Although home-brewing beer was legalized in 1978, it wasn’t until 2013 that all 50 states in America legalized making your own beer. Alabama and Mississippi were the last to allow people to do homebrew. And thank goodness, because Americans can all enjoy the sheer joy of brewing, bottling, and drinking beer that’s made right in their own homes.
In this article, we offer 5 good reasons that may convince you to brew your own beer.
You Can Save Money
It may not seem like much, but a survey revealed that the average beer drinker in America spends about 3% of his annual income on beer. This is an average of $1,270 every year. If your buying habits are a lot like the usual beer drinker, you’d be having 2-3 bottles a week.
How can you save by brewing your own beer? Let’s say you consume three bottles of beer weekly, which comes to $15 a week since the average price of a bottle is $5 at a bar. In terms of volume, your 3 weekly bottles are 1.07 liters or 3 gallons.
Not to make you dizzy with more calculations, but a decent homebrew kit sells online for $44 and produces two gallons of beer. For the price of fewer than 9 beers, you can have two gallons of your own brew. Let’s also talk about transportation. Going to and from the bar might cost you another $50 or more, if you take an Uber. You haven’t even arrived at the bar or had a single beer, and you’ve spent $25. For less than two Uber rides, you get two gallons of home-brewed beer that can last for weeks.
Start home-brewing, start saving.
You Enjoy Immense Freedom
By making your own beer, you can fool around with all the production and bottling aspects. You can play around with the recipe, choose your own bottling and packaging, and even name the beer anything you want. You can even tinker with the idea of pursuing this seriously and making a business out of it. Whatever you decide to do with home brewing, it’s all up to you.
Think you have a good brew? You can sell it, share it for free or drink it all yourself. Made a bad batch? Keep it to yourself, nobody has to know.
It Offers Valuable Lessons
Even if you don’t go into homebrew to make money, you can learn a lot about making beer. You’ll discover how our founding fathers made beer when they first came to America. You’ll learn to appreciate how much easier it is to make and drink beer than it was in olden times.
Should you decide to monetize this hobby and actually brew for money, there’s a good chance you’ll inevitably pick up valuable skills like marketing, advertising, salesmanship and time management. Skills like these can come in handy, especially if you want to eventually go into business.
You Gain a Skill to Barter With
It’s not a comforting thought, but should a disaster occur and civilization grinds to a halt, being able to make beer can come in handy. When currency becomes useless, you can use your skill in brewing and the beer you produce as a way to barter for other goods. And should you have no one to trade with, you’ll at least be able to have beer for your own comfort.
It Offers Great Health Benefits
A big difference between commercially mass-produced beer and homebrew is the yeast. The yeast is still “alive” in homebrews, and have Vitamin B that’s beneficial to your liver. Commercial beer is heavily pasteurized, so the yeast no longer has Vitamin B, and that also causes you to have terrible hangovers. Couple the presence of Vitamin B with all the other benefits of drinking beer, and you have a better reason to go homebrew—as long as you don’t overdo it.
Home-brewing your own beer isn’t as difficult as it sounds. You can start with buying the right homebrew kit, and learn how to brew by linking up with homebrewing clubs online.
As you continue to homebrew and improve on it, you can experiment with other recipes and look up other types of hops for sale online.
