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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fergus" data-source="post: 1895195" data-attributes="member: 26316">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:<a href="http://www.amurgsval.org/feng-shui/prices.html" target="_blank">http://www.amurgsval.org/feng-shui/prices.html</a>According to the site, we have the following prices:Honey 2 pence/pintMead .25 pence/pintAle .25 pence/pintWe 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/pintMead 4 cp/pintAle 4 cp/pintStep 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.</blockquote>

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