Why are "session" IPAs the same price as regular IPAs?

It depends on the beer style for the actual values but malt costs are actually higher on a per batch basis simply because you use so much of it.

For a recent homebrewed IPA I spent $23 on malt (13 lbs. of North American 2-row) and $15 on hops (a total of 6 ounces) for a 5 lb. batch. At a commercial scale the relative numbers may vary but malt will be the larger cost of the two for a given batch of beer.

Cheers!

 

How much? How prices have risen since I was homebrewing and a 55lb bag of Maris Otter cost £10 (roughly $15) !
Edit - seems to be around £25 now , say $35 to $40.

 

Because it allows you to drink for the whole 'session'. So there is a premium that must be paid for that. Duh.

 

$75 for Thomas Fawcett MO at my LHBS.

 

What do commercial breweries pay for each of those? How does that translate to actual brews cost per barrel?

 

Bulky and heavy, transport costs must be substantial.

 

Fawcetts MO is about £14 per sack if you can buy more than a few sacks from them (ten I think) It's not expensive really
Hops seem to range between about £9-£20 /kg from the likes of simply hops, who a lot of craft breweries use here

 

From that Huffington Post article:
"According to Bob Hansen, an executive at specialty malt powerhouse Briess, a medium-sized craft brewer can expect to pay 40 cents to 50 cents per pound for malt, while a macrobrewer will pay closer to 22 cents a pound."

"a craft brewer might use 70 pounds to 100 pounds of malt to make a barrel of IPA or stout."

"Certain hop varieties have become extremely sought after by craft brewers in recent years, driving prices to record levels. Though most hops cost $4 to $6 a pound, some specialty types cost as much as $20 a pound."

"a craft brewer could easily put four pounds of $7-a-pound hops into a barrel of hoppy IPA"

 

Perhaps the same reason why Bud Light is the same price as Budweiser.

 

More incentive to keep me uninterested.

 

When you use 10,000lbs of malt per batch...some imported or specialty malted, they sure as hell are.

 

Let's say a craft brewery gets the team together and bangs out 1000 cases of beer in a shift.

That's an 8 hour shift with a lunch break, and a separate break for rest.

You'll need an hour for set-up and shut-down to clean the equipment. At best (if you rotate during breaks) you'd have about 6 hours of continuous packaging.

1000 cases = 24,000 bottles / 6 hours = 66 bottles per minute. This is not lightning fast, but its pretty good for a ragtag 4-person crew operating a small bottling line. You will be hustling no doubt - and will need plenty of automatic equipment to make this happen.

This is probably around $35,000 in revenue for the brewery working with a wholesaler (assuming you can fetch a good price for this beer), so 1% of labor costs of that would be $350.

It took at least a full day to brew that beer, and also another full day to transfer the beer and prepare it for packaging.

Let's say only two people did the brewing, and two people could handle the rest of the cellar work and preparation/transferring in one day.

$350 for 4 people for 2 full-day's work? That's $43.75 per person per 8 hour shift.

That boils down to $5.47 per hour including health insurance, benefits, 401(k), and insurance.

The health insurance alone wipes that out!

 

Another factor yet to be considered is retailers. Retailers are not fond of stocking lots of different packages at lots of different price points. If I offer 4 different 6-packs of beer at price ranges from $6.99-$9.99 there are greater chances for confusion at the point of purchase. Especially in something like a grocery channel. It is neater for them and their SKU stocking to have the beers line-priced or in different package types. Retailers don't like it when a mis-marked or mis-scanned item takes a dollar or two off the price of a similar product.

-Bill

 

There is actually a huge price differential between average "feed stock" malt and super high-quality, craft malts from respected maltsters. The price differential is massive too - even when buying in bulk.

If you grown your own yeast, that probably does not reduce your costs, as the cost of financing a proper laboratory and staffing it is only going to be cost effective a huge scale. And if you are single-cell propagating for batches, that will be an enormous cost. That is why almost all craft brewers purchase their yeast from a lab.

Very few brewers I know use the same yeast for years. You may end up with more cells than what you started with, but you need healthy, viable cells that will produce a predictable flavor.

 

yup, what is known as "line pricing" and the gentleman @FreetailBrewing pointed that out above too

 

I'm purely going on the numbers we use to sell to tier 2 (distributors). When I'm thinking about the makeup of a beer's cost, the tier 2 and 3 margins are irrelevant to me because I don't control them (though I recognize they're extremely relevant to beer drinkers!). In other words, my numbers are what occurs up to and until a beer leaves the brewery, and nothing else. Those numbers above in your graphic also don't reflect any reality I'm familiar with (labor and packaging should be quite a bit higher), but it's probably a little different everywhere. I'm really only familiar with craft beer and craft breweries in the pacific northwest and AB macro brewing.

 

That's what happens when I don't read the entire thread. My apologies.

 

One of the best things about this site is that BA's get first hand info from posters like you, Sierra Nevada Bill, Peter Wolfe and the gentleman at Freetail Brewing. Thank you all.

 

I'd love to pay those prices.

 

I asked the question, knowing some of the answers.

100 ponds at $.50 is 50 bucks a barrel for malt in an IPA. 4 lbs of hops per barrel at 10 bucks a pound would be $40. That is a high figure for hops if you have a contract - from what I can gather.