Community Beer Share

So, I can't help but to always click on threads with titles like "selling your homebrew" or "thinking of starting a brewpub." It's probably because like so many of us, that is truly my ultimate dream. But with every "brew beer professionally" thread there are always a bastion of comments (justifiably so!) about how incredibly hard it is, how much is costs, the legal aspects involved, and someone inevitably points us to the "Don't try this at home" thread (which we all love).

Recently as I was pondering the idea of opening a brewery, I thought of something. Many of you might already be familiar with farm shares or fish shares- these are basically farms and fisheries that allow for local customers to pay in advance per month or per year for delivery of a certain amount fruits, vegetables, meats, and fish fresh from a local farm, straight to their doors. People sign up to receive X amount of pounds of produce or meat per week, and the benefits are that you are getting the freshest and best products at a direct-supply price, while supporting local business and eliminating nasty/dirty transportation and distribution that normally comes in between.

So my question is, why not start a community beer share??? After getting the word out, people could sign up to pay for X amount of ingredients per month and get those same benefits- freshness, affordability, quality, and support of local business. An experienced brewer could make a certain quota of a few different types of brews each month, deliver orders himself, and make a small amount of profit all the while. It wouldn't be selling beer, and it's a great way to get your name out and have people drinking your beer.

I think this idea could really work. Thoughts?

A CSB???

Neat idea. You'd still need to tackle all the legal hurdles, and I'd bet there's some lame legislation that inhibits the idea. Alcohol sales laws are absurdly technical and draconic.

I'm kind of performing a "test" on Big Brew day next week. We've got a large amount of brewer's coming over and we all pitched in on a big supply order to brew a few batches together. I'm going to judge the success of the day on wether we can all get together for a "co-op" type of operation for supply purchases and equipment loans on a regular basis.

Yeah.. I know... Homebrew clubs do that... but we don't belong to the local club for reasons that wont be described here.