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Why Do You Want A Beerbelly Brewery ?

One of our breweries is a tool. A machine if you like. They have all been designed to produce wort consistently and cleanly - with a minimum of physical effort, maintenance and cleaning. A typical thorough after brew washdown of the brewery would take about 10-15 minutes. For a long life, industry standard fittings and components have been used, and the plumbing is simplified so you don't need a degree to figure out how to use it.
It consistently turns out good quality wort ready to have yeast pitched & be fermented, and instead of a brewday being a strenuous day of heavy lifting, fixing leaks and mopping up spills - it's a relaxed afternoon where you can share a beer with your mates without having to spend all your time nursing the brewery.

The philosophy behind any of these breweries is simple and can be summed up with a few small statements;

1. Craft-brewing your own all-grain beers is an investment in your time and money, both of which you could be doing something else with. It's important to get the good consistent results from your investments!
   
2. To achieve the best result, start by using tools designed for the job. The right tool saves you money, time & effort and makes it more likely that you will achieve the result you want.
3. One of the most time consuming parts of brewing beer is the cleaning. We love brewing but no one likes cleaning. So a tool that not only does a good job, but is easy to clean is even better!

Frequently Asked Questions

How much beer will it make?
In roughly four - five hours hours, the Brewboy will take 12kg of crushed grain & ~70 litres of water, and give you 50-60 litres of wort ready to pitch yeast into immediately* and be fermented into the beer.

(50 litres @ ~1.056 sg = ~ 5.4% a/bv)
(60 litres @ ~ 1.046 sg = ~ 4.1% a/bv)
Standard mash efficiency into the kettle is 75-80%

How much LPG gas will it use per brew?
This depends on a few factors, the temperature of the water, the length of the boil and how hard you boil, but you can expect to get roughly 4-5 brews from one 9kg bottle with conservative burner control.

How much does the beer cost to make?
Once again, this is dependant on a few factors but the cost of an average (5.5% a/bv) 50 litre 'Aussie Beer' clone brew was 76 cents a litre.
This is worked out in this way.
(25kg malt = $45 = $1.80/kg )
12kg grain x $1.80 = $21.60
Hops = $5
Whirlfloc = $0.40
24gm Yeast $6.00
LPG Gas (4 brews per 9kg/$20 cylinder)= $5.00
Total cost of brew = $38.00 divided by 50 litres = $0.76 litre.
Of course you can brew many different beers, and the ingredient cost will vary depending on the cost and amount of ingredients used.

What is the lifespan of the machine?
How long is a piece of string?
The breweries are completely made of stainless steel with the exception of the cast iron burner head itself, the filter housing and canister, and the pump (pump specs here) .You can expect to get normal stainless steel lifespan from the brewery -( I have stainless steel cookware that is 30 years old and still in perfect condition), 12 months from the hosing (our recommended replacement period), and easily 5 years from the March pump. So basically if it's looked after we would be suprised if anything other than the hosing would need repair or replacement within 5 years, most likely longer. (Personally I am expecting to get an entire lifetime's brewing from my brewery.)

Sounds good, but my Wife/Husband/Significant other isn't going for it. How do I convince them ?
With the figures in black and white, and some emotional blackmail thrown in for good measure.
(What?! They're allowed to do it!)
Here's the maths in a nice little story.

Joe Commercial likes to have a beer through the week, and have a couple of mates over for a beer around the BBQ in the weekend. Joe buys a box of (insert generic brand beer here) pretty much every week, and this costs him $35 each time (we'll ignore the petrol cost of collection).
Thats 52 boxes of beer. He heads to BBQ's at his mates places every now and again, lets say 6 times a year - and he takes a dozen beers with him each time. That's 55 boxes of beer a year @ $35 each = $1925.00 a year.
$1925 x 5 years = $9625 **

1 box of beer contains 7.92 litres of beer x 55= 435.6 litres of beer/year or 2178 litres in 5 years = $4.41 per litre of beer
At the end of 5 years, Joe has nothing to show for his money but six and a half thousand empty stubbies.

Tom Homebrewer also likes to have a few beers, and have his mates around. He knows that he likes brewing his own beer because it has many other benefits aside from cost savings, so he purchases a Brewboy brewery for $4700. To produce the same 435.6 litres of beer costs Tom $331.05 (based on the average cost per litre above).
So in the first year, Tom has spent $5031.05.
Each year, Tom continues to buy his ingredients and make his beer, and at the end of 5 years, Tom has spent $6454.00 **
At the end of the 5 years, Tom also doesn't have 6600 stubbies lying around the place the need to be recycled. He's a bit healthier, because his beer doesn't contain non-natural preservatives. His wife is happier because he spends a lot more of his time at home, instead of down at the pub, and he has saved $ 3270, all the while not missing out on anything. He also has a brewery, so he can continue to brew for himself & save money for years to come. Should he ever choose to not brew anymore (heaven forbid), he has an asset that has retained it's value because of it's construction.

In ten years, Joe Commercial spends $19,250. Tom Homebrewer spends $8109 ( including brewery purchase and ingredients for 10 years worth of beer)
(yep.....that's $11,100 saved)

and over 20 years Joe Commercal spends $38,500, Tom Homebrewer spends $11,400
$27,000 saved.

That saved money could be a house deposit or a big chunk off the mortgage or the kid's uni fees or first cars, voluntary super contributions, a renovation, a holiday overseas...........anything Tom and his wife need it to be, because they still have it. Toms wife is happy, so Tom is very happy. (Which is the way it usually works)...whereas, there's a good chance Joe's wife isn't all that happy, because over 20 years, he's spent just under 40 thousand dollars on beer, and there are 27 thousand beer stubbies clogging up the back yard....

Lets put it another way,
Over 20 years, Joe Commercial pays $38500 for 8,712 litres of beer.

For $38500, Tom Homebrewer could buy his brewery and make over 44 thousand litres of beer. ***
(And he's still got his brewery, which the kids will probably fight over when he's gone... :)

Now obviously this is a simplistic comparison of costs and no one is going to fit neatly into one or the other scenario, but there are other very real benefits to brewing your own beer, and to using this machine to do it.
Because many of the mechanical problems & variables involved with mash brewing have been worked out for you with the Brewboy, you can brew based on an expectation of consistent results, which means that you can tailor your beers to suit your own taste - and then you can replicate them. Sweetness, Alcohol content, Carbonation, Bitterness, Hop Aroma, Maltiness are all able to be manipulated to right where you want them. And that's just using traditional ingredients, malted grain, hops and water. There are a thousand different recipes out there, or you can experiment with your own perhaps using ingredients you would never have thought you could use to make beer.

*depending on the temperature of your cooling water.
** average prices only, doesn't take inflation or other normal market based ingredient price fluctuations into account. We are not attempting to provide financial advice.
***Of course that's a ridiculous amount of beer for one person......Tom will quite obviously need some help from his mates.... :)

Don't be one of the crowd, ANYONE can buy their beer in a box.

Click on the images to open a new page with more information on each brewery.

Brewboy™ 2 Vessel HERMS System (click here for more info)



Mashpilot™ 3 Vessel HERMS System (click here for more info)
Click on the image above to open a new page with more information on the Mashpilot.

Brewboy™ & Mashpilot™ brewery's.
Made to order, available only from Beerbelly Brewing Equipment.

Please feel free to email us if you have any further enquiries.