Tailgate Math: What a Case of Beer Actually Costs Per Can

Every autumn the same conversation happens at our counter. Somebody is feeding eight to twelve people on a Saturday, they have a number in their head, and they are trying to work out whether the big pack is really cheaper or whether it just feels bigger. It is a fair question, and it is answerable with arithmetic rather than opinion, so here is the arithmetic.

Domestic beer, priced per can

These are our shelf prices divided by the number of cans in the pack. Nothing clever.

The 36-pack wins and it is not close: $1.04 a can against $1.28 for the same beer in a 12-pack. Buying three 12-packs instead of one 36-pack costs about $8.78 extra for exactly the same beer. If you are hosting ten people and expecting three each, that is the whole decision made for you.

Modelo and Corona land near $1.51 a bottle. That is roughly fifty cents over the domestic 36-packs, which is a real premium but a small one, about twelve dollars across a case. Worth it if that is what people are actually going to drink; wasteful if half the case comes home with you.

The Georgia beer worth the extra dollar

Metro Atlanta brews well, and this beer travels twenty or thirty miles to reach our cooler rather than two thousand. That is most of the point of buying it.

SweetWater 420 works out at $1.65 a can in the twelve-pack, about sixty cents above the domestic 36-pack, and Tropicalia runs $1.92. Across twelve cans that is roughly seven dollars more for the SweetWater and about ten and a half for the Tropicalia. For a tailgate where people are drinking slowly and talking, that is the better money by a wide margin.

Two practical things

Cold. We keep a 28-quart foam cooler at $6.59 by the register precisely because people forget. It swallows a 24-pack with room for ice, and nobody minds when it does not come home.

The drive. Georgia's open container law makes it illegal to have an open alcoholic beverage in the passenger area of a vehicle on a public road. That covers passengers, not only the driver, and it applies whether the car is moving or parked on the shoulder. Sealed packs in the back are fine. Whatever is open stays at the tailgate.

How much to actually buy

The rule of thumb that has never let us down: two drinks for the first hour per person, then one an hour after that. A four-hour tailgate for ten people is therefore about fifty drinks. One 36-pack plus a twelve-pack gets you to forty-eight, so round up rather than down. Buy the extra twelve-pack in the Georgia craft rather than more of the same domestic - the people who are drinking slowly are the ones who will notice it, and it costs about four dollars more than another domestic twelve.

Then buy about a third again in something non-alcoholic, because somebody is driving and the person who brought the good beer should not be the one drinking it all.

If half your group drinks seltzers and canned cocktails rather than beer, the arithmetic runs differently and we did it separately: BuzzBallz vs High Noon vs Cutwater.

Come get it

Beverage World Package Store, 6731 Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, Doraville, GA 30360. Call (770) 441-0001. We are open Sundays; current hours are on the location and hours page. Prices and stock in this post were correct the day it was written — the links go to the live product pages, which always win.