Economic Problems of Brewing Mead in D&D...

In a D&D game that's going to be starting up in the next month or two I thought that it would be fun to play a character with brewing skills and have his "day job" be brewing and selling mead. Running a meadery could be quite fun in general and the hired help could always run it while my character is off adventuring.

Before deciding whether or nor to go for this I wanted to see how much money there was to be made in mead. Here's my analysis:

Step 1: Finding out how much honey costs and how much mead sells for.

The SRD doesn't list a price for honey and mead, so I did some poking around for medieval pricings. This site has a large list of prices of items in England around 1450 with a list of references at the bottom of the page:

http://www.amurgsval.org/feng-shui/prices.html

According to the site, we have the following prices:

Honey 2 pence/pint
Mead .25 pence/pint
Ale .25 pence/pint

We can convert this into D&D currency by using SRD's price of ale as 4cp/pint, and when we do that we get:

Honey 32 cp/pint
Mead 4 cp/pint
Ale 4 cp/pint

Step 2: Calculating the cost of making a batch of mead.

A medieval recipe recommends 36 lbs. of honey for 10 gallons of mead mixture (which is consistent for modern day recipes, too). A medieval "cask" is 32 gallons in size, so let's say that we're brewing a cask of mead. For 32 gallons of mead mixture we'd need 115.2 lbs. of honey. Honey is 12 lbs. per gallon, so that's 9.6 gallons of honey, which is 76.8 pints of honey, which is 2457.6 cp.

This assumes that we're only using honey and water, which is possible as raw honey has enough yeast in it to ferment into a low alcohol content mead without adding anything. (This further assumes that you don't heat the mixture as heating will kill the yeasts in the honey, though this is acceptable for mead because the risk of something potentially infectious brewing in mead is much less than in beer, for example, but I digress...)

Step 3: Calculating the sale price of a batch of mead.

During the fermentation process the brewer "racks" the mead a few times. Racking is where you pour/siphon off the liquid from the sediment (stuff from the honey, dead yeast, etc.) that's collected at the bottom of the container. According to a friend who's been home brewing for 10 years, a good brewer can end up with 90% of what they start with being consumable at the end. This 90% was for beer, which is racked less frequently than mead (for flavor reasons), so let's say that of the 32 gallons of initial mead mix we have 28 gallons of consumable product (87.5% of initial amount).

28 consumable gallons of mead = 224 consumable pints of mead = 896 cp in selling mead.

Step 4: Economic analysis of mead.

It costs 2457.6 cp to make a cask of mead and you only get 896 cp for selling it.

Step 5: The problem.

How to mead makers stay in business given these numbers? Historically mead was phased out because certain grains (like hops) were much more economical to use in brewing than honey, so I can understand why an economic model would want to have either mead cost consumers more or for the brewer to make less of a profit. But mead has been around for thousands of years and I'm having a hard time seeing how mead brewers stayed in business given these numbers.

I welcome and encourage any thoughts about this... I'd like to think that brewing in D&D is something that people can make a living doing.

Well, the easy solution is not to get caught up in the details and say that you can make a very modest living from brewing mead and let it go at that.

As far as possible modifiers to your math (since I get the feeling you will not be satisfied with the first solution) you can assume the mead brewer is also a beekeeper and gets his honey for some fraction of the retail cost. At the very least he should have some longstanding deal to get honey for less than retail.
Also, the units of measure in those days were not as standardized as we tend to expect these days. Perhaps the wholesale pint is larger than the retail pint at the bar. This was common practice in those days and one of the ways traders made a lot of easy money. So perhaps your calculations are based on two different meanings of a pint and therefore further flawed.

Well, don't worry about ale. It's okay for two products that aren't exactly the same to have different prices, and mead drinks more like wine anyway.

Fundamentally, though, your data has honey selling for 8 times as much as mead but you're only cutting your honey by less than 1:4 to make the mead. So that's never, ever going to work.

You need to either cut it more (I've seen recipes running 1:6) or get cheaper honey. It seems likely that your 2p/pint price for honey isn't raw honey (which contains beeswax, bee parts, and other gunk), for example. But raw honey is in fact fine for mead, because of the racking process you mention.

It's either that, or giant bees. Economy of scale.

I recommend skipping trying the real world to d&d conversion, it's just not going to work.

Instead, just buy ranks in Craft(Brewing). Using the craft skill, you can then turn any arbitrary xGP worth of ingredients (honey, spices, etc) into 3xGP of finished Mead.

Done.

OK, I have no idea about the history of meaders, but I would guess that one simple way that meaders stayed in business was to have their own hives and collect their own honey. Of course selling the honey itself would be worth more than the mead, but perhaps they did both, making good profits from honey and poor profits from mead.

Possibly by owning the beehives that produce the honey, thereby replacing the financial cost of the honey with a labour cost. Don't have to pay for honey if you've got a ready source. Larger initial outlay, but it makes the operation profitable, especially if you sell the excess honey.

Regardless, cool roleplay idea and one I may try next time I get a chance.

Dr_Rictus said:

It's either that, or giant bees. Economy of scale.

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Adventure hook!

The second Niift the Lean book has an adventure linked to this. They are hired by a beekeeper to go down into Hell and draw off the juice these giant demon-eating bugs secrete to create their warrior caste. He plans to feed the bees a tiny, tiny amount of it, whereupon they will grow to giant size and thus produce massive amounts of honey for him. It doesn't quite work out that way...

Thanks!

Wow, go out to lunch and come back to find seven replies. I'm quite happy. *grin*

Fundamentally, though, your data has honey selling for 8 times as much as mead but you're only cutting your honey by less than 1:4 to make the mead. So that's never, ever going to work.

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Yes, I definitely agree. The problem isn't the D&D conversion as much as it is the initial pricing that the numbers are based off of. At the same time, these are the only numbers I've been able to find that have a medieval price of honey in it. I can find different mead pricings, but no other honey pricings. I have a hard time rejecting the relative price of honey without any other numbers to go off of...

It seems likely that your 2p/pint price for honey isn't raw honey (which contains beeswax, bee parts, and other gunk), for example. But raw honey is in fact fine for mead, because of the racking process you mention.

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I definitely agree that meaderies would use raw honey (any purifying process would remove some of the few yeasts that are in the honey). I'm not sure if this would be enough of a financial boost as we'd pretty much need to cut the price of honey by more than half to get the numbers to work out, but it is definitely something to keep in mind. Thanks for pointing that out. *smile*

Perhaps the wholesale pint is larger than the retail pint at the bar. This was common practice in those days and one of the ways traders made a lot of easy money.

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Good observation; for example, the SRD has a gallon of ale being the same price and buying five pints individually (37.5% savings). However, while this reasoning may make honey cheaper, it would also make selling the mead less profitable as one would probably sell mead wholesale as well.

OK, I have no idea about the history of meaders, but I would guess that one simple way that meaders stayed in business was to have their own hives and collect their own honey. Of course selling the honey itself would be worth more than the mead, but perhaps they did both, making good profits from honey and poor profits from mead.

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If the numbers I have are right then you'd make much more money selling the honey than brewing the mead and would never bother making mead. You'd lose money buy investing your honey in mead. Also, beekeeping is a very different skill set than brewing and often a full time job in and of itself. (This is meant to apply to general "be a beekeeper" replies.)

Regardless, cool roleplay idea and one I may try next time I get a chance.

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I find it rewarding for my characters to have roots somewhere, to know what they would do if they weren't adventuring. Provides added depth and more role playing opportunities. And how better to tell the tales of your glorious adventures than by treating everyone to your finest mead? *grin*

Instead, just buy ranks in Craft(Brewing). Using the craft skill, you can then turn any arbitrary xGP worth of ingredients (honey, spices, etc) into 3xGP of finished Mead.

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Well, I'd have Craft(Brewing) anyway... What gets to me about what you propose is that it basically treats all crafts as the same financially. I'd expect a tailor who works with silks and lace to have a different profit multiplier than a mead brewer. Supermarkets have a very low profit multiplier and compensate with high volume transactions, whereas the materials for many paintings are an incredibly small fraction of the selling price.

Well, the easy solution is not to get caught up in the details and say that you can make a very modest living from brewing mead and let it go at that.

As far as possible modifiers to your math (since I get the feeling you will not be satisfied with the first solution)

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Ha! *laugh* Definitely good instincts on your part. I'm totally willing to go with your suggestion if the wealth system in our game is abstracted (something like Grim Tales wealth syste, which I very much like in concept even though I've never used it). However, if I'm going to need to count coins to pay for something, then I'm going to want to count the coins that are coming in as well. Part of the fun of roleplaying for me is really getting involved in the world and throwing myself into the details of it and worrying about the little things just as much as the big things.

Overall, the space I'm in is pretty much what Rictus said: it's never going to work without changing honey to mead price ratio to be much less than 8:1 and I'm not sure that there's a good way of accurately doing that.

Thanks all for your input.

I suspect the problem is the price list. There is a list of sources at the end, but we don't know which book the prices in question came from and where that book got it's data. They could have been gathered independantly from different countries with differing economic conditions. It could be that the place with 2d/pint honey charged more than .25d/pint for mead.

Given the calculations you present, I suspect that in the real world someone making mead would either be charging more or not making mead.