Some quotes from this thread...
And quickly saw that brewing (and doing anything for work) is work, it's not nearly as fun as homebrewing.
True, but in my case the motivating factor isn't even necessarily driven by the money end of it. Sure, that's rewarding and you NEED it of course to keep the brewery and yourself going (see subsequent quotes) but the sheer joy of seeing other people enjoy your beer enough to PAY for it and in fact come back again and again is very rewarding, at least to me.
I have read many many threads and books on starting/owning/operating a brewery. The one thing I found in common is that working/owning a brewery is just an over glorified janitor position.
Absolutely true. So true in fact that we
LITERALLY say this to our applicants who apply for positions in the brewery. You WILL BE doing essentially janitor work with occasional interruptions to make some beer. But truly, those interruptions are seldom and short-lived because there's cleaning to be done.
SO MUCH CLEANING!
to brew professionally. It's basically industrial cleaning with a lot of hard work thrown in the mix. I have friends who are pros, and they are the hardest working people I know. If you want to go on that path, that is wonderful but keep in mind that it's physically demanding and involves from very long days.
Oh ya. When we were first learning our system, our brew days were somewhere in the zone of 15 to 16 hours long. And then we had to come back the next day for cleaning. We've improved and gotten brew days down to around 10 hours but they are still looong days.
We run a 10 bbl system and that means hundreds and hundreds of pounds of spent grains at the end of the mash need to be manually cleaned out and carted out to the bins for the rancher to load off to his cattle. And that's relatively early in the brew day...
As for the red tape etc... It's there. but there IS a way around it. You just have to wade in and start cutting. Keep moving forward and communicate, communicate, communicate. Know PRECISELY what you want to do with your brewing operation and then read up about other folks who have done something similar and succeeded. Then get ahold of those people and start asking questions. Then comes the hard part. Listen to them. Listen when they say "This is a bad idea. I'd do THIS instead."
I would do SO many things differently if I were starting again. My brewery footprint is for crap, I don't have a loading bay, my floors don't drain well because I tried to save some money... All things people told me I should try to avoid but I figured I could overcome them and save myself some startup money along the way. Now I'm saddled with 3 times the work and an eternally wet and messy floor that I have to pay somebody to constantly wash and clean or I have to do it myself three times a day. And I'm just getting started!
But don't get me wrong. I'm not discouraging you at all. I'm LOVING life right now. The brewery is doing well, people like the products and I have specific goals and processes for how to improve our beers AND our brewhaus.
As for your situation and retailing home-brew - I actually initially wanted to purchase a space and put local HOMEBREW on tap. What I wanted to do was basically consign taps and brewhaus space to local brewers so they could make beer and sell it in the taproom and I'd take a percentage. Ultimately that was unrealistic. However I still think it's a really cool idea if somebody could get enough brewers together who were passionate enough and reliable enough to consistently produce beer.
Course after that you'd have to go through ALL the process of getting a licensed brewery, then you'd have to register all the home-brew beers with your state and fed government (ABV, IBU and Style) and your brewers would have meet those numbers consistently. You'd have to hire and train servers, you'd have to train the brewers to follow consistent cleaning and sanitation practices in the brewhaus and they'd have to learn to play nicely together. But how cool would it be to have a co-op of say 20 or so brewers who all put 10 or 15 gallons of beer on tap each month for consignment.
Anyway, that was INITIALLY my idea. That eventually morphed into the full-blown brewery that is Muddy Creek.
Sorry, didn't mean to hijack. Just found this thread interesting. Carry on.
i understand the advice based on your locations, but the good news for me is the region in canada i live in just made it legal to sell home made craft beers and wines at local market (farmers markets) with permission by the market owner and a certification obtained by the province. It is easily done as many a homebrewer from here can tell you. This is more what i was thinking, just to get my beers out there and see what the response was. In no way am i thinking commercial, but small micro or brewpub? Yes....
