Why is Beer SO Expensive?!

today we're bringing an overpriced tipser Brewery IPA to answer the following question why is beer so expensive for example high-end six packs are like 15 bucks at the geers store $15 but that's actually a hell of a good deal when you consider how insanely expensive beer is at breweries the sixpack worth of the same beer on draft is like 36 bucks breweries are high fluer grocery stores a low flutin they must charge you based on the amount of fluen you're doing dollar per flutin most people are blaming this on inflation so I've G full armchair detective in order to shine some light on the subject and I promise you I've uncovered a few things that I think are driving prices up way higher than inflation and I can also say with 100% certainty that there does not exist a more thoughtful in-depth half-ass and potentially completely factually incorrect analysis on the subject than this one so buckle up but before we get into that let's get started bringing our very own artisanal cash P dumpster fire dry ho price gou IPA which only cost us a couple of bucks to make but convention dictates that we charge you a dollars for because to test my theory I need to try and see things from the perspective of a brewery owner and their employees so first things first we're going to add some water to our 10 and half gallon climber bre K how much water do we add well if you want to be exact if you want to be precise somewhere between 7 and 8 gallons I don't know I hate following recipes all right next we heated our water up to Mash temp which was most likely 152° we did not double crush this one even after debating it a little a bit of foreshadowing there we milled the grain a single time then chucked it into the Brew Kettle we did go with a somewhat fancy grain bill for this beer to try and at least pretend like it's worth charging a do sp for oh and if you're new here I'm Kyle this is EMT this is liby we're at the claw hammer Supply Global headquarters in beautiful Asheville North Carolina where the beer is definitely $8 a pint but mustache rides are still speaking of those $8 pints let's get back to the topic in hand expensive beer uh the first question we really need to answer is is beer actually more expensive right now or do we just think it is well according to this graph that I stole from the internet shamelessly beer prices topped out in 22 at about 9% over the 2019 price and then started to fall back down so yeah the price of beer went up and everybody's blaming it on inflation and what caused inflation well obviously Taylor Swift which reminds me before anyone gets confused and thinks this is a political video and that I am inviting smooth brain brants in the comment section to clarify I am not but yeah inflation is a real thing it is happening I don't really need to explain that but quickly um here are the inputs required for making beer we have water drain hops yeast labor energy inputs packaging and transportation I actually found another chart on the internet with most of the stuff in it and then added some things and was able to kind of put it all together so we can look at it in one place it's kind of hard to see but the raw materials the inputs required uh for making beer are still up like 20 to 40% so yeah much of the beer cost increases probably pretty straightforward postco inflation aside from a few things number one natural gas and Barley have seen some of the biggest increases in price and um this is for two reasons number one Russia is a huge supplier of natural gas and Ukraine is actually the world's third largest barley producer so it's kind of hard to farm barley when you're fighting a war and the gas price has been impacted because it has become a tool of manipulation and the rest of us are now in part paying higher beer prices for it interesting uh connection there again Remer not a local video do not comment on this I don't want to hear it I would literally ghost you harder than Pac-Man all right another interesting tidbit according to the Beer Institute I'm not making this up that is their real name aluminum tariffs enacted in 2018 which have still not been repealed increased the tax on aluminum Imports by 10% and although they were designed to hurt foreign producers it was a huge Boo for domestic producers because they just increased their prices as well imagine that according to the Beer Institute the aluminum tariffs cost the US beverage industry alone $2 billion which was not paid by Foreign aluminum producers it was paid by breweries and consumers it was essentially a direct tax on beer which is already heavily taxed and by the way according to the study most of the revenue generated didn't go to the federal government it went to domestic aluminum producers anyway I don't want to get too far into the Weeds on any of this partially because in my opinion none of this is the real reason that beer prices have absolutely skyrocketed I will get to that in a second stay tuned for that but before that back to our overly expensive Dollar Store Brewery IPA we pulled the basket after the mash was complete we let it drain and then we tossed our spent Grain on the ceremonial GRL pile as always Pro tip to avoid attracting bugs and other prets to your house make sure to toss the greens next to your neighbor's house following the mash is a boiler and the boiler is where we add the Hops we boiled and then we added hops we added quite a bit of hops because an expensive $8 brewery beer generally has lots of hops in it so we somehow screwed up our gravity imagine that and undershot we rarely actually ever Miss below we're usually right on the money or above and hey maybe that's one of the other reasons that the price of beer has gone up Brewers actually know how to brew beer and they charge for it so after the boil we chilled the wart and added the beer to our super awesome f ation cake which by the way is finally in stock I never thought I would actually get to say that but check them out they're on the site CL supply.com I'm headed up to the warehouse on Tuesday to start shipping everything out so Hallelujah future Kyle here I did go to the warehouse on Tuesday we did not ship anything anyway here's what happened we are replacing all the dip tubes on the cakes the original dip tubes we decided today we just didn't like them we've replaced like almost everything we're not going to ship this thing out unless it's awesome that's that's the bottom line so while we were replacing the dip tubes we discovered that we were having an issue with the springs that we have that were fouling up a little bit it might be just due to the old crappy dip tube design but we're not taking any chances we're ordering H springs for the cakes like we're ordering 1,200 new Springs or something it's not going to be that big of a delay so that's where we are back to the video after pitching the yeast and air rating we let the cake sit for about 5 days and then added a couple of dry hop charges using a hop dropper we've done a short video series on how to get this done I will link that below all right I think we're far enough along with the beer here we can take a little break from it you can get into the real reason why beer has gotten so damn expensive you know anything about how beer is made the reason for the beer price increases is literally hiding in plain sight I'm going to use the menu from the barri overing company here in Asheville North Carolina from their South slope location I'm not trying to call them out by any means I love the beer and I'm happy to buy uh $8 pints from them but their menu is a great example of what I'm about to talk about their pores range from $5 for a 16 o pore to $10 for an 8 O pore the $5 pore is their Flagship surf wax IPA which is the beer that you are most likely to see on grocer store shelves or on tap at local restaurants they've got some economy of scale built into this beer recipe it's also a pretty straightforward recipe standard simple grain Bell and it uses common hops it also doesn't seem to use a ton of hops it probably has a quick turnaround time in terms of fermentation there's no dry hopping there's no aging required $5 to make sense for this beer and here's where you can kind of start to see into the Matrix if you look close enough looking at all the beers as the amount of hops go up we're going from a standard IPA to say something like a hazy IPA which requires a lot of uh low alpha acid hops the complexity of the beer increases the raw materials requirements for the beer increases the price goes up looking at the menu here's where it starts to get interesting not surprisingly as the complexity of the grain bill goes up so they like one of the beers has 10 different types of malt in it the price goes up as a number of dry hopping additions increase the price goes up also when you do dry hopping during the fermentation process you're adding more vegetable Mass I guess the Hops themselves to the breed like it soaks up liquid and you're not going to be able to ring that out of the beer so you actually end up with less drinkable liquid the more hops you add uh as well and the price goes up and then things just go completely off the rails when you do stuff like add the beer to a barrel because you're getting evaporative loss so the angel share some of it's even leaking out of the barrel the devil share and then it's again more time that the beer is just sitting essentially eating up resources so the cost goes up and then a lot of these beers that burial does for example they add like crazy ingredients to them like ton of coconut and different macadamia nuts and vanilla have you ever looked at the price of vanilla vanilla beans like 200 bucks a pound crazy craft beer is like freaking like cars now why is the price of cars going up so much because some of them literally drive themselves they're just way more complicated fancy stuff cost more that's just the bottom one Speaking of fancy complicated beer that drives itself let's get back to ours drum roll please here's how it turned out well here we go we have a couple of $8 pints here smells nice smells like an $8 pint to me it does looks like an $8 pint I would not argue if someone in a bre handed me this yeah that tastes like an $8 pint it's nice I mean definitely yeah I wouldn't argue if any Brewery handed me this balanced yeah good ho Aroma yeah man Simco I love Simco yeah so this does like kind of throw into question my theory though because I was arguing that pints are more expensive because beer is more complicated and this tastes like a pretty complicated IPA if you were to ask me I mean it really is I know and in the video earlier I said that we had a fancy grain Bill we did go with a somewhat fancy grain bill for this beard I was wrong as I am with those things it's actually just base malt and what weat I think and weat yeah it's a got two row and we did this nice base though we use riverband oh for sure um and then some Simco Citra M so really basic hops however we did dry hop and then because we had so much H so many hops in the The Kettle as well we had a lot in the kettle too when we were all pulled we kind of left extra liquid behind we're not going to get full five gallons out of this we we're we're going to end up probably like four gallons because there's just there's a lot of hop debris in here due to the dry hop Edition four o of dry hops yeah yeah so you just can't like transfer all you don't want to transfer all the Hops of the bottom of this cake into another cake so we're probably going to end up with 4 gallons so it's like what 20% right there loss which is I guess maybe a 20% price increase however it did only cost us $134 per pint we did the math on this to brew it at home so yep no labor you know no no costs associated with storage or fulfillment or anything yeah that's true no labor no equipment costs no rent no overhead overhead hold Insurance just you know the ingredients on our time $134 a pint these are not bulk priced so this is like go to your Hur shop you're paying retail it's not like we bought hops online or anything yeah exactly so I guess maybe the takeaway is I don't know I'm not going to follow breweries for charging more for more F beer cuz the lower price beer is still out there you can get it if you want it yeah and I want Brees to stay in business that's the thing I want to go hang out I mean I can cook a delicious dinner at my house and it's not going to be nearly as good as going to a good restaurant it's just one of those think you're paying for the experience paying for someone else to make it for you you know it's fun Brewing but it's also fun to go buy beer and hang out with friends so though this is a I think this is a situation where I I would say this is every bit as good as a $8 pint out a at a bre it's probably it's really it's it's great it's probably better than a lot of ipas that are being served it's Super Fresh yeah I mean it's literally we brewed it two weeks ago probably Super Fresh I mean that's nice thing about going to bre you're going to get Super Fresh beer so you're kind of paying for that as well I guess but and we both really like Simco hops we put a lot of Simco in this so this is kind of tailored to our liking as well I love Simco it kind of hearkens back to the '90s I feel like in a weird way I would absolutely charge myself $8 for this P probably should yeah got a piggy bank m and at the end of the year go buy $8 P somewhere else but yeah it's good I i' say put the recipe out let people Brew it yeah yeah absolutely 100% recommend this and then so Kyle on a quick note that is pretty dang clear and this is sitting on the yeast and on the Hops yeah on the East and the Hops so this is just basically cold crashed dude and then you're picking up off the floating dip tube floating dip that's I mean technology that's wild to me honestly yeah yeah for the amount of stuff that's sediment the botom what you'll see generally is like there will be a little bit of stuff in the like the tube like dip tube because during fermentation like the yeast will actually ferment in the dip tube put in there pour a few beers out you'll get a little bit of hop debris and some like you know whatever but then it clears right you timeing about the little dip tube in the floting in the floater yeah like the floating like the line in the gotcha I mean that is yeah yeah crazy yeah it works it's a thing let's be honest we're not going to transfer this off no all right well thanks for watching we'll see you on the next one

Channel: Clawhammer Supply

Views: 20,613

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Id: WgdXwcmF0YU

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024