Vanilla Bean Pods are unbelievably expensive. In our local grocery store, two pods are packaged together for $7.99 plus tax. They are not sold by weight, so the number of packages to add up to one ounce is unknown. My experience is that it takes about ten to twelve pods to make up an ounce, but it varies widely. If you were to obtain one ounce in ten pods, that would require the purchase of five packages … approximately $45 with tax.
These ten pods would then be split open, cut into pieces, and submerged in eight ounces (1 cup) of alcohol to make your extract. That would be a cost of $5 per ounce plus the cost of the alcohol.
The prices I can see online today for 1 ounce packages of vanilla bean pods range from $7.99 to $34.99 plus tax. Since one ounce of vanilla bean pods will combine with eight ounces of alcohol to produce eight ounces of extract, the cost per ounce of your extract will range from $1.00 to $4.37 per ounce plus the cost of alcohol (see Question 2: What Is The Effect Of The Cost Of Alcohol?). In that article, the cost of an inexpensive alcohol vs an expensive one ranged from less than 20¢ up to 80¢ per ounce. Unlike the cost of alcohol, the cost of Vanilla Bean Pods has a more significant effect on the overall cost of making your own extract.
Let’s revisit the example from Question 2: I purchased a 375 ml bottle of Tito’s Vodka locally for $11.99 plus $1.17 tax = $13.16. 375 ml is 12.68 ounces, so that gives us a price of $1.04 per ounce. If I make a 2-ounce bottle of vanilla extract with 2 ounces of Tito’s Vodka from that 375 ml bottle, the cost of the alcohol in the extract will be $1.04 * 2 = $2.08.
Add to this the least expensive vanilla bean pods purchased online for $7.99 per ounce. For two ounces of vanilla extract, we will need to use 1/4 of an ounce of vanilla bean pods. That is, two ounces divided by eight ounces is 0.25 or 1/4. The cost of the vanilla bean pods to make this 2-ounce bottle of vanilla extract will be $7.99 * .25 = $2.00. Add that to the $2.08 for alcohol, and the two ounce bottle of extract costs $4.08, or $2.04 per ounce.
If we change the cost of the vanilla bean pods from the lowest to the middle option, the calculation changes to $22.99 * .25 = $5.75. Add that to the $2.08 cost of the alcohol, and your cost for the two ounce bottle is $7.83 or $3.92 per ounce, very near doubling the cost.
From this, we can see that, while changing from a very inexpensive alcohol to a moderately priced alcohol, the overall cost per ounce of your vanilla extract would change by 60¢ per ounce, changing from a very inexpensive vanilla bean pod to a moderately priced vanilla bean pod does have a very significant affect on the cost of the extract, nearly doubling the overall cost per ounce.
Keep in mind that there are probably significant differences in the quality of inexpensive vs expensive vanilla bean pods. But that is just another question to be answered on another day.
