Show of hands: Who doesn't want to go into commercial brewing?

:raises hand:

I guess I'm just a little frustrated in how many fellow homebrewers I talk to seem to want to go commercial. The idea of turning a hobby I love into my livelihood sounds like a horrible idea to me. I personally don't care if others like my beer, I make it for me.

Is there anyone else out there that feels the same?

 

I think the desire is less to have LOTS of people like your beer, than it is to do something that we all love so much for a living. Truthfully, that's the best kind of job, one where you can wake up, go to work and not mind because you love what you do so much.

While becoming a professional brewer or having my own brew pub would be cool, realistically, I like the money I make as an engineer. IMHO, I already brew and make very good money, why would I want to switch to brewing and making mediocre money??

 

Less than zero interest here.

 

:raises hand:

I do it to have the joy of my own concoctions. To be honest, about a million new places have opened in NC since they raised the ABV limit here, and I can hardly keep up tasting all of their stuff. I do my best mind you.

Orlando

 

Right here. I'd hate to have to worry about the business side of the deal, and I don't always feel like brewing.

 

I can appreciate that Ace.

Don't get me wrong, I love to share my beer. It's just the idea that you're banking on the general public to see if you stay afloat financially or not seems like a horrible way to go. I think the stress would take the fun right out of brewing.

My dream isn't a brewpub. My dream would be to have a small building next my home just for brewing, with floor drains, a bar, and lots of storage. That sounds like heaven to me.

 

Amen. Once I have to do it.......I wont want to do it. Love to brew but don't want a job doing it.

 

I don't know about commercial but I would like to be able to sell my crafts locally at the market.

Not really for income but for a reason to brew. Drinking it all is starting to turn into a full time job in itself and I'd like to cut back on my drinking a bit but not my brewing. Hoping for favorable changes to our HB laws in Oregon soon.

 

I don't care to. The workload is high and the pay not so great. Might be fun to do a stand-in once or twice but I'll pass on the 8 to 5'er or the 4 to 12'er or the....

Might be okay for a retirement gig if the body can still handle the lifting then.

 

I'd hate trying to make a business out of it. To be successful 90% of your time would be consumed with business and 10% would be the actual brewing. That would suck. I do love making beer other people enjoy as much as for myself. In an IDEAL world, I'd have one part time job that pays all the bills and have a nano-brewery (maybe 1-2 BBL) that would be another part time job.

 

the only way i would ever dream of anything like that is if i won the lotto and i didnt have to work. then i would just ope up a brewpub just for the activity and becuase there isnt any brewpubs around my town. we have a gordon beirsch, but i dont really enjoy many of their beers.

watch the documentry 'Beer Wars' and it will throw a new light on todays beer industry. there is a lot of bs that goes into starting/ operating/ owning a brewery.

 

Sign me up for that dream as well!!!!!

 

I love beer and brewing too much to ever want to do it for a living. It's that simple...homebrewing and professional brewing are NOT the same.

It's one thing sleeping in and brewing a batch of beer starting at 10am on a saturday with some friends and several beers on hand, riffing your recipe as you go along and starting out at 5 in the morning in hip waders to muck out a truckload of wet stinky grain before you can get started on today's long 5 or 10bbl brewday, where you can't stray from your recipe/methods/taste of your finish product or else you run the risk of sinking your reputation or losing money. If we have a recipe go off kilter or something happen we're out 5 gallons, maybe 10.....or we drink it, but as watching the Brewmaster's shows, if something goes wrong you open your valve and dump a half million dollars down the drain.....

I find it amusing too that so many folks think they are going to "go pro" I wonder how many of them even understand what that really means.

The most I would maybe like to do 'proffessionally" is teach brewing, write the occasional book, and maybe own an LHBS, or maybe work part time in one when I retire....but even then, that could take the magic out of it.

 

To those who make it happen and really want it I say, "Go for it!" However, it seems a lot of times it's premature enthusiasm. A lot of those threads start along the lines of:

Hey, new brewer here, glad to be on HBT! Wife bought me a Mr. Beer for Christmas and I've just finished brewing my first batch. Already I have this dream of opening my own brewery...

The OP then starts asking for advice on how to do that and all I can think is, "Whoa, uh, slow down there Junior, one step at a time!! It's great to be enthusiastic, but why don't we get this first beer out of the way?"

 

It sounds like a cool idea and then you watch a show like Brew Masters and it kind of makes you think about going to the next level. With that said I don't I would take that step I enjoy doing it becuas it's a fun hobby. I look around and see how many micro breweries there in the world today and it seems to be a VERY competitive venture.

I think I will sit on the sidelines and drink the occasional commercial brew and enjoy the hobby.

 

Why ruin a perfectly good hobby by making it a job. I have to agree with some of what Revvy is saying. Too many homebrewers assume that commercial brewing is an end goal or a logical extension of a homebrewing hobby. They are in two completely different ballparks. I might open an LHBS as a retirement venture many years from now. Not necessarily because I think it's a dream job, but more because it's something I could reasonably do given my area of expertise.

 

^^^^This ^^^^

There's a little farmers market set up around the corner from my house on Saturday mornings during the summer. Use to be nice to go pick up a fresh loaf of bread, pies and cakes. If it weren't for government putting their hands in everything, it’d be great to sell beer there once in a while. They even put the home bakers out of business. If you don't have a commercially licensed kitchen, you can't sell any of your goods, so alcohol is way out of the question.

 

I'm fine just how it is now. Home brewing once or twice every few months, enjoying wings/pizza/fries/spicy food with friends with home brew on tap. My garage and/or backyard will become our poker/cigar/bbq palace just like my dad had with his friends. I could care less about competitions, trying to make profit, or selling my creations.

 

I already ruined 1 hobby by making it my job, and brewing became my new keep-me-sane hobby. So I'm hoping to stay amateur- I don't think that will be a hard goal to attain.

 

For some people spending long hours brewing beer is much better than the job they are currently in. Just sayin.

I kind of like my job, and brewing is not an escape, but rather an interesting hobby that challenges my less than perfectionist nature, satisfies my DIY craving, and in the end I have beer!

I'd hate to learn to hate beer because it was a stressful job. For every Jim Koch and Sam Calgione, there are numerous failures.

Then again, many of the stresses are caused by the distribution fights, which aren't a problem if you only want to serve on premises...

 

I'm so glad it's not just me hearing all of this! I don't think people think about the "work" it takes to run a brewery. The replication of beers needs to be spot on. If your not serving from location, you have to deal with distributing. If you live in a town like mine, you'll have to fight for a liquor license. Not to mention the hard work and typically low income they make.

My husband worked in a brewery for awhile and as much as he loved beer, doing the same thing day in and day out for little pay just wasn't worth it.

That's why I love homebrewing. I do it when I want, I make what I want, and it never needs to taste the same twice (though, I can if I want it to).

That's almost exactly where this thread came from Shooter. I'm very active in a young homebrew club and it seems every other meeting someone pulls me to the side and says "Hey, I'm thinking of starting a pub in town." I agree that our town, heck our state, needs a brewery of some sort. But really, homebrewing is not the stepping stone to commercial brewing. I view homebrewing and commercial brewing as two entirely separate entities.

Thanks to everyone that "raised your hand". This was really starting to frustrate me and it's great to know that I'm not alone.

 

I ruined a vocation by deciding to become a minister. I enjoyed being a leader in my church, and even being a seminarian was fun; all the "authority" without the responsibility (and people stabbing you in the back)....But there some reasons I'm not doing church work now....

 

I dream about opening a brewpub. But only in the sense as something to do if I somehow become independently wealthy through the lottery or some other freak thing. Which is not likely to happen.

I would not want to run it as a business to where if it does not succeed I can't put food on the table for my family type of thing.

 

As Maynard G. Krebs would say, "WORK!"

No interest here, but I would like to see a batch done on a commercial scale...may haul a bag or two of grain to make myself useful.

 

I consider it, but only because my job will lead to a very early retirement in a few years, and I should have a decent amount of savings and plan on moving to a much more small business-friendly state. BUT, I much more frequently say I am going to get into the beer business in a much more flexible position, since I will already have my pension and don't really think I want another full-time job. I see myself tending bar at nice pub, or resturuant.

 

You know what gets me the most about this? I really sometimes wanna pull my hair out when the person creating one of those "I wanna go pro" threads begins theirs by saying, "I, like all of you on here are one of those folks who dreams of blah blah blah...."

I sometimes wanna scream, "No you idiot, some of us on here actually have brains and know what it really entails, not pie in the sky dreams, and if we wanted to do more than a hobby with this we'd be all hanging out at Probrewer.com, not HOMEbrewtalk.com. So why don't you go over there for a dose of realism and leave this place to us HOBBYISTS.

But I don't.

 

I do agree that, if I was independently wealthy, running a pub/brewery/beer store might be kind of fun. Since that indepently wealthy thing hasn't worked out so far, I think I'll stick with this as a hobby.

 

I think working at the LHBS would be way more fun than a brewery. Heck, I'm there enough. I should see if I can get put on pay roll.

 

I have seriously contemplated it, read anything I can get my hands on, and tried to talk to people who have experience.

That being said, I have little interest in working a big regional brewery or something to that effect. The assembly line and industrial process of it all somehow takes the luster off for me. A brewpub, smaller craft brewery up to about 30 bbl? I am still in the "thinking" stage.

Luckily, my employer pays me good money to read HBT all day. YIKES!

 

Totally agree. Although I sometimes dream of a LHBS where you also serve samples of homebrew. A place where someone can come in and say "What good recipes/kits do you have?" or "Does homebrew actually taste good?" and you could say, "Just walk over to the bar here and let me give you some tastes."

In the end though, I just enjoy expanding my hobby and creating my basement brewery.

 

Yummm, asbestos!

Seriously, I thought you were just going to brew on your POLE... (hoops pole).

 

I have no idea how much money the owner of a successful brewery makes but I would lean toward pretty good money, quite possibly/probably multi-millionaire.

Point is I am trying to make is if you open your own brewery and it is successful you will probably then be the owner and probably doing well. I am of course assuming the idea here is not to go work for a brewery, but to open a small one that will hopefully grow. Now, I bet you are right that in the beginning you don't make much and if you never become successful you would have been better off keeping your well paying job you already have. I also agree that the odds of becoming super successful are slim.

I think I would rather make a hobby a living instead of doing something I hate though.

That said no, I would rather become a farmer.

Funny how few if any said yes.

 

I have no interest in opening up a brewery or a brewpub, but what would interest me would be to have a home bar and be able to recoup my losses from parties and poker nights and what not. It would allow me to brew more and drink less: a lot of the beers I like are low abv offerings that are better fresh and that don't keep very well.

Alas, selling homebrew is illegal as is bartering for it and as a future lawyer, there's really no leeway. A lot of people already like my beer, even people who don't normally drink beer. My girlfriend's grandma of 90 enjoyed a glass of Bob's Coal Porter and said it reminded her of the Labatt Porter her husband used to drink in the 50's.

People seem to go into brewing for the same reason every garage musician wants to make it big: adulation and the feeling that others approve of their work.

 

:raises hand:

I'd rather have it as a hobby, something that is fun where I can get away from my business.

 

I understand, but I have so many hobbies I would gladly give one up to do for a living...well it would have to be successful though.

 

I live in a city where our only 2 breweries have just opened within the past 2-3 years. One brews strictly German styles and the other brews more balanced, English style beers. I'd love to start up a brewery that brewed some hoppy, American style beers as there isn't really a source for that locally.

I'd do it because I love brewing and I don't want to work a crappy desk job the rest of my life. I'd love to have my own business that I built from the ground up.

 

This is the appeal for me as well.

 

I have no desire to open a brewery, my beer isn't that good but I am open to the idea of a LHBS.