I am looking on northernbrewer and morebeer.com and the malt seems to be cost prohibitive to brewing my own beer. Are there any sources for lower cost ingredients?
I buy most sacks of bulk grain from my local homebrew store. They are reasonable and I have never found an online retailer that can beat them after shipping is factored in. For 10 lb bags of grain and smaller, I usually order off labelpeelers.com. They are in my home state so shipping is not bad. They often run sales for 33% or 40% off grain purchases, so if you plan ahead and are patient they are a great deal.
If you want to minimize malt costs, take @kellyst's advice. I'll just add that if you were thinking that brewing your own beer might be cheaper than buying beer, that's not necessarily true. It can be true, with careful shopping, depending on what styles you like, and after you have recouped your initial investment in equipment. But I think very few home brewers stop buying equipment after the initial outfitting. This hobby can be a money pit.
Another option if you are a member of a homebrewing club is to do a group buy where you buy malt in bulk (e.g., order a pallet of various malt in 50/55 lb. bags). Cheers!
Some on-line retailers discount malts as you increase amount purchased. Before they merged with Northern Brewer, Midwest Supplies used to have a sliding scale that made it cheaper for me to get malts for a single recipe through them. Farmhousebrewingsupply.com sells 10 lb quantities of certain basemalts at a somewhat discounted price from their per pound option. This will not beat buying a sack full of grain, but it helps if, like me, you brew a variety of beers with different base malts.
Here is one example: https://www.amazon.com/Briess-2-Row...=1468632063&sr=8-1&keywords=Briess+2-row+malt As Peter (@pweis909 ) already commented you will need to pay about 30 bucks for shipping. Cheers!
My LHBS will sell a 55 LB sack for about $60. I thought that was steep until I saw the shipping costs from any of the online places - they'll rope you in selling it for $35 - $40, but then you check shipping and it's another $30. Best part is, my LHBS will do it as a 'virtual sack' - you buy the 55lbs for a price, and if you don't have a mill, you can come in, get the 10 or 15 lbs for your recipe, and it's deducted from your "sack." it's not that you have your bag with your name on it, they'll run though plenty of bags to keep you getting a fresh amount. It makes sense when you think about what they charge for grain in a per-pound basis. Of course, you want to do this for your base grains, then get specialty by the pound for your recipe.
+1 for buying grain at your LHBS. I'm fortunate enough to have three nearby, so it's a no-brainer for me. YMMV. Shipping pretty much eats up any savings you would perceive from buying from an online source. And, in this case, you're supporting a local business without paying a higher price, which is icing on the cake, IMO. Plus, the more money you spend, the better the conversation and advice (sadly, not a universal truth). 50# is not a helluva lot of grain - maybe 5 batches of a 'normal' gravity beer. For perspective, consider that the price of a 50# sack of grain is in the same ballpark as 50 bottles of a low priced craft beer - that's one typical batch. Granted, there are other costs involved, but, since grain is, arguably, the most expensive component in your beer, this takes some of the sting out of a $50-ish outlay. But, as has already been said, if cost saving is your motivation, you might want to consider other hobbies. Like I've said before, brewing beer to save money is like learning to play the guitar because it's cheaper than iTunes.
Well I know I'm not going to save money over the cheap crap light beers. Was hoping I could at least save a little over the ipa's and stout's prices at the stores. I don't know if I `want` to be in the hobby or not yet, I'm just gathering data and waiting on my first fermentation to be complete.
One factor for you to consider before any consideration of quitting homebrewing due to the cost of materials and equipment is that you have the capability to brew some clone beers that you typically stand no chance of buying in a store. After you've been involved in this craft beer culture for a while, you'll read about many special beers that you'd like to try, i.e. Pliny the Elder and Heady Topper. There are clone recipes available for both of those beers. Sure, you can trade for most hard-to-get beers, but shipping costs enter into that picture again. Also, a lot of homebrewers look at the challenge of creating their unique recipe, maybe for that day that they open their own brewery. EDIT: I'm going from memory here, so I might be off on these costs, but the last time that I brewed the Pliny clone recipe, my ingredient costs were about $80 (extract is typically more expensive than all-grain, but all of those hops make up the bulk of the costs for this beer), and I get 50 twelve ounce bottles from it. At the brewery, this beer is about $6 for a 500 ml. bottle, or about $70 for a case of 12. The homebrewer comes out ahead on that one, and the recipe makes a pretty precise clone of that beer. (It should because the recipe came from the owner/brewer of that beer.)
A lot of LHBS have grain sales around September. They'll take 10% off of a sack. I usually buy 200 pounds and piece the rest together by the next sale.
These are all some really great tips. I will be looking on Amazon for grains soon, (I have prime) so if I can score the free shipping that would be huge. Also I will be looking at making a stop by my LHBS in September. I don't get to go there as often as I'd like because it's about 30 miles away
Make friends with and hit up local breweries as well. I'm buying sacks of base malt from a local brewery and buying a couple batches out of specialty malts when I get a chance to stop at the LHBS.
Local is good if the price is right and the quality good...my brew buddy just picked up some local malted barley and with any luck we may be looking at 25-50 cents a #. He's already brewed a couple batches with the 1.4 L base and it appears to be well-modified.
Our homebrew group does a bulk grain buy which splits the shipping and the bags are pretty cheap. Easy to stock up and buy specialty malts when on sale.
Sign up for any lhbs emails too, one of my local places just did a fire sale of #50 sacks of two row for $35. One day sale only announced by newsletter. Bulk is the way to go. Why pay $3 an ounce for Citra when you can buy a lb for $26 for example.
