Three groups of my friends (6 people, total) are attempting to start breweries, brewpubs, or cideries.
I have a number of thoughts for these friends. (Advice not totally unsolicited -- I've been homebrewing for about 17 years.)
- Brewing a good batch of beer - better than most of the what's sold in stores - is easy. Almost anyone can do it with their first batch.
- This tricks people into thinking that brewing is easy. But...
- Consistency is hard. That recipe that turned out so well the first time? It might be good the second time, or it might spoil, or it might be too hoppy, or it might be cloudy, or taste of yeast, and so on. At any rate, it's unlikely that it will taste exactly the same as it did the first time.
- Brewing large batches is hard. Even transitioning from 5 gallon to 10 gallon batches requires different equipment. Recipes don't scale in a simple way. And when you get into backwatering high gravity beers everything becomes even more complex.
- Making wine and cider is hard compared to brewing beer. The former two have fewer ingredients, which, being fruit instead of grain, tend to be less consistent. Conditioning takes MUCH longer which means feedback and learning take much longer.
- And yet, I bet actually making a consistent, high-quality beverage is the easy part compared to running a profitable brewing business.
- Brewing is expensive. Startup costs are high. Even an enthusiastic homebrewer can easily spend thousands. Think $10,000 for a bare-minimum commercial brewing setup built around e.g. a SABCO Brew Magic.
- The legal stuff is hard. Licenses, bonds, a legal location -- all that stuff takes time and money.
- The food industry is brutal. Combining a brewery and a restaurant seems like it must tremendously increase the probability of failure.
Anyway, brewing is a fun hobby. But one of those that sort of lulls people into making hasty business decisions.
My friend has been working on a TV series for years which finally was picked up last season by Esquire Network featuring craft breweries across the country. Awesome to watch it go from custom videos for the Craft Brewer's Association, to pilot, to first and second seasons. Super proud of them.
So true. Add to this that brewing to the tastes of your target market will be much less interesting than trying out that new farmhouse yeast you located at 28*C in the garage.
> Brewing large batches is hard. Even transitioning from 5 gallon to 10 gallon batches requires different equipment. Recipes don't scale in a simple way. And when you get into backwatering high gravity beers everything becomes even more complex.
As an ignorant software engineer. I have to ask this.
¿Can you keep the batch size constant and increase the number of batches?
> Anyway, brewing is a fun hobby. But one of those that sort of lulls people into making hasty business decisions.
Well said. I started brewing as a hobby about 20 years ago (egads!) But always knew that I would lose the joy of it if I tried to turn into a professional gig.
A friend is in the process of opening a brewery right now. He drastically underestimated the legal paperwork involved to get started. He's sitting on a great space with all the new equipment installed and still waiting in the local government to finish their end of the process....
And this is unlike moving a small business to large how? This is like saying; I shouldn't start my own company or try to grow it because the complexities are too great to overcome. If you know the right people, this is why you bring in a master brewer from Sam Adams who wants to have his own stake. It's all about business, and not about brewing at some point in the game - and you need to put your SKIN in the game if you want to grow. Sad that people put the idea of opening a brewery down because of how "hard" it is. Pull up your big-girl pants and bring in a skilled person or two and go to the next level. Takes initiative. :) I say this with love, mind you.
I could almost replace "beer" and "brewery" with "food" and "restaurant" and feel like it would be talking about the same thing.
My restaurant ends up focusing so much more on keeping up with cleaning, food safety, and local regulations than actual cooking food it feels almost silly. And most people only want to hear about food or money (lol, money) when they ask me about how the restaurant's doing. I hope I don't accidentally convince someone that they should look into running one.
Do you think the regulations are over-the-top, or are they reasonably balanced? It sounds like you spend all your time satisfying regulations, and actually providing the product falls far down the list. In your opinion, could the regulatory burden be lifted and still produce a safe product, or are they all necessary?
I actually visited Hill Farmstead Brewery last month in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. If you're not aware, they're sort of the Magnolia Cupcakes of breweries - people drive hours to get there, wait in line for hours, and generally get very hyped up about the beer.
While I waited over an hour to buy my 2 allowed bottles, I was able to read a little about the guy who started the brewery. I'm paraphrasing, but he basically explained in an interview somewhere that once you realize you're not doing something for fun or for yourself, you come to see other elements about the work that matter, and that those are what ultimately make it worth while. (His motivation has a lot to do with maintaining his family connection to the land he's brewing on, which has been in his family for like 200 years.)
I thought those were pretty wise words for anyone considering a new venture. Novelty and fun wear off. If you can figure out what about the work really matters, you'll be less likely to burn out.
FWIW I saw the founder of the brewery, and I can tell you he was not showing any signs of having a good time or a good day.
FWIW I saw the founder of the brewery, and I can tell you he was not showing any signs of having a good time or a good day.
Eh, Shaun's almost always like that, at least on days the retail shop is open. Pictures of him actually brewing or hanging out with other brewers or at his (amazing) festivals confirm that he is definitely doing what he loves.
Hill Farmstead is a very interesting case. Shaun has said many times that there is an absolute limit on the amount of beer he can reasonably brew on-site, and that he has no interest in expanding beyond that limit. As a result, given the quality of his product, he will inevitably be swamped by demand unless he raises prices, something he has generally been reluctant to do. Imagine if Napa's highest-rated winery were selling the vast majority of its juice in $20 bottles.
I am glad the author actually does enjoy his work, but this is just another reminder that your dream job might not be as dreamy as you initially imagined. Sometimes the grass is just greener because you haven't looked close enough to notice all the brown patches.
For anyone interested in starting a brewery,
my startup [1] does Flavor Profiling and Statistical Quality control for small to medium sized artisan beer, coffee, and spirit producers.
We use machine learning and data-science to quantify the flavor profile of products, detect flaws, and pinpoint the sources of batch variation.
Looks great but too much subscription money for a startup. I'd suggest per-test pricing with discounts for repeat business or agreement to be listed in an "as used by..." page as an alternative sales strategy.
Replace all of the brewing talk in the description of cleaning, tedium, and notetaking with chemistry, and then you will understand why I became a developer after spending 4 years studying chemistry.
My father-in-law, who used to be the brewmaster of one of the biggest breweries in the world, has a PhD in Chemical Engineering. I'm glad he did not end up as a developer, although perhaps my wife would understand me more!
Interestingly, the t-test, probably one of the most relevant pieces of mathematics in modern science, was invented by Gossett in the Guiness brewery in Dublin in 1908.
The problem was that for testing the batches, the sample size was too small for the estimate of the standard deviation to be consistent, so the distribution was wider than would be expected from a Gaussian normal distribution. So, the lad used resampling from a bag of a thousand chicken bones (measuring the lengths) to derive a distribution. Somehow, the mathematical underpinnings were later defined properly by Fischer.
Brewery incubators are coming... Some of them might work out pretty nicely to help test and get your feet wet with bigger equipment before taking the leap.
There are some (extremely good) "breweries" around here which I'm told are "recipe only," i.e., the actual physical site/equipment used is that of another, larger, brewer.
However I'm not sure exactly what that really means... do they typically really just give the recipe over to the larger brewer and say "make this!" or is the "originating" brewer more involved in the actual brewing process, just using the larger brewer's equipment?
I know someone with a brewery - it's a pretty small operation with a small bar. It's not a trendy location or operation but he has been going for years.
The biggest problem is governments. Either the local government, which decided to arbitarily start charging commercial premises 90% of the metered incoming water as wastewater, on the assumption that 90% of what comes out the tap goes down the drain. Breweries use a lot of water, so that added costs.
Then the federal government decided that young people were drinking too many strong pre-mixed drinks (alcopops), so they added a massive alcopops tax (a 70% increase) to try and stop young people drinking (yeah, as if that was going to work [1]). While the young people switched to spirits, wine and cider, his business got smashed because one of his big product lines was ginger beer, and for whatever reason some politician or bureaucrat decided that ginger beer counted as an alcopop.
Most of us in the software industry don't realise how much freedom we have. We can start pretty much any type of software company we like, where we like, when we like. Most of us don't even have to tell a single layer of government what we are doing, save for reporting the income to the taxman. The horror stories of random regulation changes on small businesses like breweries and restaurants is the stuff of nightmares. I mean, imagine if a government somewhere decided to arbitrarily add a 70% tax to mobile-app sales. Lots of small developers would go under. But governments routinely do this sort of thing all the time to lots of other small businesses.
Alcohol has to be one of the most over-regulated things in existence. It seems like every state and municipality has it's own laws saying that you can't sell it at certain times or places, or that you can't drink it in certain places, or that you have to sell a certain amount of food in addition to it.
Another factor I didn't see mentioned is that it is very hard to scale up a brewery. The equipment is a big expensive investment and it makes a certain amount of beer. If you want to make more than that, you need more equipment.
I'll leave the brewing to the professionals. I can get Pliny the Elder pretty easily here in San Diego. Stone Brewery is close by, and always releasing new and innovative brews.
If you're interested in building a nanobrewery, we've developed plans and software for a brewery made out of 3x 55 gallon stainless steel drums at the openbrewery.org project. The software uses Processing; the hardware is less prescriptive since a lot of it will depend on what parts you can get your hands on.
Our goals are to achieve greater consistency and to automate the process as much as possible, so brewers don't have to sit and watch the beer cooking for an entire day.
Our nanobrewery is already running for a year or so and there are at least two more under construction around the world (that I am aware of). So far, the project comprises just the brewery itself-- no tools for downstream analysis of the beer, though that is an important future improvement.
Shameless plug, brought to you by one of the project founders :)
Not true, cider is the new deal. ;-) After becoming a homeowner, I throttled back on my beer brewing hobby and focused on brewing hard cider from my own fruit.
One snag with distilleries is that the local law may not allow on-site tasting, which is critical to a small production business that won't have good distribution. In Connecticut, they just changed the law on that last year.
Working on the winemaking side (with arbitrary fruits) as a side project here in southwest China. It's an interesting place to work, much different to recipes like "pay x to buy y at your local brewing supplier" like in the west. More experimentation!
Brewing (and wine making) seems like the rare field(s) that consumers think they can do better.
I don't think I can make a better computer than Apple just because I use one. I don't think I can block better than the offensive lineman on the 49ers, even if I think he's incompetent. I can't make a car better than GM, even if I might drive one.
Yet why do so many people think opening a brewery is easy?
Beer Wars is a great documentary on the fight craft brewers have against the big beer companies. [1] The war is all in distribution.
Didn't Ray Kroc say something to the effect of McDonald's product not being hamburgers -- anyone can make a better hamburger than McDonald's in their kitchen. McDonald's burgers aren't the best; they're easy to obtain.
Just like Bud Light -- it sucks, but you don't have to spend a whole day cooking it and then a whole month waiting for it to be ready to drink it.
might be because with homebrew it really is so easy to make good beer. even easier than becoming good at grilling burgers. scaling up is the problem.. and then all that entrepreneur stuff.
I find such attemps are so shallow. "Hey, this brewery thing is popular, everybody is opening one. And I like beer. I should open one myself".
How many people have a genuine passion AND business sense for the stuff, instead of merely going with what other people do and what's considered a hip and trendy thing to do (with some of them even thinking they won't have to do much work to run such a business).
It's like when I see tons people attemting a career in designing skateboarding gear or some such non-industry...
At least due to the startup costs and necessary experience involved, there are many fewer breweries opening than frozen yogurt places. I can't believe the number of frozen yogurt places. And they're still opening. In a mid-sized city with a really long and cold winter. I almost want to go in and ask what the heck they're thinking.
Homebrewing is lots of fun and not terribly expensive. I highly recommend John Palmer's book "How to Brew" if you're just starting out. It's a long read, but you'll have an understanding of the process before you make your first batch. Then grab a couple of friends and make next Saturday Brew Day.
I found scheduling consistent brew days is the best way to improve your craft. Don't let it fall by the wayside and make two beers a year or you'll forget everything and lose interest.
[+] [-] edj|12 years ago|reply
Three groups of my friends (6 people, total) are attempting to start breweries, brewpubs, or cideries.
I have a number of thoughts for these friends. (Advice not totally unsolicited -- I've been homebrewing for about 17 years.)
- Brewing a good batch of beer - better than most of the what's sold in stores - is easy. Almost anyone can do it with their first batch.
- This tricks people into thinking that brewing is easy. But...
- Consistency is hard. That recipe that turned out so well the first time? It might be good the second time, or it might spoil, or it might be too hoppy, or it might be cloudy, or taste of yeast, and so on. At any rate, it's unlikely that it will taste exactly the same as it did the first time.
- Brewing large batches is hard. Even transitioning from 5 gallon to 10 gallon batches requires different equipment. Recipes don't scale in a simple way. And when you get into backwatering high gravity beers everything becomes even more complex.
- Making wine and cider is hard compared to brewing beer. The former two have fewer ingredients, which, being fruit instead of grain, tend to be less consistent. Conditioning takes MUCH longer which means feedback and learning take much longer.
- And yet, I bet actually making a consistent, high-quality beverage is the easy part compared to running a profitable brewing business.
- Brewing is expensive. Startup costs are high. Even an enthusiastic homebrewer can easily spend thousands. Think $10,000 for a bare-minimum commercial brewing setup built around e.g. a SABCO Brew Magic.
- The legal stuff is hard. Licenses, bonds, a legal location -- all that stuff takes time and money.
- The food industry is brutal. Combining a brewery and a restaurant seems like it must tremendously increase the probability of failure.
Anyway, brewing is a fun hobby. But one of those that sort of lulls people into making hasty business decisions.
[+] [-] bsims|12 years ago|reply
Brew Dogs. http://tv.esquire.com/shows/brew-dogs
[+] [-] owl_icecream|12 years ago|reply
Who wants to brew pilsner and pale 7 days a week?
[+] [-] huherto|12 years ago|reply
As an ignorant software engineer. I have to ask this. ¿Can you keep the batch size constant and increase the number of batches?
[+] [-] asynchronous13|12 years ago|reply
Well said. I started brewing as a hobby about 20 years ago (egads!) But always knew that I would lose the joy of it if I tried to turn into a professional gig.
A friend is in the process of opening a brewery right now. He drastically underestimated the legal paperwork involved to get started. He's sitting on a great space with all the new equipment installed and still waiting in the local government to finish their end of the process....
[+] [-] BrownBuffalo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ska|12 years ago|reply
This is literally unsolicited advice.
[+] [-] silencio|12 years ago|reply
My restaurant ends up focusing so much more on keeping up with cleaning, food safety, and local regulations than actual cooking food it feels almost silly. And most people only want to hear about food or money (lol, money) when they ask me about how the restaurant's doing. I hope I don't accidentally convince someone that they should look into running one.
[+] [-] angersock|12 years ago|reply
Start with a big one.
[+] [-] brc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisgd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|12 years ago|reply
While I waited over an hour to buy my 2 allowed bottles, I was able to read a little about the guy who started the brewery. I'm paraphrasing, but he basically explained in an interview somewhere that once you realize you're not doing something for fun or for yourself, you come to see other elements about the work that matter, and that those are what ultimately make it worth while. (His motivation has a lot to do with maintaining his family connection to the land he's brewing on, which has been in his family for like 200 years.)
I thought those were pretty wise words for anyone considering a new venture. Novelty and fun wear off. If you can figure out what about the work really matters, you'll be less likely to burn out.
FWIW I saw the founder of the brewery, and I can tell you he was not showing any signs of having a good time or a good day.
[+] [-] twoodfin|12 years ago|reply
Eh, Shaun's almost always like that, at least on days the retail shop is open. Pictures of him actually brewing or hanging out with other brewers or at his (amazing) festivals confirm that he is definitely doing what he loves.
Hill Farmstead is a very interesting case. Shaun has said many times that there is an absolute limit on the amount of beer he can reasonably brew on-site, and that he has no interest in expanding beyond that limit. As a result, given the quality of his product, he will inevitably be swamped by demand unless he raises prices, something he has generally been reluctant to do. Imagine if Napa's highest-rated winery were selling the vast majority of its juice in $20 bottles.
[+] [-] esw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukasm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JasonCEC|12 years ago|reply
We use machine learning and data-science to quantify the flavor profile of products, detect flaws, and pinpoint the sources of batch variation.
[1] www.Gastrograph.com
[+] [-] contingencies|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azurelogic|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donretag|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sov|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hessenwolf|12 years ago|reply
Interestingly, the t-test, probably one of the most relevant pieces of mathematics in modern science, was invented by Gossett in the Guiness brewery in Dublin in 1908.
The problem was that for testing the batches, the sample size was too small for the estimate of the standard deviation to be consistent, so the distribution was wider than would be expected from a Gaussian normal distribution. So, the lad used resampling from a bag of a thousand chicken bones (measuring the lengths) to derive a distribution. Somehow, the mathematical underpinnings were later defined properly by Fischer.
[+] [-] drone|12 years ago|reply
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kitcheninc/the-brewery-...
http://blogs.westword.com/cafesociety/2013/02/innovative_cra...
[+] [-] snogglethorpe|12 years ago|reply
There are some (extremely good) "breweries" around here which I'm told are "recipe only," i.e., the actual physical site/equipment used is that of another, larger, brewer.
However I'm not sure exactly what that really means... do they typically really just give the recipe over to the larger brewer and say "make this!" or is the "originating" brewer more involved in the actual brewing process, just using the larger brewer's equipment?
[+] [-] brc|12 years ago|reply
The biggest problem is governments. Either the local government, which decided to arbitarily start charging commercial premises 90% of the metered incoming water as wastewater, on the assumption that 90% of what comes out the tap goes down the drain. Breweries use a lot of water, so that added costs.
Then the federal government decided that young people were drinking too many strong pre-mixed drinks (alcopops), so they added a massive alcopops tax (a 70% increase) to try and stop young people drinking (yeah, as if that was going to work [1]). While the young people switched to spirits, wine and cider, his business got smashed because one of his big product lines was ginger beer, and for whatever reason some politician or bureaucrat decided that ginger beer counted as an alcopop.
Most of us in the software industry don't realise how much freedom we have. We can start pretty much any type of software company we like, where we like, when we like. Most of us don't even have to tell a single layer of government what we are doing, save for reporting the income to the taxman. The horror stories of random regulation changes on small businesses like breweries and restaurants is the stuff of nightmares. I mean, imagine if a government somewhere decided to arbitrarily add a 70% tax to mobile-app sales. Lots of small developers would go under. But governments routinely do this sort of thing all the time to lots of other small businesses.
[1] http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/alcopop-tax-fails-to-d...
[+] [-] TheCoelacanth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sizzle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] midas007|12 years ago|reply
Probably mostly for show, but people drop the cash. The place is packed on weekends, year round.
http://www.sierranevada.com/brewery/california/taproom
[+] [-] fitek|12 years ago|reply
Our goals are to achieve greater consistency and to automate the process as much as possible, so brewers don't have to sit and watch the beer cooking for an entire day.
Our nanobrewery is already running for a year or so and there are at least two more under construction around the world (that I am aware of). So far, the project comprises just the brewery itself-- no tools for downstream analysis of the beer, though that is an important future improvement.
Shameless plug, brought to you by one of the project founders :)
[+] [-] js2|12 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/Kings-County-Distillery-Guide-Moonshin...
(Book is written by a guy who grew up in a dry county and whose father is a preacher, natch.)
:-)
[+] [-] pwenzel|12 years ago|reply
Part of my stockpile:
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2823/10919772826_8b39ab55de.jp...
Few things are as satisfying as tapping a homebrew cider that chilled in a snow drift on your roof.
[+] [-] smackfu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DerpDerpDerp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawncheer|12 years ago|reply
http://www.feaststl.com/dine-out/big-idea/article_14e48446-4...
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
I don't think I can make a better computer than Apple just because I use one. I don't think I can block better than the offensive lineman on the 49ers, even if I think he's incompetent. I can't make a car better than GM, even if I might drive one.
Yet why do so many people think opening a brewery is easy?
Beer Wars is a great documentary on the fight craft brewers have against the big beer companies. [1] The war is all in distribution.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326194/
[+] [-] mcdougle|12 years ago|reply
Just like Bud Light -- it sucks, but you don't have to spend a whole day cooking it and then a whole month waiting for it to be ready to drink it.
[+] [-] rsl7|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
How many people have a genuine passion AND business sense for the stuff, instead of merely going with what other people do and what's considered a hip and trendy thing to do (with some of them even thinking they won't have to do much work to run such a business).
It's like when I see tons people attemting a career in designing skateboarding gear or some such non-industry...
[+] [-] epaladin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] almondsays|12 years ago|reply
Just some perspective.
[+] [-] natural219|12 years ago|reply
Sidenote: I do think the original title "So You Think You Want to Open a Brewery..." would have fit better here.
[+] [-] coldpie|12 years ago|reply
I found scheduling consistent brew days is the best way to improve your craft. Don't let it fall by the wayside and make two beers a year or you'll forget everything and lose interest.