Hello all,

I am a recent college graduate from a business school with a great interest in entrepreneurship. My other homebrewing friend and I have toyed around with the idea of opening a brewery. Now of course we need a lot more experience in homebrewing, but we feel like this is a possibility. An initial thought is that we can brew almost as we normally do (5 gal. batches) and just sell it. Of course there is a liquor license and other startup costs, but the idea is to start cheap and work up into a full fledged business. Also, to get a job at a brewery (a Boston-area brewery, as I am looking to move to Boston) would be a good way to to get experience in the brewing industry.

Does anyone have any experience, information, advice, contacts?

Whats up fellow brewer. I am out here in Nebraska and there is only a couple local breweries and brew pubs. Spilker Ales (spilkerales.com) is based out of a town of around 300 people. He has been very succesful but others around here have not. Lincoln is a town of 300,000 people they have three brew pubs. I have a friend that works for one of our local brew pubs. He loves it and he shares your same dream of opening a brewery. He is a very smart guy has a masters in chemical enginering, just never did anything with his degree. Anyway he has been saving for years to start up his own brew pub. The start up costs are very expensive. I am a loan officer for a bank and have tried to get him a small business loan a few times. I think you need to learn what you are doing first (work at a brewery), figure out what you are getting into, and then plan the financials. Starting out small sounds easy but even a garage micro set up isn't cheap and selling five gallon batches wouldn't even be worth the hassells of licensing and paying beer taxes and all the other crap. It looks good on paper but is a lot more difficult than you think. Screwing up a 5 gallon batch of beer isn't as costly as a 500 gallon one. If challenges motivate you I'd say go for it. Hell I've thought about it and even have the money but the thought of retirement is too awesome to trade for that kind of gamble.

Just to give you and idea of what it takes to get a SBA loan consider the following. You will probably need at least 30% down on the total project (assuming you have good assets and credit). You will also have to qaulify for the loan with your current income. So if you need 150,000 for a small setup you will need 45000 of your own money and have to make monthly payments on the other 105k (around a grand a month). This is if you need the loan at all if your rich or win the lottery this wouldn't be a problem. Then it is just a matter of building up experience and getting some good beer recipes going.

Hope it works out for you.

Cheers,
Jeff

Ah..........Every homebrewer dreams of brewing for a living. Wouldn't it be nice. But the truth is its hard to make money on beer. Belive me i've done the numbers. And 5 gallon batches is the hard way to go about it. You would need a kick ass brew system. But good luck man.

thanks for the advice/info. i'm not in a position to start officially thinking about this right now, but it's something i may be pursuing in the next 5 years.

anyone else w/ experience/advice/information on this?

I've been helping a good buddy with his brewing operation and he's got a really informative blog about doing it.
His plan is to do 30 BBL batches and he's going to be going for high end Belgian's and Saison's to start with. I'm looking forward to having his Batch 001 which he hosted a beer competition and the winners beer is being made right now and should be available in late Feb./early Mar 08.

Also Sam from Dogfish Head's book Brewing up a business is really good too.

Patrick Rue's place can be found at: www.thebruery.com and Sam's book all over the internet.