Golden Hive, prices, and why he's ripping you off

A recent conversation on Golden Hive and some of his pricing got me thinking. GH rightfully gets a lot of criticism around here for being too expensive, but it's rare that anyone really dives into what that means. It's one thing to tell a beginner to not spend money on Golden Hive's kits, it's another to actually demonstrate why it's a bad idea. I think it's useful to actually lay out just how crazy his pricing is. I know that I'm partly preaching to the choir here on r/mead, but there's also a lot of beginners here who aren't familiar with Golden Hive's scummy practices. So I felt like searching around and doing some simple arithmetic to really make a point.

His most basic kit is currently on sale for $85. It includes a single one gallon fermenter, an autosiphon with a tube clamp, a stick on thermometer, a hydrometer, and a recipe book. The benefit of a kit to a consumer is twofold. It simplifies the process of getting equipment by collecting it into one convenient package, and it's usually a better bargain because everything is bundled together. That second part is important. Let's look at how much this equipment costs if we purchase it individually.

That's a total of $52.05. One notable improvement is the bottling wand, because using a tube clamp to bottle sucks and a bottling wand is better in every conceivable way. That leaves us with almost $30 left. Now I've left out the recipe book. That is supposedly $50 normally, but on sale for $40 right now. You could argue that with it making up $30 of the value of the kit that's a bargain, but let's really examine that.

$40 for a book is a hefty price. While there's a lot of great free recipes on the internet (shoutout to the wiki), I don't actually have a problem with someone selling recipes for money. I buy cookbooks, why wouldn't I potentially pay for any other source of recipes? But if you're going to do that, you had better charge a fair price and put out a quality product. There's not a lot of great mead books for sale, but The Compleat Meadmaker by Ken Schramm is a mere $20, and Ken is famous for being one of the best mead makers alive. He can charge some crazy high prices for his mead, but he sells his book for less than half the full price of Golden Hive's book. How to Brew is one of the most common beginner books for homebrewing beer, and it's just $17. Let's look at cookbooks, which at their core are the same thing, a collection of recipes. A classic like Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking will set you back $15-40 depending on where you buy it and whether you get it in hardcover. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's The Food Lab is a popular contemporary cookbook that sells for $32.68. And these are physical books assembled by a professional publishing company. They're paying for editing, pictures, printing, advertising, etc. Golden Hive's book is a pdf made by some dude on tik tok. Ask yourself, is it really worth the price, even when discounted to $40?

Maybe you're not convinced. Let's look at something that doesn't include the recipe book, like the Deluxe Mead Bottling Kit, which includes a hand corker, some corks, and a dozen 750 ml wine bottles for $80. We can buy all this ourselves for:

That is only FORTY TWO DOLLARS. Golden Hive is charging beginners almost ONE HUNDRED PERCENT MORE than what this equipment actually is selling for, hoping that they just don't know any better. This is an outrageous ripoff. And the hand corker I found even comes with 10 more corks!

Speaking of corks, even the individual stuff he sells is comically overpriced. His 20 pack of corks is $13. That's funny, because you can easily find one hundred corks for just $15. His ten pack of 71B yeast is $19, when you can buy a ten pack for just $10. 71B doesn't magically become more valuable if it's being sold to you by Golden Hive. Neither do corks.

In fact, you don't even really have to go out of your way to buy this stuff separately. You can easily find vastly superior mead kits to his own for less money. Homebrew Ohio sells a kit for just $60 that has more than Golden Hive's $80 kit. You get a fermentation bucket (vastly superior for primary), a secondary fermentation vessel (a necessity that Golden Hive doesn't include), hydrometer, yeast, tannins, acids, and campden tablets. There's also a shitty recipe that you should ignore, but still, this kit is superior in every single way imaginable and charges $20 less. This actually could be considered a bargain that's good for beginners.

This post is long enough as is, so I'm not going to dig into his claims that the kits are of "Unparalleled Quality" and how "We've spared no expense in sourcing the finest quality equipment" (maybe he should include a bottling wand, or drop the thermometer strip). The actual equipment found in the kits could be a whole post of its own. His recipes...well that's also a post for another day.

None of this is a criticism of beginner friendly content. We all have to start somewhere. But there's also people out there trying to take advantage of those who don't know any better, and Golden Hive is one of them. If you prefer to pay double for stuff that you could easily buy elsewhere, that's on you.

tl;dr

Golden Hive is not interested in selling products that help beginners. Golden Hive isn't interested in teaching people how to make mead. Golden Hive is interested in selling overpriced garbage to beginners who don't yet know what this equipment actually costs. His videos aren't there to introduce you to an exciting new hobby, they're there to dupe you into buying trash.