How to make really cheap beer.

[pkbites]

I've been through dozens of brewery tours, and I've done some home brewing, so I can tell you what a long complicated process it is to make beer, even cheap beer.

Is there possibly another way?

Could someone come up with a beer flavored syrup, not unlike syrup used for soda. Then instead of the time spent brewing and aging, all they would have to do is add carbonated water, foaming agent, and grain alcohol for kick.
Soda is a non-complicated mixture of artificial everything in water, why not beer?
This would save time and money, thus a much, much cheaper product for us hopp heads.

can/has this been done?

[friedo]

mmmmmmmmmm....beeeeer syyyyrup. Drooooooool.

You'd still have to spend time fermenting stuff to make the syrup. I dunno.

[Alessan]

Tell me this - does artificial orange juice taste just like freshly squeezed orange juice?

Oh. I forgot. We don't care about taste. We just wanna get boozed.

[Lazarus7]

as foul a concept as instant coffee ... and sadly probably equally as marketable ...

[scr4]

all they would have to do is add carbonated water, foaming agent, and grain alcohol for kick.

And how would you make the grain alcohol?

[Pergau]

You can get brew in the bag beer kits, that you fill with water and hang from the back of a door in a warm place and in 2-3 weeks you have ok tasting beer. But this stuff actually has a flavour, unlike Bud etc.

I will try to find a link for you Boots Chemists in England/Ireland used to do them

[Pergau]

There are a lot of companies selling brew in the bag kits. They're called "Brewsacks"

Try http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/

[Lazarus7]

That reminds me ... time to build a mashton and make my own damn beer! ... none of this big asses brewery sheite ... a tasty microbrewery beer for me ... or my own damn beer! ...

[Pergau]

Mash ton! thanks Lazarus7 I've been trying to remember that word for ages

[Lazarus7]

Originally posted by Pergau
Mash ton! thanks Lazarus7 I've been trying to remember that word for ages

no worries ... any time.

[Celyn]

PKBites - whatever your recipe would produce, I don't think it would really be beer. Anyway, although I haven't done it for a while, making beer only takes 2 -3 weeks, and organised peole (not me) could always try to have a couple of brews going simultaneously (at different stages of readiness) so the time investment wouldn't be a big deal after the first batch.

I only ever made beer from the canned beer kits available in home-brew shops, simply because the results were good and the process was simple, so I would recommend that method really.

In fact, as those kits are basically a sort of beer syrup, you COULD use one to try your plan. Do let us know the results!

Incidentally, re. the "mash ton" word mentioned by other people, I'd say it is actually "tun" (tho' perhaps not in the U.S. for all I know.)

[Sam Stone]

I brew beer all the time from cans of 'Beer Syrup', and the results are almost always excellent. You can get anything from a Lager to a heavy bitter ale. Whatever you like.

And it's not much work at all. Fill your 5-gallon plastic jug with water, add syrup, let sit for a couple of weeks, pour into bottles.

The most difficult part of the whole process is sanitizing everything.

Here in Canada, the syrup usually costs about $15, and it makes five gallons of beer. That's about 1/5 the cost of beer from the store.

[pkbites]

I'm more or less talking about a commercial brew. A beer flavored soda if you will. Instead of fermenting it for the alcohol, grain alcohol could simply be added to the soda.
Straight grain alcohol is incredibly cheap to make. I'm talking about a commercial brew that would cost consumers, say, 4 bucks a case (same as soda.).

[Celyn]

Out of curiousity, is grain alcohol actually legal to make in the States? Wow.

[muppetsoup]

doesn't get better than this...
http://www.exaflop.org/docs/x86still/

[Engineer Don]

A friend of mine once showed me a "backpackers beer" kit, which was two small plastic tubes that you were supposed to dump into a canteen full of water to make beer. One tube was just alcohol, and the other was an amber/brown concentrate that gave it color and flavor. Sort of beer concentrate. He said it wasn't very good tasting.

As far as cheap beer goes, you get what you pay for. Can't you still get Lucky Lager? It can't be more than 5 bucks a case. I certainly isn't worth more than that.

[Engineer Don]

Oh, and last I heard grain alcohol was illegal in most states, but still legal in some (Oregon?) It is sold under trade names like "Ever Clear". It is 190 proof, or 95% pure alcohol. Above that percentage I think you need to use acids in the distillation process, and there is always some residual ether, so it is kind of bad to drink.

[Badtz Maru]

I saw Eidelweiss (sp?) beer on sale for $2.99 a case at a store near Lake Tawakoni in Texas.

[Badtz Maru]

Everclear is legal in Texas. It has all kinds of warnings on it. I used to buy a half-pint of it and mix it in a 1 liter bottle of Mountain Dew, drink it all and get a helluva buzz.

[Una Persson]

Originally posted by Engineer Don
Oh, and last I heard grain alcohol was illegal in most states, but still legal in some (Oregon?) It is sold under trade names like "Ever Clear". It is 190 proof, or 95% pure alcohol. Above that percentage I think you need to use acids in the distillation process, and there is always some residual ether, so it is kind of bad to drink.

Everclear is legal in KS and MO too.

[Arjuna34]

Originally posted by Engineer Don
Oh, and last I heard grain alcohol was illegal in most states, but still legal in some (Oregon?) It is sold under trade names like "Ever Clear". It is 190 proof, or 95% pure alcohol. Above that percentage I think you need to use acids in the distillation process, and there is always some residual ether, so it is kind of bad to drink.

It's legal in Virginia also.

Arjuna34

[Lazarus7]

Originally posted by Arjuna34

It's legal in Virginia also.

Arjuna34

But is it tasty?

[pkbites]

I'm in Wisconsin, the drunkest state in the union! Most bars per capita and most booze drank per capita than any of the remaining "sober 49" (as we cheeseheads call them). There just aint no alcohol that's illegal here.

The cheapest beer I've ever bough here in the past 5 years was Grain Belt ($4.99/case of 24 cans in 1998) but I haven't seen it here since. Who is buying beer for $2.99 a case? Do you realize a case=24 cans or bottles NOT 12?

When I first turned leagal drinking age (18 years old in 1978) a case of Kingsburry returnables was $1.66! Beat that!

[occ]

[QUOTE
But is it tasty? [/b][/quote]

Uh, I don't think you're supposed to drink it straight. Its used to spike drinks, as far as I know.

[ZenBeam]

A friend of mine once showed me a "backpackers beer" kit, which was two small plastic tubes that you were
supposed to dump into a canteen full of water to make beer. One tube was just alcohol, and the other was an
amber/brown concentrate that gave it color and flavor. Sort of beer concentrate. He said it wasn't very good tasting.

Maybe they need a third vial with some carbonation.

[dietrologia]

We Southern Californians have to cross the border into Tijuana to get our Everclear (tm) equivalent.

In Tijuana they sell these bottles labeled "Alcohol" with a "~" over the second "o"! It's listed as 95% alcohol. My friends and I always wondered what the other 5% consisted of and... quite frankly, what's the point? Hell, you've got 95% pure alcohol, what's another 5% gonna do?!

The packaging of this product was particularly scary because: a) it's from Tijuana, for chrissakes! and b) it had a plastic cap that didn't screw on, snap on, or was held in place with any means--it just fit on over the lip of the bottle.

We're still alive, though.

[beagledave]

Originally posted by dietrologia
We Southern Californians have to cross the border into Tijuana to get our Everclear (tm) equivalent.

In Tijuana they sell these bottles labeled "Alcohol" with a "~" over the second "o"! It's listed as 95% alcohol. My friends and I always wondered what the other 5% consisted of and...

The other 5% is pretty much water. Actually..it's damn near impossible to get a higher % of alcohol, because the liquid will tend to reabsorb surrounding water in the air

[LazarusLong42]

[Chemical Engineer Hat on]

1. Yep, pure grain alcohol (ethanol) is legal to make and sell in the United States. That doesn't mean you can buy it in a liquor store, of course. But I believe that they'll let pretty much anyone order it from Pharmco or Sigma of Fisher or any one of a dozen other companies that sell alcohol.

2. Standard "pure" ethanol is 95%, or 190 proof. The other five percent is water and maybe some small traces, but not likely. They distill it pretty well to just ethanol and water. The reason it's not pure ethanol is that water and ethanol form what is called an azeotrope.

What the hell is an azeotrope, you ask?

[WARNING: highly technical discussion follows]

In a normal mixture of two pure liquids (say methanol and water), the component with the lower boiling point will boil off first during distilling. But that's not the long and short of it. The vapor produced by boiling 50% methanol/50% water will be around 80% methanol, 20% water. As more methanol boils off, the concentration of methanol in the vapor drops, and the concentration of water increases.

This is the reason fractional distillers are used. That 80/20 mixture boils up to the next plate in the distilling tower, is cooled to a liquid there, and vapor produced from that... which vapor will be about 90% methanol. On the next plate, the liquid will be 90% methanol and the vapor 95% or so. (These numbers are derived from the boiling curve for methanol and water, which you may view here). At the very top of the distillation tower, you'll get pure methanol, and after you've boiled off all the methanol, you'll have water left over.

Ethanol's different, though. Difficult, in fact. An azeotrope could also be called an equal-boiling mixture. What happens is that the vapor from a 95% ethanol/5% water mixture is also 95%/5%. So no matter how much larger a distillation column you build, you'll never separate out all of the water.

In order to get pure, 200 proof ethanol, you must introduce an azeotrope breaker into the mixture. The one usually used in this process is pentane. Adding the pentane creates a much more complex mixture (and you no longer have as simple a boiling curve; I won't try to describe what's needed, as I barely remember myself). The pentane destroys the equilibrium at that 95%, and the ethanol is free to boil out the top of the column effectively pure.

I say "effectively" because there will always be small traces of both water and pentane.

[End technical discussion]

[Chemical Engineer hat off]

As to drinking pure or 95% alcohol--I wouldn't do it, personally, even if I did drink. One could theoretically add it to "beer flavoring," but I suspect it would taste as much like beer as carbonated grape juice spiked with ethanol would taste like wine. (I use the subjunctive because I don't drink and can't vouch for the taste of any of these things).

As to cost--a gallon of pure ethanol costs us about $4.00 here. Beer is 5% or so ethanol. So, ethanol adds about 20 cents per gallon to the cost of making the beer. That's prices in extreme bulk, through a contract, though.

Hell, bottled water sells for more than that

And one last note on legality: I just looked in my Sigma catalog. It notes that an ATF license is not required to purchase 100% alcohol from them. Excise taxes are included, though. And if you're not buying bulk, it'll run you quite a bit more than $4 a gallon.

OK. Everything you ever wanted to know about alcohol but were afraid to ask. There ya go.

[Dijon Warlock]

Here's what you need.

(FWIW, EverClear is legal in Iowa, too. Doesn't taste like much of anything, really. Just has that burn going down. It can be fatal if consumed in large enough quantities--which aren't that large, from what I've heard. Six ounces, or so, IIRC.)

[pkbites]

The per case cost of the beer is said to be between $6.00 to $9.60 a case, however, you have to frequently buy co2 cartridges that raise the cost from $9-$12 per case. I can already buy beer in the store that cost less than that!

However..........the Beer Machine does work as advertised, and if you want to try a simple method of home brewing I'd strongly recommend it!