40 pints = standard 23L kit
Advanced options
Starter equipment (fermenter, syphon, bottles or a pressure barrel, steriliser) is GBP 40-70 once: it amortises inside the first batch at pub prices. Kit beer's honest ceiling: a well-made kit beats cooking lager and loses to a good cask pint: all-grain brewing closes that gap at the cost of a full Saturday per batch. The supermarket comparison is the fair one (see right): the pub pint buys the pub. ABV maths lives on our homebrew ABV calculator. Drink responsibly.
What The Home Brew Cost Calculator Works Out
- Your pint costs: the ingredient kit price divided by the pints it makes. The standard 23-litre kit at GBP 20-30 yields 40 pints, so 55-75p each against GBP 4.50-6 at the pub, roughly eight times cheaper.
- Batch value at pub prices: pints x the pub price, around GBP 190 for a standard kit, which covers GBP 40-70 of starter equipment several times over inside the first brew.
- The honest comparison: the pub pint buys the pub, so the fair fight is supermarket beer at GBP 1.20-1.60 a pint-equivalent. Home brew still wins two- to threefold, but as a hobby with a dividend rather than an arbitrage.
- Sugar, priming and extras (advanced): brewing sugar or spray malt, priming sugar, caps and steriliser per batch, typically GBP 2-5, which the kit price alone leaves out.
- Starter equipment and its life (advanced): the fermenter, syphon, steriliser and bottles or pressure barrel (GBP 40-70) spread over the years they last and the batches brewed in that time. Upgrades like a brew fridge can go in here too.
- Batches per year (advanced): sets the annual pints and cost. Six batches is a committed hobbyist; a 40-pint batch arriving every two months is a storage plan as much as a schedule.
- Supermarket price (advanced): change the GBP 1.40 pint-equivalent to the beer you actually buy; craft cans run GBP 3-4 a pint-equivalent and make home brew look much better.
- Pints you would otherwise have bought (advanced): the honesty setting. Brewing 240 pints a year only saves money on the pints that replace bought beer, not on the extra ones that get drunk because they are there.
- True cost per pint and brewing per year (advanced): kit, extras and amortised equipment per pint, and the full annual cost of the hobby at your batch count.
- Savings and equipment payback (advanced): the yearly saving against supermarket and pub prices for the pints replaced, and how many batches it takes for the equipment to pay for itself against supermarket beer (against the pub it is the first batch).