Last Day of Class: Full(ish) Cost Accounting of Making Mead
Classes are over. One final remains. I’m sipping a glass of mead wrapping up a personal assignment: a full cost accounting of making my own mead. It’s not truly full costing because it doesn’t include environmental or social costs. This is more inspired by outdated neoclassical economic modeling.
As my grad program wraps up, I figured to use some of those skills into a new favorite hobby of mine. The mead was bottled two weeks ago and labeled last week. Most of the bottles will be resting on their side until Thanksgiving 2017, when it’s expected they start peaking in flavor and aroma. Like those bottles, I will soon be resting
tl;dr Making your own mead, including the cost of your time, is affordable compared to buying a similar product at the store.
*Schramm’s and Oliver prices include some percentage of profit while my homemade mead does not. Conversely, B Wiley Mead does not include overhead costs like utilities and physical space.
The inputs to obtain the final price comparison starts with the volume of production.
After figuring out how much I could brew, I needed the appropriate equipment, which are mostly fixed costs. Glassware would have come to the most single expensive item. For example, a 5-gallon glass carboy is around $35. I shared carboys with a friend who also brews and reused glass bottles.
Reduce > Reuse > Recycle
Future bottling will not be labeled unless it’s for a gift. Interestingly, cutting out all optional equipment costs, including labels, brought down the baseline price of a B Wiley Mead bottle by 10%. Some of the items listed as optional could add costs and frustrations if eliminated. For example, a bottle washer is to bottle grime as a fire hose is to a fire. Even small amounts of bacteria can sour a fermentation. And I’m not talking about Brettanomyces lambicus.
(pushes up glasses)
The cost for ingredients is mostly related to honey, the sugary feast for the yeast to thrive and multiply on. I made a smaller batch using the more unique and expensive wildflower honey for experimenting around flavor, aroma, and clarity. Additional ingredients for mead brewing are critical but their costs are meager in comparison.
Labor costs had the largest impact on the pricing of a bottle. I’m not costing out my own time though. I learn new skills or work on existing ones because they bring me joy. Slowing down and savoring the simple things in life.
This is simply a calculation of how labor costs could be figured into a craft mead operation for an initial batch and future batches, which would have lower costs due to increased efficiency and understanding of the process.
#FightFor15
The full(ish) cost accounting was an exercise for me to budget my next batch and see the impact of scale in production. Scale matters, even for craft operations. Quality also matters in terms of pricing so don’t skimp on steps or inputs.
Until next time. Sip responsibly.