Starting a brewery… Turns out, not an easy process. Who knew?
I think we're doing better than Sisyphus...
Over the past few weeks and months, we’ve gotten the ball rolling, so to speak. Relative to where we were when the decision was made to do this, we’ve come a ways. Relative to where we’ll be opening day, we have yet to begin working.
The main things we’ve done:
- Met with an officer about licenses
- Met with a banker
- Amassed a collection of ideas and plans to differentiate ourselves
- Met with some SBA people
- Spoke with some real estate agents
- Told everyone we know we’re going to ask them for money (if we know you and we haven’t asked yet, consider yourselves warned)
- Started a blog (very important step in the process)
- Started the business plan (I have an outline…)
- Lots of other little stuff
Things we still need to do. And mind you, this list is very, very, very incomplete:
- Actually write the business plan
- Write it again
- Go over it a few times with various consultants, and then rewrite it again
- Come up with the name
- Research suppliers for the hardware and the supplies (like tanks, grains, hops, kegs, etc.)
- Find the perfect location
- Get the money
- Buy all that stuff
- Get licensed
- Open
- Find people to drink our delicious beer
It’s more complex than that, but that’s where I see us as of today. The immediate next step is the business plan. We need to do a lot more research, write it, rinse, and repeat. Part of that involves talking to suppliers, just to get an idea of what our costs will be. Things like overall overhead, cost per batch, pricing, gross per batch, etc.
Picture of a random IPA. Just because.
The more I find out about this process, the bigger the challenge becomes. I don’t say that in a negative way, just an honest one. I had this date of August 2010 in my head. I’d love if we could open by then. When we first started talking about doing this, 8/10 seemed so far away! And now… It’s starting to seem like tomorrow. So August of next year might not work. We’ll see though. No hard deadlines to meet just yet, and a lot of work between now and then either way, but, that’s where we stand.
Starting a Brewery 