Save some money on grain prices

[adm]

Why not start a poll? See how many people would be interested buying Pale malt through a JBK bulk buy - then at least you'd have an idea as to what volumes we'd be talking about.

Personally, I would be interested, and would buy about 8-10 sacks per year

[boingy]

TBH we'd be better off contacting the maltsters direct and trying to negotiate a special JBK discount on the price of one or two sacks or a preferential postage rate rather than trying to arrange our own distribution of large heavy sacks. Experience suggests that some suppliers are fairly amenable to offering a modest discount (e.g. 5%) to "club members". Negotiating higher discounts is harder. The fact is that it is a bigger pain in the ass for a supplier to ship 30 sacks to 30 different addresses (and deal with 30 different people) than it is for them to ship a couple of pallets to a handful of businesses.

[pdc]

TBH we'd be better off contacting the maltsters direct and trying to negotiate a special JBK discount on the price of one or two sacks or a preferential postage rate rather than trying to arrange our own distribution of large heavy sacks. Experience suggests that some suppliers are fairly amenable to offering a modest discount (e.g. 5%) to "club members". Negotiating higher discounts is harder. The fact is that it is a bigger pain in the ass for a supplier to ship 30 sacks to 30 different addresses (and deal with 30 different people) than it is for them to ship a couple of pallets to a handful of businesses.

And that is why we have homebrew shops, they deal with the hassle of homebrewers - we are big customers to shops. Shops are probably small/medium customers to Maltsters and so individually we are tiny to them with our 50-300Kg needs per year.

Why look for discounts - if you can get the quantity you want from place that is accessable at a price you are happy with then that is where you shop.

[adm]

TBH we'd be better off contacting the maltsters direct and trying to negotiate a special JBK discount on the price of one or two sacks or a preferential postage rate rather than trying to arrange our own distribution of large heavy sacks. Experience suggests that some suppliers are fairly amenable to offering a modest discount (e.g. 5%) to "club members". Negotiating higher discounts is harder. The fact is that it is a bigger pain in the ass for a supplier to ship 30 sacks to 30 different addresses (and deal with 30 different people) than it is for them to ship a couple of pallets to a handful of businesses.

Yeah - that's what I meant. Soz if I wasn't clear!

For example - if there were 30 people on here that each would take 4 sacks a year, we'd go talk to the maltsters for a price for 120 sacks a year and try to get a discounted sack price and a decent shipping rate.

Some of these guys will ship out single sacks anyway - so they can do it, but they charge £25 a sack and something like £12 for the delivery. £20 or less a sack plus a flat rate £5 delivery would be nice though

[pdc]

I think if you said "We'll have 120 Sacks for JBK please" you would get a better rate than £25 per sack, but you would have to take delivery there and then.
TBH @ £25 per sack and £12 delivery isn't that compatible with Barley Bottom? Better still if you can pick it up. It is probably one of the cheapest sources you will find.

As a group are we becoming bitter (excuse the pun) because we can't get it as cheap as some they supply, like microbrewries?
Even at those prices the gain bill isn't going to work out to be expensive per pint.

[adm]

I'm just a tight git!

I'm always on the look out for a deal and hate to pay the "sticker price" on anything.

Right now, I get my pale from my nearest (20 miles) micro brewery at £25 a sack, which is fine. I collect it myself and take the opportunity to by some beers from their brewery shop at the same time. Conveniently, it's also near to my closest home brew shop, so I normally pop in there and pick up anything else I need. But i'm still kidding myself becuase it probably costs about £8 in diesel and takes a few hours of my time.

My thought was to use a year's worth of JBK malt requirements then shop around the maltsters to see if any would give us a good rate. Then you place a "blanket" order for the whole amount and call it off in individual sacks as it's needed, which they then ship out.

In my business, that's how we work with our customers. They give us a forecast for what they expect to use, we negotiate prices based on this, then they place orders at that negotiated price and we ship out to whoever...

Ah - pipedreams....

[boingy]

Our local microbrewery used to help out local hombrewers with "reasonable"quantities of malt and hops (but not yeast) at generous prices but they stopped because it was just too much hassle. Basically people started expecting them to supply ingredients almost instantly rather place an order and arrange to collect it the next week. There were even a few people who would turn up unannounced and demand malt and hops on the spot. Oddly enough, the brewery preferred to prioritise their own needs before doing the favour for the home brewers. The head brewer summed it up for me. He said that they started the scheme as a way of encouraging homebrewers and of gaining a good reputation at grassroots level. In the end he decided it was actually damaging their reputation because a few individuals were publicly complaining about the "bad service" they were getting. Insane but true.

I'm very fortunate in that our local HB shop sells 25KG MO for £31 and it's only a 5 minute drive away. His hop prices suck and he has a very variable stock level for other common malts but for MO he is spot on.

[softlad]

I wasnt looking at this with a view to stamping my feet becasue I cant malt as cheap as microbreweries. I am just looking at ways to save a few quid. With pale malt being heavily used in most beers it seems like a good place to start with cost cutting.

I'm also looking at hops and have planted four varieties which should serve me well after next autumn.

The only other way I could see of reducing cost was to reduce production which isnt going to happen !

Maybe I'll have to live with paying around 40p a pint

[pdc]

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying anyone is stamping their feet, and I'm as thrifty as I can be - except SWMBO isn't!!

I am concerned that either I'll be stuck with bags of malt I haven't got time to process or the process of buying storing and passing on the malt will be time consuming and a bit of a burden and people will fail to collect.

Personally I think I'd use 2 maybe 3 bags a year and store it my garage and use it over the year then buy some more next year. So if there are other like minded members who want to buy a years supply and pick up from Castleford and store it home then get in touch. Collectively we'd need to buy 10+ bags which initially I'd store until you could collect at the earliest possible convenient time. We'd also need to think about arrangements for payment but that's a minor detail.

[dr_watts]

We use FastwayCouriers at work and you don;t need an account. You buy a number of STICKERS priced at between £7.95 or £6.95 depending on number and they will pick up and drop off up to 30 kg.

Only problem is they don't cover the entire country for collection but you can get them to drop off out of zone just costs a little extra.

Might be worth looking at as a courier possibility as they are cheaper than anyone else without an account.