Quote Originally Posted by trainman View Post
Are you all mostly looking for direct brewery purchases to source the myriad of special beers in these pages?
I note Will, particularly, has had some high price high abv beers without, necessarily, the brewery link, but those could be from a specialist beer shop.
If having delivered, what generally is the delivery charge (or the min spend for free delivery)? Marble, Siren, Salt sound interesting, though i'm thinking lots of murk in the latter two.
OK, some facts and figures:

Since 20 March last year I have spent just over £2k on beers to drink at home, or £200 per month (but not all of it has been drunk yet). Forgetting for the moment about delivery charges, the split is something like this:

Breweries 59%
Bottle shops 16%
Online bottle shops 14%
Supermarkets 7%
Pub off-sales 4%

Delivery charges - approx. £150 so far, so call it 10% on top of the price of the beer. But look out for offers to drop the charges for spending a certain amount, though in my experience so far these offers come from the more expensive breweries.

Breweries

Harveys £7.95
Stancill nil (local brewery)
Black Sheep £8.45 per 25kg at first, later £5.99 - the website adds up the weight of your order so you can trim it or top it up as necessary
Williams Bros £9.99 at first, then £5.99 (but I can't remember if this was a change in the charge or just a smaller order)
Allendale nil if you order over a certain amount (can't remember what - £75?)
Purple Moose £13.98 (I think this was £6.99 for each of two packages)
Rock Leopard £7.50
Buxton, Siren Craft & Salt nil (if spending more than £50)

Online bottle shops

Beautiful Beers nil (can't remember if there was a minimum spend - maybe £45)
Stori Beers, Bala £7.95
M&M Wine Co, Hipperhome £9.99
Master of Malt £4.89
Drinkswell, Ripon £7.95
Beer Sniffers nil (minimum spend £75)


Some of the high price, high abv beers are direct from the brewery, some come from my two habitual local bottle shops - the Dram Shop, which is half a mile from my house; Beer Central, which is in Sheffield's Moor Market. From Beer Central, just over 40 beers at an average of £4.50. Their cheapest are £2.95 from local breweries like Abbeydale, Thornbridge, Little Critters and Ashover; I have spent over £10 on a bottle or can on two occasions: one was from Buxton, and the other from Norway. (I was given a 5% discount card after spending £45 at the start of January!) I've also had 40 or so beers from the Dram Shop, spending about £130. Most expensive from there was £7.50 for 440ml of a 10% triple IPA, cheapest was £5 for three cans of Brass Castle Bad Kitty past its best before date (and it was crap).

Online bottle shops are more expensive, with average price (adding cost of beer and delivery, dividing by number of cans or bottles) £3.82. Delivery works out at 25p per can/bottle.

Average price per drink from the breweries (adding cost of beer and delivery, dividing by number of cans, bottles, or theoretical pints in a minikeg) £2.48. Delivery about 20p per drink.

Most expensive breweries (the first three with free delivery) Buxton: 10 beers for just over £50; Siren Craft 14 beers at around £4.70 on average; Salt 10 beers for £53.50, but I got a Tryanuary discount of 10%, making an average of £4.85 each; Rock Leopard £58 for 12 not very high abv 440ml cans, so £4.83 per can (including delivery). The more mainstream breweries above (ie all the rest) are between £1.85 and £2.98 per can or bottle, but the lower price is skewed by a number of lowish abv 33cl cans. Allendale Wagtail (bitter) 3.8% £2.50 for 50cl = £1.32 per unit of alcohol; Williams Brothers Caesar Augustus (lager/IPA crossover) 4% for 33cl = 95p per unit of alcohol; Black Sheep Riggwelter 5.7% £1.80 for 50cl or about £2.20 a pint in a minikeg = 63p/69p per unit of alcohol; these are the most and least expensive in terms of bangs per buck.


What do you mean, too much information? How dare you.