HBT Collaborative Microbrewery

jezter6 · Mar 2, 2010

The only way this is ever more than a pipe dream is to do a few things:

1) Consult with a lawyer, either one from here, or on your own (yes, you'll probably have to fork that consulting fee up front)

2) If the lawyer indicates a full-go, then you would need to work with him to do all the paperwork to create a company.

3) You would then likely need to pretty much have a business plan put to paper, at least a basic one, and then start looking for investors.

If you do the work to seriously get 1-3 going, you've turned this from an idea into a prospect. Sure, you may end up folding the company in 6 weeks when the idea doesn't pan out, but it will NEVER pan out, if you don't get it started.

Someone has to take the bull by the horns and just DO IT, and then work on how to make it work for everyone else. But if everyone sits around discussing it, then nothing will ever get done and it will be a permanent pipe dream. At least if you have those things started, other people will see that you are TRULY serious about this and want to make it happen.

mhermetz · Mar 2, 2010

I think that brings us to the main issue here...

If a person on here was serious enough to take the bull by the horns.... He probably already did it.... or will be doing it without help from investors.

ReverseApacheMaster · Mar 2, 2010

As a law student and a licensed principal at a brokerage firm I can shed a little light on some of these issues:

As far as the business organization, you can (and would want to) incorporate. You could have more than 500 investors by issuing stock, or by incorporating groups of investors together and letting their corporations by primary investors. Either way, honestly, too many investors will drive up costs with paperwork to maintain the corporation. It would be better to have fewer investors (like 25, maybe 50 tops) who could invest serious cash. You could do crazy stuff like incorporate, issue stock and let people place it in their IRAs to use retirement assets for capital and keep profits tax deferred. Personally, I don't recommend that route, but reasonable minds differ.

They would want to nominate managers to perform certain functions (bookeeping, purchasing, legal, advertising, etc.) and leave very little to group decisions (like what beers to produce) and likely make it a quorum vote rather than complete consensus. I love democracy as much as the next, but if you leave all decisions to everybody, nothing would get done.

The brewing operations would have to have a central, agreed to, location. You can't have 50 people brewing in their garage and try to sell it through a single entity. You would probably want to locate it where the most owners live and/or where the administrative requirements are the most lax.

All in all, I think you would have a handful of people getting to brew and most people doing administrative/management work, unless everybody lived so close together they could put the brewery where everybody could drive there and work on the brew process each day. Even then, there's only room for so many people...

So, I think it would be a great idea with a local group of homebrewers with capital, but to try to do across the internet with a large number of people, not so much.

ReverseApacheMaster · Mar 2, 2010

mhermetz said:
I think that brings us to the main issue here...

If a person on here was serious enough to take the bull by the horns.... He probably already did it.... or will be doing it without help from investors.

There are people on here who are building/operate breweries/brewpubs. The idea here was to form sort of a collective brewery.

brewagentjay · Mar 2, 2010

Hey, It sounds like a great idea not sure how it would work but if someone wants to make this happen go for it. I'm taking my dream by the horns of having a brew pub & I'll be happy to help in this as much as I can. At very least I'll sell the HBT Brewery beers in my pub............