10 ms·
So You Think You Want to Open a Brewery
- esw 13y agoThanks for this. This reminds me a lot of an old Slate piece (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitter_brew.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...) about owning a coffee shop.
- cylinder 13y agoI think a winery and vineyard sound much more appealing than brewing.
- dmm 13y agoI would be willing to bet that a winery has just as much dealing with regulators, cleaning, and sales.
- bitops 13y agoIt's all really hard work and a winery is likely even more work. You need to always be watching the grapes, you have to hire seasonal workers to pick the grapes (actually not much automation in this area) plus the unpredictability of the weather.
- fphhotchips 13y agoDo you mean geographic area, or grape-picking? Because these [1] are fantastic at picking grapes automatically. Sure you still need a driver, but it's slightly faster than doing it by hand. [1] http://www.agha.org.au/cms/uploads/images/Grape%20harvesting.jpg http://www.agha.org.au/cms/uploads/images/Grape%20harvesting...
- maxerickson 13y agoYou are also more directly exposed to your crop. Brewers have to deal with hops, but grains aren't a big problem.
- mbarrett 13y agoI've done both wine and beer, recently planted my own home vineyard of 650 vines. In my experience, much more can go wrong with wine than beer but both are worth it when you open the first bottle.
- deutronium 13y agoDoesn't that depend on if you continue the whole process for each. With beer, did you also grow and malt the grain?
- mbarrett 13y agoI did not but I was only basing my findings off of the production of beer/wine, not the agriculture side.
- poulsbohemian 13y agoI would tend to agree with this, on about four points that come to the top of mind (though I am not a commercial producer of either, I observe what my friends and neighbors in the business experience): 1) Grapes have more bug problems 2) Grapes have more potential frost problems 3) With grapes, you have to watch your sugar contents really closely. With hops, you grow, you harvest, and often you turn into a dried pellet form, IE: the end-product with grapes is more temperamental. 4) You are (typically) aging wine longer than beer, so there's more time when something can go wrong. Had a friend who was cellar master at a winery. New guy comes in and does something stupid, ruined wine that had been sitting in barrels for two years.
- _ak 13y agoRegarding 3: the same goes for beer, except you can mess up over the course of just a few minutes to an hour instead of a few months. Crush your malt too fine or too coarse, mess up the mash temperatures, and you end with things like a too high or low efficiency, a stuck sparge, or too many fermentable and unfermentable sugars. Of course, in a fully automated industrial brewery this usually isn't a problem, but your typical nano or micro-brewery is a still a lot of manual works, and thus many ways to mess up manually. Edit: and now that I think about the other things: Regarding 1 and 2: some hop varities have mildew problems, and bad weather has negative influence on the growth and other things like alpha acid, so bad weather can have quite the impact on hop quality and availability. The 2013 hop harvest in Germany was quite the disaster, apparently. AA% is a lot lower, and young plants of some new breeds got way too much water.
- smackfu 13y agoBrewery is better because you can make a great beer anywhere. In most of the world, a winery tops out at "this sure is pretty... and the wine is OK".
- zwieback 13y agoIt seems like making wine is basically farming, making beer is basically an industrial product. I'm glad I live in Oregon where there are plenty of people doing either one.
- DigitalJack 13y agoEvery brewery I've been to in oregon (portland) thinks "microbrew" means "put a shitload of hops in it."
- zwieback 13y agoSo glad you said that! It's very challenging to find beer that's not overhopped but they do exist. Coming from Germany I'm still looking for some good lagers that aren't insanely hoppy.
- poulsbohemian 13y agoGood luck! I studied in Muenster way back as a university student. Thankfully Pinkus Mueller is much more available these days in the US and I don't need to negotiate with a distributor to get a case or two. Koestrizer is still hard to come by though. Hard to find a really good beer in the US. The big name brewers produce corn-flavoured water, the micro-brewers produce over hopped barley soda pop (ok, I exaggerate a little, I know they are all trying to produce interesting products).
- Avshalom 13y agoBroadly* speaking it's an east coast/west coast thing. East Coast imperial IPAs barely qualify as pale ales on the Best Coast. *very broadly, no you don't need to tell me about DFH 120 minute or what have you.
- twoodfin 13y agoI think you're greatly exaggerating the difference, unless you want to name any highly rated East Coast "Imperial IPA" that isn't as hoppy as, say, Stone Pale. Heady Topper, for example, is pure hop madness.
- poulsbohemian 13y agoFor what it's worth... I live in the heart of Washington's wine country. Every year there are dozens of new wineries, and the same number that go bankrupt. Very few people who move here to be a "gentleman farmer" enjoying the imagery of the harvest find that to be the case - most end up bankrupt. While I am not in the wine business, it's pretty clear there are a lot of shenanigans that go on, like buying wholesale wine and putting a nice label on it - like most businesses, the marketing matters at least as much as product quality. I make cheese, and have spoken to some of you here about that as well. Producing commercial dairy products blows away the health and safety regulations in beer and wine making. Think it is hard putting a fermented grape in a bottle for sale, try something that comes out of the backend of a live animal...
- smackfu 13y ago>it's pretty clear there are a lot of shenanigans that go on Even in California, the beautiful tasting room all done up in oak often has nothing to do with the beautiful vineyards outside.
- justincormack 13y ago"making cheese is farming bacteria" as my (French) book says. Its fun to do, but I don't have a desire to do it commercially.
- poulsbohemian 13y agoI am trying to decide whether or not to pursue it commercially. Makes a fun hobby though and a great way to teach your kids about microbiology ;-)
- eru 13y agoThat saying applies to beer and wine as well. (Only that for cheese, you farm the bacteria on animal products.)
- justincormack 13y agoAnd salami and so on. With cheese it is pretty extreme - you don't even bottle it so even the outside of it is made form bacteria too...
- lawncheer 13y agoThe "lean startup" version of brewing: http://www.feaststl.com/dine-out/big-idea/article_14e48446-40b2-11e3-b537-001a4bcf6878.html http://www.feaststl.com/dine-out/big-idea/article_14e48446-4...
- slg 13y agoI 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.
- lukasm 13y agohttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/Cattle_eating_grass_through_barbed_wire_fence.jpg/440px-Cattle_eating_grass_through_barbed_wire_fence.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/Cat...
- js2 13y agoBeer is so yesterday. The new (old) thing is your own distillery: http://www.amazon.com/Kings-County-Distillery-Guide-Moonshining/dp/1419709909 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.) :-)
- smackfu 13y agoOne 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.
- pwenzel 13y agoNot 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. Part of my stockpile: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2823/10919772826_8b39ab55de.jpg 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.
- quaffapint 13y agoHow many months does it take until the cider's ready from fruit to drink?
- jffry 13y agoDepends on how obsessive you are about clarity. I've made apple cider and drank it after only a month in primary. It was still a little cloudy but otherwise fine. I also have ciders that I've aged for 1/2/3 years, which have gotten crystal clear and taken on an even more wonderful flavor with time. Some years, apple harvests where I live are good, and other years not so great. Not so great apples = not so great cider = benefits more from aging.
- pwenzel 13y agoI began harvesting fruit for my 2013 batch around Labor Day, and drank some for New Years. It improves with every month of aging. Carbonation takes time and helps to build character.
- silencio 13y agoI 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.
- angersock 13y agoYou know the easiest way to make a small fortune running a restaurant? Start with a big one.
- silencio 13y agoStart with one, period, do a truckload of due diligence and then add another truckload before the sale closes, and then cross your fingers and hope that your employees don't burn the place down. ;) Starting a restaurant from scratch is something I don't want to wish on even my worst enemy. It's very, very difficult and time consuming to the point that I will try my best to talk people out of it if they even think about it. I know 3-4 talented chefs that almost went bankrupt trying to open their own restaurant instead of just buying one and remodeling/revamping it. Big ones can be iffy, they'll all but guarantee you some kind of (positive) cash flow but a lot of them sink so much money into necessary wages that I definitely recall wondering why the fuck anyone would think I would spend $1+ million to buy a wildly popular business that gives me all of $10k/month back before I can pay off any business loans. I seem to recall the broker trying to sell that particular one to me with "you can take the place of a few employees because owner/managers tend to work way harder and save like another $10k+!"....sure, if I wanted to work my ass off from 7am to 1am every single day?
- cdcarter 13y agoI believe angersock meant start with a big fortune.
- smackfu 13y agoAnother 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.
- natural219 13y agoFantastic article. I think brewing beer will be the next project on my list. Sidenote: I do think the original title "So You Think You Want to Open a Brewery..." would have fit better here.
- coldpie 13y agoHomebrewing 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.
- natural219 13y agoThanks for the advice!
- edj 13y agoThis is so apropos! 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- owl_icecream 13y agoSo 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. Who wants to brew pilsner and pale 7 days a week?
- ska 13y agoFYI: "unsolicited" probably isn't the word you meant to use there (perhaps "unsupported"). This is literally unsolicited advice.
- azurelogic 13y agoReplace 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.
- donretag 13y agoMy 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!
- sov 13y agoHah, same here. I'll always have a soft spot for medicinal chemistry, though.
- percentcer 13y agoI never thought I wanted to open a brewery, and now I'm sure of it!
- JasonCEC 13y agoFor 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. [1] www.Gastrograph.com
- contingencies 13y agoLooks 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.
- JasonCEC 13y agoMaybe. We've considered lowering prices - but $500 / month is far less than what any company (startup or not) would need to spend on hiring an employee with quality control experience. We do far more than most QA/QC teams ever could... unless they have individuals with an advanced math degree, expansive analytical chemistry knowledge, and production experience - and paying that team won't be $500 / month!
- contingencies 13y agoThat's one way of looking at the market: as an alternative to hiring someone and getting them access to appropriate lab gear. Another would be looking at the probably much larger layman's market... if you can get your flavour profile priced low enough to become normalized as a standard record at some competitions, for instance, then you may have ten times the market in half the time.
- JasonCEC 13y agoThat is very interesting to me... When this first became a business a few years ago, I had hopped that we could get `laypeople` to review products, and then use a mass of consumer data to sell our services. This has not paned-out in practice; doing reviews on our system is not difficult but it is involved - you have to care about flavor and what you're tasting to do it. Also, going Standards/consumer route puts us into direct competition with many of the trade organizations that our clients belong to, like the SCAA and the BA - they try to sell their own sensory systems from 'partner companies' (that then donate money back to the organization...). I think it is better for us to gain the trust of a set of clients who are looking for a better way to taste products for quality control (based on science), and charge them for a service than to gamble on general consumers in the short term. In the long term.... I would love to have 1M+ random people using our app to review beer, coffee, and etc. [Do you still live in Kunming? // I use to live right around KNU!]
- sizzle 13y agoI'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.
- sizzle 13y agoI'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.
- subpixel 13y agoI 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.
- twoodfin 13y agoFWIW 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.
- snogglethorpe 13y agoHmm, but at least he can reasonably resist pressure to lower prices... :] [This is not something to be sneezed at... like 75% of the conversation on U.S. beer websites seems to be complaining about beer prices—which seems a bit crazy to me, as from my point of view, U.S. craft beer prices are already extremely low (craft beer prices where I live are probably three times what they typically are in the U.S.)!]
- drone 13y agoBrewery 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. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kitcheninc/the-brewery-incubator-co-working-brewery-collabora https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kitcheninc/the-brewery-... http://blogs.westword.com/cafesociety/2013/02/innovative_craft_brewery_co-op.php http://blogs.westword.com/cafesociety/2013/02/innovative_cra...
- snogglethorpe 13y agoHow does this compare to normal contract brewing? 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?
- llimllib 13y agoI'm not in the industry, but I understand that those are generally called "contract brewers", and the originator of the beer recipe may be more or less involved as the contract brewer begins production, but they definitely don't continue to be unless they find that the product isn't up to snuff. Again, take that with a lump of salt, I hope somebody who knows more will chime in.
- snogglethorpe 13y agoRight, as far as I understand it, that's a general pattern for breweries expanding production beyond their current capacity, or to geographically remote areas. What I'm talking about seems a little different though: it's very, very, small craft breweries which don't have any of their own equipment (except presumably small-batch/homebrew equipment used in creating their recipes in the first place), and do all their actual production brewing on the premises of another brewery, usually located in the same city. Maybe they work the same way, but I can't help but think that the latter type would be more involved in the process... :]
- contingencies 13y agoWorking 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!
- coldtea 13y agoI 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...
- almondsays 13y ago"Hey, this web app thing is popular, everbody is making one. And I like the web. I should make one myself." Just some perspective.
- epaladin 13y agoAt 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.
- brc 13y agoI 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. [1] http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/alcopop-tax-fails-to-deter-teen-binge-drinking-raises-45-billion-in-revenue/story-fneuz92c-1226650824648 http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/alcopop-tax-fails-to-d...
- TheCoelacanth 13y agoAlcohol 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.
- midas007 13y agoHave to admit, Sierra Nevada Taproom and Restaurant in Chico is a huge cash printing press. Probably mostly for show, but people drop the cash. The place is packed on weekends, year round. http://www.sierranevada.com/brewery/california/taproom http://www.sierranevada.com/brewery/california/taproom
- mathattack 13y agoBrewing (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. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326194/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1326194/
- rsl7 13y agomight 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.
- eru 13y agoAnd beer even used to be something every self-respecting wife would make at home.
- mcdougle 13y agoDidn'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.
- mathattack 13y agoConsistency too. McD is about process.
- hessenwolf 13y agoSo, be a chemist. Fairy muff. 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.
- fitek 13y agoIf 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 :)