So You Think You Want to Open a Brewery
This is so apropos!
Three groups of my friends (6 people, total) are attempting to start breweries, brewpubs, or cideries.
I have a number of thoughts for these friends. (Advice not totally unsolicited -- I've been homebrewing for about 17 years.)
- Brewing a good batch of beer - better than most of the what's sold in stores - is easy. Almost anyone can do it with their first batch.
- This tricks people into thinking that brewing is easy. But...
- Consistency is hard. That recipe that turned out so well the first time? It might be good the second time, or it might spoil, or it might be too hoppy, or it might be cloudy, or taste of yeast, and so on. At any rate, it's unlikely that it will taste exactly the same as it did the first time.
- Brewing large batches is hard. Even transitioning from 5 gallon to 10 gallon batches requires different equipment. Recipes don't scale in a simple way. And when you get into backwatering high gravity beers everything becomes even more complex.
- Making wine and cider is hard compared to brewing beer. The former two have fewer ingredients, which, being fruit instead of grain, tend to be less consistent. Conditioning takes MUCH longer which means feedback and learning take much longer.
- And yet, I bet actually making a consistent, high-quality beverage is the easy part compared to running a profitable brewing business.
- Brewing is expensive. Startup costs are high. Even an enthusiastic homebrewer can easily spend thousands. Think $10,000 for a bare-minimum commercial brewing setup built around e.g. a SABCO Brew Magic.
- The legal stuff is hard. Licenses, bonds, a legal location -- all that stuff takes time and money.
- The food industry is brutal. Combining a brewery and a restaurant seems like it must tremendously increase the probability of failure.
Anyway, brewing is a fun hobby. But one of those that sort of lulls people into making hasty business decisions.
I could almost replace "beer" and "brewery" with "food" and "restaurant" and feel like it would be talking about the same thing.
My restaurant ends up focusing so much more on keeping up with cleaning, food safety, and local regulations than actual cooking food it feels almost silly. And most people only want to hear about food or money (lol, money) when they ask me about how the restaurant's doing. I hope I don't accidentally convince someone that they should look into running one.
I actually visited Hill Farmstead Brewery last month in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. If you're not aware, they're sort of the Magnolia Cupcakes of breweries - people drive hours to get there, wait in line for hours, and generally get very hyped up about the beer.
While I waited over an hour to buy my 2 allowed bottles, I was able to read a little about the guy who started the brewery. I'm paraphrasing, but he basically explained in an interview somewhere that once you realize you're not doing something for fun or for yourself, you come to see other elements about the work that matter, and that those are what ultimately make it worth while. (His motivation has a lot to do with maintaining his family connection to the land he's brewing on, which has been in his family for like 200 years.)
I thought those were pretty wise words for anyone considering a new venture. Novelty and fun wear off. If you can figure out what about the work really matters, you'll be less likely to burn out.
FWIW I saw the founder of the brewery, and I can tell you he was not showing any signs of having a good time or a good day.
Thanks for this. This reminds me a lot of an old Slate piece (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...) about owning a coffee shop.
I am glad the author actually does enjoy his work, but this is just another reminder that your dream job might not be as dreamy as you initially imagined. Sometimes the grass is just greener because you haven't looked close enough to notice all the brown patches.
For anyone interested in starting a brewery, my startup [1] does Flavor Profiling and Statistical Quality control for small to medium sized artisan beer, coffee, and spirit producers.
We use machine learning and data-science to quantify the flavor profile of products, detect flaws, and pinpoint the sources of batch variation.
[1] www.Gastrograph.com
Replace all of the brewing talk in the description of cleaning, tedium, and notetaking with chemistry, and then you will understand why I became a developer after spending 4 years studying chemistry.
So, be a chemist. Fairy muff.
Interestingly, the t-test, probably one of the most relevant pieces of mathematics in modern science, was invented by Gossett in the Guiness brewery in Dublin in 1908.
The problem was that for testing the batches, the sample size was too small for the estimate of the standard deviation to be consistent, so the distribution was wider than would be expected from a Gaussian normal distribution. So, the lad used resampling from a bag of a thousand chicken bones (measuring the lengths) to derive a distribution. Somehow, the mathematical underpinnings were later defined properly by Fischer.
Brewery incubators are coming... Some of them might work out pretty nicely to help test and get your feet wet with bigger equipment before taking the leap.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kitcheninc/the-brewery-...
http://blogs.westword.com/cafesociety/2013/02/innovative_cra...
I know someone with a brewery - it's a pretty small operation with a small bar. It's not a trendy location or operation but he has been going for years.
The biggest problem is governments. Either the local government, which decided to arbitarily start charging commercial premises 90% of the metered incoming water as wastewater, on the assumption that 90% of what comes out the tap goes down the drain. Breweries use a lot of water, so that added costs.
Then the federal government decided that young people were drinking too many strong pre-mixed drinks (alcopops), so they added a massive alcopops tax (a 70% increase) to try and stop young people drinking (yeah, as if that was going to work [1]). While the young people switched to spirits, wine and cider, his business got smashed because one of his big product lines was ginger beer, and for whatever reason some politician or bureaucrat decided that ginger beer counted as an alcopop.
Most of us in the software industry don't realise how much freedom we have. We can start pretty much any type of software company we like, where we like, when we like. Most of us don't even have to tell a single layer of government what we are doing, save for reporting the income to the taxman. The horror stories of random regulation changes on small businesses like breweries and restaurants is the stuff of nightmares. I mean, imagine if a government somewhere decided to arbitrarily add a 70% tax to mobile-app sales. Lots of small developers would go under. But governments routinely do this sort of thing all the time to lots of other small businesses.
[1] http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/alcopop-tax-fails-to-d...
Another factor I didn't see mentioned is that it is very hard to scale up a brewery. The equipment is a big expensive investment and it makes a certain amount of beer. If you want to make more than that, you need more equipment.
I'll leave the brewing to the professionals. I can get Pliny the Elder pretty easily here in San Diego. Stone Brewery is close by, and always releasing new and innovative brews.
Have to admit, Sierra Nevada Taproom and Restaurant in Chico is a huge cash printing press.
Probably mostly for show, but people drop the cash. The place is packed on weekends, year round.
If you're interested in building a nanobrewery, we've developed plans and software for a brewery made out of 3x 55 gallon stainless steel drums at the openbrewery.org project. The software uses Processing; the hardware is less prescriptive since a lot of it will depend on what parts you can get your hands on.
Our goals are to achieve greater consistency and to automate the process as much as possible, so brewers don't have to sit and watch the beer cooking for an entire day.
Our nanobrewery is already running for a year or so and there are at least two more under construction around the world (that I am aware of). So far, the project comprises just the brewery itself-- no tools for downstream analysis of the beer, though that is an important future improvement.
Shameless plug, brought to you by one of the project founders :)
Beer is so yesterday. The new (old) thing is your own distillery:
http://www.amazon.com/Kings-County-Distillery-Guide-Moonshin...
(Book is written by a guy who grew up in a dry county and whose father is a preacher, natch.)
:-)
Working on the winemaking side (with arbitrary fruits) as a side project here in southwest China. It's an interesting place to work, much different to recipes like "pay x to buy y at your local brewing supplier" like in the west. More experimentation!
The "lean startup" version of brewing:
http://www.feaststl.com/dine-out/big-idea/article_14e48446-4...
Brewing (and wine making) seems like the rare field(s) that consumers think they can do better.
I don't think I can make a better computer than Apple just because I use one. I don't think I can block better than the offensive lineman on the 49ers, even if I think he's incompetent. I can't make a car better than GM, even if I might drive one.
Yet why do so many people think opening a brewery is easy?
Beer Wars is a great documentary on the fight craft brewers have against the big beer companies. [1] The war is all in distribution.
I find such attemps are so shallow. "Hey, this brewery thing is popular, everybody is opening one. And I like beer. I should open one myself".
How many people have a genuine passion AND business sense for the stuff, instead of merely going with what other people do and what's considered a hip and trendy thing to do (with some of them even thinking they won't have to do much work to run such a business).
It's like when I see tons people attemting a career in designing skateboarding gear or some such non-industry...
Fantastic article. I think brewing beer will be the next project on my list.
Sidenote: I do think the original title "So You Think You Want to Open a Brewery..." would have fit better here.
I never thought I wanted to open a brewery, and now I'm sure of it!
I think a winery and vineyard sound much more appealing than brewing.
I'll leave the brewing to the professionals. I can get Pliny the Elder pretty easily here in San Diego. Stone Brewery is close by, and always releasing new and innovative brews.