47.08 | 38 pints packaged → $1.24 a pint, $0.93 a bottle |
Default prices are placeholders — grain $2.00/lb, hops $2.55/oz, electricity 17 ¢/kWh, water $1 per m³, caps 3 ¢. Put yours in the calculator. Computed by this page's engine from the default profile.
The ranking answers are in the same ballpark and get there by accident: the AHA's second case study lands on "$0.96 per bottle" with energy, gas and water omitted and the equipment spread over a "40-year lifespan"; Homebrew Answers reaches "just under 40p a pint" for ingredients only, energy dismissed with "I can't be bothered"; CraftJacks includes energy and water — as boxes you type a guess into, "$1.50–3.00 per batch." The three lines below are the ones this page does differently.
What does the energy cost? (It's a number, not a guess)
Your profile already knows how much water you heat and how much you boil off. Heating 33 L of water from the tap to the boil is sensible heat — 3.1 kWh — and keeping the kettle boiling long enough to lose 4.7 L is latent heat, another 3 kWh. About 6 kWh of heat has to reach the wort, half of it just to boil. What it costs depends on how much of the fuel's energy gets into the kettle:
| Heat source | Fuel at the meter | Cost per batch | Per pint |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electric element, 85 % | 7.1 kWh at 17 ¢ | $1.21 | $0.032 |
| Propane burner, 40 % | 1.18 kg — 13% of a 20 lb tank at $20 | $2.59 | $0.068 |
| Kitchen gas hob, 35 % | 0.59 therms at $1.50 | $0.89 | $0.023 |
Default profile, tap water at 15 °C / 59 °F, 6.1 kWh delivered. Efficiencies are stated assumptions — an insulated electric kettle does better than 85 %, a windy patio burner worse than 40 % — and editable. Computed by this page's engine.
Bringing 33 liters from tap to boiling takes 3.1 kWh; boiling off 4.7 of them takes 3. Water's latent heat is more than five times what it takes to heat it from ice-cold to boiling, so every liter you boil away costs as much as heating six. A vigorous "rolling" boil that loses 20 % an hour instead of 10 % doesn't make better beer; it doubles the second line. Lid half on after the hot break, and the profile's boil-off rate — the one the Total Water page uses — is the number to measure and lower.
Per pint of what? The divisor nobody states
"Per pint" means per pint you drink, and a 5.5-gallon batch doesn't produce 44 of them. Some beer stays with the yeast and some in the bottling bucket — the bottle-count page's ledger — and on the default profile 4.75 gal reaches bottles: 38 pints. Dividing by the batch size understates the cost per pint by 14%. The AHA's $51.08 batch is "$0.96 a bottle" over the batch and $1.13 over what reaches bottles; brewmybeer is the only page that says to divide by packaged volume, and this calculator does it with your profile's losses. Keggers lose less in transfer and more in the last pour; the keg option uses the same ledger with a smaller bottling loss.
Equipment: what a pint costs now, not in forty years
The AHA's case study spreads $1,357 of equipment over 40 years to get "$2.83 per batch." Brewer's Friend's break-even post assumes "equipment doesn't wear out ever." Both are ways of saying the gear is free, which it was not when you bought it. The honest figure is the cost spread over the batches the gear has actually done, and it changes every brew day:
| $500 of equipment after… | Per batch | Adds per pint |
|---|---|---|
| 1 batch | $500.00 | $13.16 |
| 5 batches | $100.00 | $2.63 |
| 10 batches | $50.00 | $1.32 |
| 25 batches | $20.00 | $0.53 |
| 50 batches | $10.00 | $0.26 |
| 250 batches | $2.00 | $0.05 |
Per pint over the default profile's 38 packaged pints. Computed by this page's engine.
So the first ten batches on a $500 setup cost $1.32 a pint more than the ingredients say, and the figure only reaches the "few cents" the articles quote after a couple of hundred brews. The calculator's equipment fields do this arithmetic live; the break-even it reports is the classic one — Brewer's Friend's $225 of gear on $40 batches "worth $100" comes out at 3.75 batches, and the engine reproduces that — but against the running cost with energy and packaging in it, and against the store price you enter.
Bottling a batch costs the priming sugar and 50 caps, about $1.89. Kegging costs the CO₂ — 172 g to carbonate, dispense and liquid-purge a corny, about $1.90 from a $25 five-pound cylinder (the CO₂ page has the line items). Those are the same number to the penny, so the folklore that kegging is cheaper per batch is not true of the consumables: what it actually saves is 450 mL of beer left behind in the bottling bucket, and an hour of your Saturday. The keg, the regulator and the fridge are equipment — a few hundred dollars that the table above turns into real money per pint for the first year. Choose the packaging switch above and the calculator swaps the lines.
Is homebrewing cheaper than buying beer?
Than craft beer, yes, and not by a small margin. Than the cheapest beer in the store, no — and the articles that say otherwise got there by leaving lines out. Per pint:
| Beer | Per pint |
|---|---|
| Mass-market lager (AHA: $0.63 per 12 oz) | $0.84 |
| Craft beer (AHA: $1.38 per 12 oz) | $1.84 |
| Craft on draft (CraftJacks: $2.50–3.75 a pint) | $3.10 |
| This page’s default batch, everything counted | $1.24 |
| …with $500 of gear over its first 10 batches | $2.55 |
Store figures as published by the AHA (per 12 oz, converted) and CraftJacks. Homebrew from the default ledger above. Computed by this page's engine.
The honest summary: with everything counted, an ordinary all-grain batch costs about the price of mass-market lager and less than half the price of craft — after the gear has paid for itself, which on a $500 setup against craft prices takes about 22 batches. If you brew big hoppy beers with $30 of hops and liquid yeast, the margin over craft shrinks fast; if you brew bitters and lagers, it grows. None of this counts the five hours, and it shouldn't — you're not paying yourself to fish, either. What the calculator gives you is the true cost of the pint in your hand, and the knowledge that the energy line you never thought about is the same size as the yeast.