I guess I'm doing both ends of the spectrum this year. My grape vines finally yielded enough grapes for 7 bottles of wine I plan on opening a bottle on New Year's Eve, so I don't know yet if I have a decent wine. This is a pretty small batch so I needed some smaller bottles for secondary fermentation. A couple of 96oz apple juice bottles were just the ticket.
But then I had to do something with the apple juice. So I made some hard cider. The results were quite okay. I've never had any hard cider before so I don't have any comparison. But I like it at least as well as domestic beer. I've done a few more batches since with cheap apple juice and doing things like carmelizing the sugar, adding yeast nutrient and adding pectic enzyme to clarify it. I highly recommend it for someone wanting to try out home fermenting.
The thing is, you don't need a $30 kit. At minimum, you need a bottle of apple juice ($0.99-$1.50), and part of a packet champagne yeast ($0.70-$1.40). A little more sugar will raise the ABV to the normal 5-6% for hard cider (the champagne yeast is happy to eat table sugar). Yeast nutrient is not necessary, but is cheap. So is the pectic enzyme.
I suspect that what this brewsy company is doing is packaging some or all of these cheap ingredients into a packet and charging $30 for it. I might be wrong, but I don't see anything more than that in their ads..
ETA: My local home brew shop takes reservations in the fall for many varieties of proper grape juice for wine.
