But you could also walk out of the store with nothing except a basic $30 kit and three weeks later have your first gallon of perfectly drinkable beer. Fortunately, Nelson runs cost-benefit analyses with his thriftier clients all the time: If you’re someone who regularly entertains and can get through a keg a month, you would likely pay off a mid-tier, $1,500 home brewing system in a year and a half, he estimates. Granted, most of us aren’t about to start hypermiling beer in our apartments – what we’d save in cash we’d surely lose in time and the trust of our friends once we tell them they’re drinking horse-feed brewskis. “For them, it’s a challenge to see just how inexpensive they can make a keg of beer to the point where they’re buying horse feed and germinating it themselves and then malting it themselves.” “We’ve had that sort of person in the home brew club, people who were just trying to make the absolute cheapest beer they possibly could,” says Spanik. Aaron Spanik, a Halifax-based member of the Brewnosers, an Atlantic Canadian home brewers club that dates back to 1986, points to a subset of home brewers he personally calls “hypermilers,” after the sort of drivers who try to eke out the most mileage possible from a tank of gas. I thought, why don’t I just try to make my own and maybe save some money that way?’ ”īut the question of whether brewing beer at home is actually cost-effective isn’t straightforward: Rather, outcomes vary widely based on one’s approach. For the past few months, Nelson reports that new customers have been coming in and saying, “ ‘The cost of beer has gone up. Meanwhile, the federal government’s planned excise tax increase of 6.3 per cent gave some drinkers a scare (it’s since been capped at 2 per cent till next year). In Canada, beer prices dropped during the pandemic but are now seeing an inflation-driven price spike of around 6 to 7 per cent, according to the Consumer Price Index, in part owing to the rising costs of everything from barley to aluminum cans. The trend seems to extend to the U.K., too, where market research by the brewing equipment company Pinter found a 77-per-cent increase in web searches for “home brew” as the price of a British pint hit the equivalent of $6.50 in 2022 (which is still less than what you’d pay in Vancouver or Toronto these days). At Ontario’s GTA Brews Homebrew Club, officer David Chang-Sang says there has been an uptick in new members joining the 450-person organization in the past six months. Kyle Nelson, head of operations of home brew supply store Toronto Brewing Co., estimates Canada has more than 100,000 home brewers, and local brewing supply shops are reporting strong sales this spring. Unlike other domestic hobbies (sourdough baking et al.) that went flat after their pandemic lockdown popularity, interest in brewing has only built in momentum. Today, he considers brewing a rewarding and delicious creative outlet. Galvanized by good beer, Smith invested in what he considers to be a “relatively modest” $1,200 all-in-one home setup (a piece of gear that’s like a supersized electric kettle with a pump, heating element and control panel) that’s currently standing counter-height in his kitchen. “But what my brother was making could rival a lot of the stuff that you could find at the LCBO or the beer store. “There’s a lot of stigma around those old ‘U-brew’ days where the product actually wasn’t all that good,” Smith says. Then he tried his brother’s home brew – and was shocked. First, the Toronto-based design consultant joined an informal High Park neighbourhood craft beer club and developed a taste for unique picks from local microbreweries. It was during pandemic lockdowns that Tim Smith began to take an interest in the finer points of beer.
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