Budgetary Exbeerimentation

I love buying beer at stores that let you make a custom six-pack from a selection of single beers. There's no faster way to learn about beer's countless styles and substyles, endless variations in alcohol content, flavorings, price, seasonal/limited releases and multi-brewery collaborations. Beyond the educational aspect, it allows the most variety since one sixer equals six different experiences. Grocery stores rarely cater to this style of buying, so I hunt for specialty shops with the largest possible selection of singles.

This is the most expensive and inefficient way to buy beer, since as with most other products, buying a larger quantity of one product results in a lower price per ounce. The excellent Founder's "Breakfast Stout" is $3.50 per bottle at Total Wine and Spirits, but only $12.00 for a four-pack. That's 15% less per beer, which compounds quickly since I make weekly trips to buy custom six-packs. If you drank one a day for a month (monotonous, but a delicious monotony) you'd spend $108.50... but for some reason, introducing a four-compartment cardboard sleeve reduces that price to $92.00.

Depending on your philosophy, the time cost is even worse. It takes time and mental stamina to scan hundreds of individual labels, especially since good stores put helpful info cards under each beer (more reading). The clock ticks while you juggle all that information, running dozens of tiny cost-benefit analyses in an attempt to whittle the store's inventory into only six choices. And the trip repeats every week, in my 2004 Mustang that's about 60 cents and ten minutes per trip, for a cost of $2.40, 40 minutes, and a gallon of gas monthly.

There's got to be a way for me to learn about beer and have a ton of variety without wasting so much time and money. After weeks of the custom six-pack method, I discovered the swanky craft beer "bomber" area of Total Wine. A bomber is a 22oz bottle instead of the usual 12oz, meaning you get almost two beers per bottle, plus breweries often release their craftiest (and rarest) beers in this format - which means more education. Great! So this $10.00 bomber of tasty Southern Tier "Crème Brulée" stout is only 45 cents an ounce, and since the aforementioned Founder's is only 29 cent per ounce for a single beer, that means buying bombers is 1.5 times as expensive! Wait... what was I trying to do again?

• Goal: drink a large variety of beer for both educational and entertainment purposes, and waste less time and money.
• Obstacles: the cheapest buying method is the least educational and varied, and the most educational/varied method is the most expensive and time consuming.

An easy improvement is to buy for the whole month in one trip, which automatically cuts shopping time in-store, and driving costs (both time and money) down to 25% of the original amount. Doing all the shopping in one trip also means I get to buy more at one time, which exposed an incredibly obvious solution that would never have come to me if I were buying a single six-pack: buy multiple six-packs and rotate them for variety.

The best beers come in 22oz bombers at around $10.00, but the best six-packs are about the same price, for triple the servings (six beers versus two servings per bomber). For $50.00, I could grab five top-notch six-packs (30 servings) and have a great beer every day, rotating them to revisit the same beer only once every five days. Since a bomber has 1/3 the servings as a six-pack, it would cost three times as much to buy a month's supply: $150.

According to my records, I spent $153.00 on craft beer last month (I recommend Mint.com for budget tracking), so these numbers aren't just theoretical. Eventually I settled on a compromise:

• Two good six-packs to rotate at $10 each (running total: $20, twelve servings)
• Two excellent four-packs to rotate at $10 each (running total: $40, twenty servings)
• Three excellent bombers at $10 each (running total: $70, twenty-six servings)
• Five random weird singles at around $3.00 each (final total: $85, thirty-one servings)

By sacrificing a little variety, but no quality, I was able to cut the month's beer expenses by 43%, while cutting gas and time costs by 75%. It's always nice to save money, but it's beyond nice to spend less time at the store. I'm going to see what other areas of my life would benefit from the "do more in one trip" method, remembering that the benefits can extend beyond saving money.

Partial picture of the haul (click to enlarge)