Will Home Distilling Save You Money?

today we are answering the age old question the mystery the thing that everyone wants to know will home distilling save you money how's it going chases i hope you're having a kick-ass week i'm jesse and this is still it's the channel all about chasing the craft of home distillation but the question is will distillation home distillation actually save you money now this seems like it would be a easy thing to work out right you figure out what you spend on ingredients you figure out how many bottles it makes you compare that to what you buy from the store bob's your uncle you've got your answer it's not quite that simple there's a whole lot of other things to think about when it comes to this question and we are going to go through each and every one of those together well the ones that i think that are worth mentioning anyway but uh the thing is at the end of it i'm gonna tell you why none of this matters all right guys so basically one of the patreons asked me to to run through this they thought that would be interesting to see my thoughts on it and i've seen this discussed in forums and online and stuff for the purpose of this video uh i would like to use the next step whiskey that we made a couple of weeks ago here on the channel and the reason i'm doing that is because i think it's a decent sort of middle of the road example of what things could cost and we need an example to work through as well because it's going to make things a whole lot easier so first of all guys first of all ingredients yes you've got to spend money on ingredients right and this is easy for you to figure out this is easy for you to calculate it's easy to know what you're spending on because you do it right then and there you sit down you order ingredients you bring it in most of the time some of the time you'll buy bulk stuff and you'll have it sitting on the shelf but once again i don't think i need to go into too much detail on i mean you guys are smart people if you buy 10 kilos of something and it costs you 20 and then you go and use 2 kilos in a recipe so i think we can skip over the ingredients thing just a little bit uh but as a reminder oh and by the way guys i've got my wife's computer here too because i'm not going to remember all the stuff off the top of my head i've got my spreadsheet going on here for that next step whiskey which is the one we made in the t500 if you haven't seen that video please go check it out it's well worth it but we had munich alemult oats dark crystal chocolate malt sugar and i put some wood in there as well and all of that together added up to 60 new zealand dollars now obviously obviously obviously team all of this is going to be in new zealand because that's what i'm buying stuff in here in new zealand and it's probably going to be different for you but whenever i do give a number for something for a total like that i will give a usd equivalent for what i'm spending here in new zealand just in usd so so if i exchange 60 into usd that's what it will be makes sense one thing i would like to mention here is that people often forget to account for shipping so you go online you see what it costs but you forget that you shipped it to yourself or you forget that maybe even you took a special trip to go and pick stuff up if you've got a 20 minute drive remember to account for that as well guys for me for this order that was 9.99 so we're up to 70 bucks already now we get to the slightly more interesting stuff things that people tend to forget about when they run these equations quickly through their head or or you might leave these out on purpose forget about them when you're justifying things to your significant other for example but electricity now this doesn't seem like much and it is going to obviously vary depending on where you are but for me for example i sat down and had a quick think about this and i realized that i ran that still for a total of uh it was about nine hours for that recipe uh heating the mash up uh three stripping runs and a distillation run and heating times for all of those it was about nine hours and that was at two kilowatts the super simple way to figure out roughly the cost of running an appliance like this if you're trying to do it at your house is you multiply the watts of the appliance by the hours that it runs for divide it by a thousand and then multiply it by the kilowatt hour price that your electricity provider gives you if you can't be bothered doing that just google the average price in your area and it'll give it to you so for me that was 4.59 which to be fair was actually less than i thought it was going to be but this got me to thinking that i also use a 2000 watt heater to heat the fermenter in a little chamber to keep the fermentation temperature you know on track and just some real rough calculations that worked out to be seven dollars which is kind of crazy and makes me realize that i need to switch that heater out for something a little bit more efficient complete not a freaking overkill and i'm literally throwing money down the drain for it but you can kind of see how doing this process and actually going through and looking at it assessing it and putting a number on it uh is kind of i don't know it's kind of an eye-opening experience for me anyway let's move on to the next one and that is equipment so here's the deal guys uh you go out and spend a whole lot of money on equipment and then you just forget about it and you look just at the ingredient that's not quite a true representation about how much this is costing you and the thing is team you could go about this in a lot of different ways you could kind of look at the cost of the equipment itself versus how long you think it's going to be an operation for and essentially depreciate it by you know on a per use case or on a per week case and then how many times you use it a week or on month or a year or whatever it happens to be that's up to you and it depends how you think about this and it depends exactly why you're doing these calculations but for me this first time around what i've done is i have looked at the cost of the equipment i'm using and then the rough amount of times i think i'm going to use it to kind of get my money's worth out of it and for the t500 which i use for that i said i'm going to use it 50 times which is you know over the course of the next six or seven years that's about how many times i think i'm going to use it and it was 545 new so that was 10 for this batch once again kind of crazy i didn't really think of that um the brutal bag bag that i used for it maybe i used that i don't know 15 20 times uh so that was only 60 cents and then i just threw in a few other things like the use of the fermenters and the glass jars because i tend to break them every now and again so on average maybe i use a glass jar 20 times before i need to buy another one or whatever it happens to be and all of that added up to 12 and 30 cents funnily enough that was a lot lower than i thought it was going to be this one though this one is the killer this is what's going to mess you up this is why you don't save any freaking money home distilling and that is your time once again guys i get it i get it i get it um some people look at this in different ways if it's a hobby you don't count your time at all right or do you i don't know that's up to you what i've decided to do right now is to split this up into different things that i had to do during making this product and then assign a different monetary value on that time based on how much i love it or how much i hate it and to be honest guys this was hard for me because every time i do anything like this i've got to record it i've got to plan it i've got to move the camera around i've got to get b-roll so one hour of actual brewing time is like three hours for me so it's kind of hard to put numbers on this for me but uh here's the rundown team uh planning time that took me five hours because this was developing a totally new recipe from nothing and a totally new kind of method for the t500 as well so that took me a fair bit of time but you know what i love that so i said that was five dollars an hour i'd like to think i'm worth more than five dollars an hour but for the planning time because i love it so much i'm saying it's five dollars an hour uh mashing took me two hours and distilling took me roughly nine hours all up and for both of those i put them in at 10 each that may surprise you don't you like distilling i do like distilling but you know what i actually enjoy the the thinking about it and the planning and the geeking out and the trying to decide what to make that's where the fun is really for me i would never go to work and get paid for ten dollars an hour but i would tinker around and pay myself ten dollars an hour in the shed right that's kind of my thinking on this one cleaning on the other hand [ __ ] that that's 30 an hour and that was one and a half hours uh and then just random miscellaneous stuff like having to come back out to the shed and check on where the fermentation's at or you know come out and check where the aging's at i put two hours down at the rate of ten dollars an hour uh and that all comes up to 200 bucks which is basically more than all the other stuff put together and i am being very very generous with low rates there so if we add all of that up the ingredients the shipping the energy the equipment depreciation or the equipment usage or the purchase of equipment divided up by how many times you use it how you want to look at it and your time this comes to 300 bucks it cost me 300 bucks to make it based on what i just went through well actually 293.79 but there you go that recipe is going to yield me i think by the time it's aged out and i've proofed it down to where i want it to be it's going to be roughly five and a half liters which means for a 750 ml bottle that's 40 dollars a bottle uh and for a one liter bottle that is 53.42 i'm going to change these numbers around in a second to alter the total based on different ways you can look at it just to show you how much this fluctuates but before we do that i want to talk to you really quickly about i guess i'd call it the opportunity cost or the opportunity value of the spirits you're making and really this involves just what you enjoy and the easiest way for me to think about this is imagine you felt like having a drink that night and you knew kind of what you wanted to drink and you could walk into a store and all the standard brands are there on the shelf but there in the corner there's a bottle of what you can make four what was it forty dollars and sixty cents for a 75 mil bottle now would i pick that bottle up for forty dollars and uh six cents so the stuff we made is kind of like i compare it to maybe like a blended scotch or something like that so i could go over there and pick a bottle of my stuff up for 40 bucks or i could go over there and get a bottle of monkey shoulder for i don't know maybe 55 or something for me here in new zealand which one am i going to buy [Laughter] that's kind of the way i look at this and i have thought about this in the past and where where it really breaks down for me is if i'm looking purely at how much money it saves me and you know how much it costs me and so on and so forth and take all the other stuff out of it if it's a vodka i'll take my stuff all day every day at that price at that sort of price difference if it is a mixing drink i'll take the savings and use my stuff all day every day where it changes is when i start getting into the quote unquote craft spirits uh or the brown spirits so if you offer me a bottle of uh laphroaig quarter cask for 65 on special i literally cannot make something that i enjoy that much for that sort of price point i just can't like i i don't i haven't had the the time in the craft i haven't had the ability to develop it i haven't had the time in terms of having products age for a long enough to get to that point the one thing that's gotten the closest for me so far when it comes to brown spirits is the south island peat that is getting really really nice and give that another six months and that really would give that sort of value for money uh what i can get off the shelf and that 50 to 65 70 range a run for its money i hope the other things like craft gins for example so if i'm making a gin just to make a dirty gin and tonic at the end of the day i'll take mine all day every day at that value but uh having a really nice bottle of 1919 gin for example it's just worth a little bit more to me it really is like i enjoy having it and the other thing is i enjoy spending money on craft spirits because it gives me inspiration to come back to the distillery and make better stuff in the future so there's that as well i don't know if you think about it the same way and you're the only person that can really figure out what is worth it to you does that make sense all right anyway uh before i go in and change these numbers around and give you an idea of the the you know the the cost of making your own spirits based on a few different ideas and they say a huge huge thank you to the patreons thank you so much patreons it was one of you guys that let me know that i should do this so thank you i think it's a good idea for a video but also thank you for everything else you do you make this possible you let me do this literally as my job uh how freaking cool is that anyway thank you so much guys so all right what i want to do now is let's run the same numbers but uh put a real value in for the time so let's not wait things way down to like five dollars an hour because i like it and this gets out of control crazy quick so if we say we're worth 15 dollars an hour and i'm telling you right now i think that each and every one of you is worth a shitload more than 15 new zealand an hour i really do you're worth more than that uh but if we say we're worth 15 an hour we're already at 48.27 for a 600 for a 750 ml bottle now this just gets out of control crazy quick because the amount of time that you put into making spirits um is just nuts 20 it's 60 bucks for that 750 ml bottle and let's what should we jump up to 30 an hour that is an 84 bottle uh at 750 mils so yeah guys um if you if you value your time and you're doing this to save money you're not you're just not you cannot save money uh by making your own spirits if you want to pay yourself you know if you think about what that time would be worth just go out and do like a couple of hours worth of work extra you know get to a couple of hours worth of overtime and you can buy that bottle of spirits as opposed to working for a shitload of time to make it uh it yeah it just doesn't stack up team but but but but right at the beginning of this video i kind of hinted at the fact that i think that this whole freaking exercise is kind of pointless after doing it i'll admit that it's actually been quite eye-opening to see where the money goes and what i'm spending money on and how i can change that and be more efficient the reason i said that and the reason i still stand by it is that i don't do this to save money i do this to spend money this is a hobby to me it's a love of mine i am investing money in ingredients and energy and equipment and my time because i love doing it and the reward i get back from it isn't the bottle of spirits at the end of the day the reward i get back from it is the god damn i can't believe i'm going to say it but the journey i hate that word the the it's the process it's the it's the being pissed off and swearing and cursing and grumpy and angry and then getting a breakthrough and feeling awesome for it and that it's all of that rolled in together the bottle of spirits that sat there at the end is a bonus that is the the icing on the cake the cherry on top uh so i kind of forget all of this and in that case maybe what you could do is go back and just take your time out entirely uh and in that case if you take your time out entirely and you keep everything else in there it's a 11 bottle of spirits and what if you take it a step further what if you say that buying the equipment is an investment into my hobby and from here on in i'm just going to look at the you know basically just the ingredients forget about the power forget about the equipment just the ingredients that's the cost that i'm going to call it well now you've got a eight dollar bottle of spirits and i mean that's pretty freaking reasonable right i'm gonna walk into the store and there's a bottle of eight dollar next step whiskey next to the you know the the 55 monkey shoulder or something like that i'm gonna pick that eight dollar bottle a lot more often the long and short of it is team if you're in this hobby to get drunk for cheap you're watching the wrong damn channel and you're in the wrong damn hobby go to the bottle store and buy the cheapest thing you can find it's the best way to do it if however you're in this hobby because you love the craft if you're watching this channel because you enjoy the blood sweat and tears of making that [ __ ] um then it all adds up and it all makes sense and it's just the cost of your hobby i haven't edited this video yet obviously but i get the feeling it's gonna be freaking rambly and making not a lot of sense but uh anyway this was kind of fun for me it was kind of eye-opening for me i hope it was the same for you if you liked the video make sure you hit the like button that helps me out a whole lot like it actually does help me out and it cost you nothing if you haven't subscribed yet and you like these videos hit the subscribe button down below too that helps me out even more uh and the other thing you can do is drop your comments in the comment section down below let me know what you think on this topic let me know if you've done these calculations before and let me know what your thoughts are on the topic in any case guys i'll catch you next time keep on chasing the craft see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 51,187

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Id: M9MlK_RD2bY

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021