The licenses and insurance policies mentioned earlier are all required and are good info.
First off, you need a state license. They are usually set at a standard price for the first year, then reflect your production (in barrels) the following years. You are also required to pay taxes on your production. You can find out the information from your state and figure out what it would cost you to charge each client.
All states (as far as I know) require liablility insurance. This can get pricey, and can also get tricky in situations.
Don't forget you need to be registered with the ATF and yes you do need to have a license through them.
You will be producing a beverage so don't forget you will need to be registered with the board of health and get ready for regular inspections. You can't just do this in your kitchen or out of your garage. If you can't afford to build your own sanitary kitchen (think stainless backsplashes, tile floors, stainless countertops), you will need to rent kitchen time. You can usually rent kitchen time at local colleges with culinary arts programs or some production facilities that close on weekends (even better idea is if you know or belong to a church or other organization with a certified kitchen that will allow you to use it free or cheap).
You mentioned you have all of the equipment. Remember that you might recieve orders for pretty high volume at once, or multiple orders at once. Would you say 250 people to receive gifts would be rational for a wedding? Assuming one 12 ounce bottle of beer per person, 250 ppl X 12 oz = 3000 Fl oz / 128 fl ounce per gal = 23 gals for one wedding. Will you have the ability to boil that much wort, ferment that much beer, and bottle it all with your current setup? Can you double, triple, or quadruple that if you have multiple orders at once? Talk to current wedding companies and see how the busy seasons go. Lead times and storage space will also need to be thought of.
As for bottles you will need to purchase bottles on a regular basis also. Is there somewhere nearby you might be able to purchase returnable bottles from? If not what costs are going to be necessary to purchase that volume and have it freight shipped (at that quantity your looking at pallets)? Since you will be selling the beer to the client in bottles you will need labels for the bottles, which leads to the next consideration.
Deposit. Any container leaving the facility will need to have a deposit collected. Even brewpubs are required to collect deposit on growlers, although they usually don't tell you and just add that into the 5 or 10 dollars per fill. And since you have labels for an alcoholic beverage don't forget the labels need federal and state apporoval. There are legal requirements for warnings, font size restrictions, and they also need to be recognizable by the state (up until recently the state of michigan did not recognize scotch ale as a beer, hence a scotch ale had to be sold as a pale ale from scotland or something to that effect). There is also nomenclature designated for ABV (i.e. light, strong, malt liquor). I would contact the personal label companies dealing with wine that currently exist and see how they deal with the acoholic label restrictions (maybe a stock label, and the couple can pick two things a picture and the name).
And no, you can't just sell 10 cases of beer to your client for the wedding because they are simply buying it at your 'brewery'. As far as I know most states (if not all) don't allow this. Yes, most states allow sales on premise for places like brewpubs. "But I can buy a growler or a six pack at 'Eddie's Brewhaus' and take it home, isn't that the same thing?" Not entirely. Most states do allow small amounts of sales to customers at brewpubs for home consumption, but that's exactly it... small amounts. The primary function for the company is sales at the bar.
Easiest way to work around this? Build your three tier system, but that's where your building more and more costs and the red tape gets thicker and thicker. You might be able to talk to a local distributor and see if they will carry your product and have a partner run the 'storefront' to the clients. They might allow it as a side item that you do most of the work for. Maybe you could deliver it to their warehouse, help them put it in a back corner, and pick it back up to tak to the 'storefront' so the distributor only deals with the floor space and paperwork. Or maybe you could have a partner become the distributor if you already know someone in the wedding business? The company in the wedding business would need a liquor license though also.
You might want to figure out what the startup costs would be first. Licensing, registrations, insurance policies, equipment, etc. Then figure out what the production costs would be for each batch(Grain or extract prices, fuel costs, bottles, water, storage and kitchen rent?). And finally figure out what the prices would be per batch just at cost. Look at how long you could delay the costs of startup before you would need to shut down the operation.
Don't forget about disasters. Would the company be able to recover if an entire drum of extract gets infected, if mold or rats destroyed an entire pallet of grain, if a dry spell happens for the better part of a year?
The bottom line also lies in if the company can sustain itself. Is there enough of a market to even cover operational costs, even if it is a side job/hobby gone wrong :cross: ? How much promotion would be necessary, and how far can you go with promotional costs if does become absolutely necessary.
If you have read through this entire post and have now placed me into a category that reads in your mind, "Discouraging a**holes" then read again. Nowhere have I said "don't do it". I have simply raised valid questions and given the informaiton I have found thus far for operating a brewery of any kind. If you have researched all the legalities, crunched all the numbers, and you think it can happen then by all means DO IT!!!!! :rockin: I'm sure you will never regret it.
Just remember it is a business. The beer is just a bonus.
but...
