Let us know how your efficiency turns out. Also, I'd wonder about costs of that malt. Must be hard to keep the costs low for a sack if you don't have the scale of the giant malsters.
I do see the appeal of making a wholly local beer.
I see there's a watch company (assembler, anyway) in Detroit called Shinola. Pretty nice watches - I met a guy with one a month ago. I thought Detroit was falling apart?
Nah, Detroit is on the upswing, especially with the hipster crowd. The wildest thing is the part of Detroit where Shinola is, used to be the city's "Tenderloin" district, called the Cass Corridor, where up until about 6 years ago or so, the only reason people went there was to score hookers or heroin (except for the city's first restaurant to ever get a microbrewery license back in the '80's, and another great micro that split off from them and opened across the street- but you didn't go a block past those places.)
Now it's rebranded as "Midtown" and you can't even afford to live there- what used to be 600/month one bedroom bedbug infested places, are now twice that minimum (I know I tried to move down there after the fire last summer.) And one of the hottest restaurants in the country is down there.
Right where Shinola is now is sorta the beer/funky boutique disctrict. On one end is
Hopcat, which has 100+ beers on tap. Then down the block is
Jolly Pumpkin's taproom for sour beers,
Traffic Jam & Snug (the first brewpub in Mi) and
Motor City Brew Works and at the opposite end of the district is
8 Degrees Plato- which is a beer store with a bar inside. And also is Shinola, and Jack White's "Third Man Records" Detroit branch.
All of this is a short walk from where I work. And this is just one of the areas around Detroit that is blowing up.
As to the malt, I've brewed with the Pilsner before, it's fantastic, had no issues with efficiency... But yeah right now it's pricier than the regular malts...like 2.5 times more. The vienna was 2.30 a pound as opposed to a buck a pound for the mass produced stuff.
I haven't tried their pale/2 row yet, because I can't justify it. But I'm going to play around with the other "specialty" malts as they get released, just at least to get a feel for them initially, especially if I have a gift card or know I'm getting a discount on them. The shop I've been going to since I started brewing has a great "incentive" program for repeat customers- each month you get a "credit" based on what you spent last month, and you can roll it over as long as you want, you don't have to use it the next time you come in, you can let it ride until you want to spend it. I had like 20bucks in credit and a 10 dollar gift card for them from brewing with them on Teach a Friend day in Nov. so between those discounts, it only cost me 10 bucks for everything I bought when I was there besides the grain.