The True Cost of a Can of Beer

Let's break this down properly. We'll use a typical small brewery setup: an 1800-litre brew length at 4.5% ABV. These are the real numbers.

### What you start with — and what you lose

You brew 1800 litres, but you don't get 1800 litres of beer. Around 200 litres will be lost in the bottom of the fermenter — trub, yeast sediment, hop debris. It's not saleable. It goes down the drain.

So your usable beer is 1600 litres. At 440ml per can, that gives you roughly 3,636 cans per brew. That's your starting point. Everything that follows gets divided by that number.

### Malt

Malt is your base. For a standard brew at this volume and strength, you're looking at around £350. That's your grain bill — pale malt, maybe some speciality malts depending on the style. It doesn't change dramatically between a lager and an IPA. The base is the base.

Per can: 9.6p.

### Hops

Here's where style matters. A straightforward lager might use around £100 worth of hops. Nothing extravagant — a bittering addition, maybe a small late addition for aroma, and that's it.

An IPA is a different story. You're dry-hopping, you're adding big late additions, you're using varieties that cost real money. £200 or more for an IPA is normal, and if you're brewing a heavily hopped NEIPA or double IPA, it can go higher.

Per can: 2.8p (lager) to 5.5p (IPA).

### Yeast

This one surprises people. Yeast is not a trivial cost, and the numbers are counterintuitive. A lager yeast will cost you around £160 per brew. Lager strains need bigger pitching rates, they ferment at lower temperatures for longer, and the yeast itself tends to be more expensive. An ale yeast for your IPA might be around £100.

Per can: 4.4p (lager) or 2.7p (IPA).

### Duty

This is the one that really hurts. Beer duty in the UK is calculated per hectolitre per percentage of alcohol by volume. With Small Breweries' Relief — assuming you qualify, and assuming the relief scheme doesn't get restructured again — the rate for the smallest brewers is around £9.85 per hectolitre per percent ABV.

For your 1600 litres — that's 16 hectolitres — at 4.5% ABV:

£9.85 × 16 × 4.5 = £709 per brew.

Read that again. Seven hundred and nine pounds. Before you've sold a single can. Before you've paid for the can to put it in. That's what you owe HMRC for the privilege of making beer. And remember, that's the reduced rate. Without Small Breweries' Relief, you'd be paying roughly double.

Per can: 19.5p. Nearly twenty pence of every can goes straight to the taxman.

### Electricity

Brewing is energy-intensive. You're heating water, boiling wort, running pumps, powering a chiller, keeping fermentation at temperature for days or weeks, then cold-crashing. Your electricity bill for a single brew comes in at around £90.

Per can: 2.5p.

### Labour

Someone has to brew the beer and clean down afterwards. A brew day plus clean-down is roughly 12 hours of work. At a modest rate of £13.50 an hour, that's £162 per brew.

Unless you do it yourself. In which case it costs you nothing on paper and everything in practice — but we'll come back to that.

Per can: 4.5p.

### Packaging

Now the big one. Every can needs a can, a lid, a label, and a box to ship in. Someone needs to run the canning line, whether that's you, your staff, or a mobile canning company. All in — cans, lids, labels, boxes, and the labour to package it — you're looking at around 48p per can.

Let that sink in. The single biggest cost in producing a can of beer is the can itself. Not the malt. Not the hops. Not the electricity or the labour. The packaging costs more than all the ingredients combined.

Per can: 48p.