In the equipment guide I said kegging pays off once bottling day itself becomes the bottleneck. That's still true, and it's also conveniently vague, because it dodges the number everyone actually wants: what does switching cost, all-in? I put off kegging for years partly because every answer I found was either a supplier's optimistic bundle price or a forum thread where someone's "basically free" setup involved a scavenged fridge and a brother-in-law in the welding-gas business. So here's the honest ledger — every part itemized, the time math on both sides, and the cases where the correct answer is to keep your bottles and your money.
What bottling actually costs you
Start with the incumbent, because its costs are easy to underestimate in one direction and overestimate in the other. In money, bottling is nearly free per batch: caps run a few cents each and priming sugar is pocket change — call it $3 a batch, with the bottles themselves reusable more or less forever if you treat them well. There's no pressure equipment, no gas to refill, nothing that leaks.
The real cost is time, and it's the same tax every single batch. A five-gallon batch fills around 48 to 50 twelve-ounce bottles, and my bottling-day log looks like this: 30–45 minutes cleaning and sanitizing the bottles (this is the soul-grinding part), about 10 minutes boiling and mixing the priming solution, 45–60 minutes filling and capping, and another 15 minutes cleaning up the siphon, bucket, and the floor. That's a solid two hours, sometimes two and a half, and it doesn't shrink much with practice because most of it is fifty small repetitive motions. Then the beer needs about two weeks of bottle conditioning at room temperature before it's carbonated — the wait is free, but it's real.
The kegging shopping list, itemized
The core of a kegging setup is four purchases. A used 5-gallon ball-lock corny keg — the soda-industry surplus vessel almost every home brewer starts on — runs about $60–80 refurbished; call it $70. A 5 lb CO2 cylinder is around $75 new, plus roughly $20 for the first fill, so $95 before it dispenses anything. A dual-gauge regulator — one gauge for tank pressure, one for the pressure you're feeding the keg — is about $60. Disconnects, gas and beer line, clamps, and a picnic tap to pour from add up to about $35. That's $260 for the core kit, and none of it is optional: without any one of those four pieces, nothing dispenses.
Then comes the part the bundle listings quietly leave out: the keg has to live somewhere cold. If your kitchen fridge has room for a 25-inch-tall keg plus a CO2 tank, congratulations, this line is $0 — but for most people it doesn't, and the realistic options are a used fridge or chest freezer at $100–200, plus (for a freezer) a $40 external temperature controller so it holds serving temperature instead of freezing the beer solid. Call refrigeration $190 in a typical case. That puts a realistic all-in figure right around $450 — and if you'd rather buy a purpose-built kegerator with a tap tower, you're looking at $500–900 instead. Ongoing costs are mild: a CO2 fill is about $20 and, in my experience and most others', a 5 lb tank carbonates and serves somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 five-gallon kegs, plus the occasional $2 O-ring.
What kegging gives you back
Time, mostly. My keg day is about 35 minutes: 20 minutes cleaning and sanitizing the keg (one big vessel instead of fifty small ones), 10 minutes racking the beer into it, 5 minutes hooking up the gas, setting the regulator, and checking for leaks. Compare that to two-plus hours of bottling and you're saving roughly an hour and a half to two hours per batch. Carbonation is set-and-forget: leave the keg at serving pressure in the fridge and it's fully carbonated in about a week, sometimes two — quicker methods exist, but the lazy one works and doesn't risk overcarbonating. And there's a quality-of-life change that's hard to price: beer on tap means pouring exactly one glass without committing to a whole bottle, and no sediment layer at the bottom of every pour.
What kegging doesn't do is fully replace bottles. Beer for a party across town, beer as a gift, beer entered in a club competition — all of it still needs to leave the house in something, and filling bottles from a tap without special equipment gives you beer that goes flat and stale fast. Most keggers keep a case of bottles and their capper around anyway. The switch changes your default; it doesn't delete the old skill, which is one more reason to learn priming and bottle conditioning properly before you leave them behind.
The break-even math, honestly
Take the $450 all-in figure and the roughly two hours saved per batch. If you brew every month, that's around 24 hours of bottling drudgery avoided per year — the setup pays for itself in sanity inside the first year, and the per-batch running costs (a dollar or two of CO2) are actually cheaper than caps and sugar. If you brew four times a year, you're spending $450 to save eight hours annually, on gear that also wants fridge space, occasional new O-rings, and a corner of your brain tracking gas levels. Same math, completely different verdict. There's no brewing wisdom in the difference — it's just arithmetic multiplied by your actual brewing pace, which is why nobody else's forum answer settles it for you.
Who genuinely shouldn't switch
Skip kegging, at least for now, if any of these describe you. You brew a handful of batches a year — the break-even math above simply doesn't work, and $450 buys a lot of ingredients instead. You like variety on hand — one keg holds one beer, and having a pale ale and a stout available means a second keg, more line, and eventually a second tap, so the system's cost scales with your ambition. Your beer mostly leaves the house — gifts, parties, a homebrew club — because that beer needs bottles anyway. You're short on space or on household goodwill for a second fridge; a keg setup has a permanent footprint in a way a box of bottles under the stairs doesn't. And if you're new to brewing, bottle for your first several batches regardless of budget — bottling teaches you priming, carbonation, and patience, and skipping straight past it means learning pressurized-system troubleshooting before you've learned the basics.
What actually goes wrong in year one of kegging
The switch has its own troubleshooting log, and the first entry is nearly universal: the slow gas leak. A connection that isn't quite seated, a keg lid O-ring that needs a smear of keg lube, a loose clamp on the gas line — any of them will silently bleed a full CO2 tank into the room over a weekend, and you find out when the regulator gauge reads zero. The five-minute ritual that prevents it: after hooking everything up, spray every connection with diluted sanitizer solution and watch for growing bubbles, the same way you'd check a bike tube. The second entry is foam — a glass of froth on every pour usually means the beer line is too short for the pressure you're serving at, or the keg is warmer than you think; longer line is a couple of dollars and fixes most of it. Third, don't panic when the first pint or two off a new keg comes out murky — that's the sediment that would have been at the bottom of every bottle, all concentrated at the keg's pickup tube, and it clears after the first couple of pours. None of these ended a batch for me. All of them ended an evening.
So: $260 if you've got cold storage, about $450 if you don't, roughly two hours back per batch, and a payoff that depends entirely on how often you brew. If you're brewing monthly and dreading bottle day, switch — the math is on your side. If you're not there yet, you have my written permission to keep the $450 and spend it on grain.