Ginger Beer Plant

I tried making beer a few times. I eventually just gave away everything and stopped bothering. While there were a few reasons for this, one of the primary ones was that it just did not make economic sense. I ended up spending about a dollar a beer in ingredients and putting in hours of work. It just made more sense to buy beer.

I was just given a "ginger beer plant" though which would have been a much better choice for a broke college student. The ingredients are pretty much just sugar, ginger, and ginger beer plant. This is astronomically cheap. Sugar at Target was 55 cents a pound. In bulk you can probably find a way to buy it for half that price. Assuming this uses the same amount of sugar as regular beer, I would guess that a 5 gallon batch would use about 8 pounds of sugar. Or about $4 for the batch. This works out to about 10 cents a beer!

Why this isn't in every dorm building in the country is beyond me.