You know the answer: one bite at a time. I picked this topic because no matter how much you have dreamed of opening your own brewery and following something you are truly passionate about, it can feel overwhelming and you just aren’t sure where to start. Baby steps. Sorry for the mixed metaphor.

1. Idea. First, you need to have an idea, of course, of what kind of brewery you want to do and what you think your town will appreciate.

2. Money. How much can you scrounge up by using savings, selling things you don’t need, and what friends and relatives would contribute as a loan that you will pay back at a good interest rate (interest only to start, paid monthly) secured by your equipment. Numbers one and two are the most important starting points. Do not proceed to number three until you have these two figured out.

3. Location. This relates right back to numbers one and two. If a packaging brewery, the location needs enough space, good plumbing and tied to a sewer system, adequate power, but still accessible to the public for your tasting room. If a brewpub, you really want an existing restaurant for lease or for sale. My preference is to never do a packaging brewery (again) and instead do a brewpub, even if it only served soup and salad. The existing restaurant, if you can find it, will save you possibly multiple six figures and months in time.

4. At this point, you need to become a legal entity. Most likely choose a Limited Liability Company or incorporate. I have always chosen the latter, but the former is fine too.

5. Once you have your company with your articles of incorporation and federal ID, you can open a checking account. The bank needs this information. Fund it with at least $5,000, which the IRS wants to know you have skin in the game. I think you should list any other money you put in as a loan that you and/or your friends and relatives will repay with interest. With this checking account, you need to set up your books. Unless you really know Quickbooks or some other accounting software, hire a bookkeeper to input all of this information and organize it for you. They can teach you as you go along.

6. Lease/Own. You have found your location and should have 30 days before you sign the lease or buy the property. Use this time wisely to:

7. Check with the city about zoning to make sure you can do what you want.

8. Draw up some sort of simple plans and take them to the town to ask if they see any problems with what you want to do. They might state, “You lack handicap access; you must install an elevator,” or, “Because this constitutes a change of use, it requires a review process, and we need architectural and engineered drawings with stamps (this is why I favor existing restaurants; their use is typically considered existing, potentially eliminating the need for an architect or engineer).”

9. Get bids. I have failed at this and usually hire someone I know and trust, and it has worked out for me, but it’s still safer to get bids. Remember, you only have 30 days before the point of no return.

10. Begin. Apply for your TTB (this is your federal brewer’s license and you can do it online) and your state brewer’s license through your town clerk’s office. The process takes four to six months. Gather your equipment. There’s a lot out there cheap. Work on your design and how you will decorate. Build your business system, hire your staff, design your logo, website, and social media accounts. I could go on from here, but it’s beyond the scope of this article.

I could write a ton on any of these points. If you would like to go further into any of them that maybe I wasn’t clear on, reach out and I’m happy to explain.

Successful businesses don’t happen by accident, but they require a start and follow-through. People have been doing it for hundreds of years, and there is no reason you can’t as well. After all, it’s easier than eating an elephant.

Leave a comment

I graduated Santa Fe High School 50 years ago; my greatest academic achievement. Before I did, somehow, I bought one of those little mini bottles of Hennessy Cognac VS. I had the strangest idea that I would squirrel that little bottle away and drink it for my 50^th anniversary. What 18 year-old thinks that way?

And, what does that have to do with owning a brewery? Everything.

Most likely, all of you already practice delayed gratification in some form. Maybe you are a parent who is watching your budget to save for your child’s braces or college fund. Perhaps you are training for a marathon, running every day, slowly increasing your mileage until you feel you can complete 26.2 miles. Or, maybe you put off quitting your job for another couple of years to save for opening your own business.

Amazon, of course, makes it difficult to avoid impulse purchases. Just like all the things that are always placed at the checkout counter in stores. They understand the psychology of impulse buying.

However, to open a business, unless you are super-duper rich, you need to learn priorities and start putting off the things that will not advance your goal of opening your own business. Because, if you truly want to open a brewery more than anything else, you will put off flying to another town for the weekend to see a show, and rather spend that money on a piece of equipment you will need in your brewhouse. It’s all about understanding your true priorities. You have a bigger yes for something in order to say no to others.

When we started in business, we put off paying ourselves anything more than the bare minimum we needed to pay rent and eat. We reinvested all profits into the business, either by purchasing equipment or paying off our huge loans.

Personally, Sandy and I–I’m not making this up–ate beans and rice, salad, and bought powdered milk and other crazy things like that in order to save 50% of our paychecks once we started making more than the minimum. Delayed gratification. We wanted to be debt-free. That was our goal. That was our yes.

In your new brewery, you may want that Zahm-Nagel CO2 tester, but if cash is tight, you can put it off for another year. You do what you have to do to survive. You watch literally every penny. We still have those, right?

In the book, The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas Stanley and William Danko, one of the big lessons from people who become millionaires is that they live below their means. They value freedom more than status, so achieving financial security is their long-term goal. This is a perfect example of delayed gratification. Many of the millionaires described in the book own their own companies. These aren’t large corporations, but rather businesses like septic pumping or electrical contracting. A brewery would easily fit into this category. It can be a great, profitable business that can build real wealth over time, if you can live below your means.

We were talking to friends the other night and they seem pretty well off. But they weren’t always that way. They were close to bankruptcy at one point and said that if they had gone through bankruptcy it would have been easier financially, but their moral compass wouldn’t allow that. Instead they eliminated any expenses they could and worked weekends besides their weekly work for the next ten years. They put off an easier life for a reward down the road. Ten years go by really fast, especially when you are working so much, but the payoff continues for decades.

I bring this up because I think that learning delayed gratification is one more piece of the puzzle in running your own successful business. It’s worth considering, and I’d love to hear the different stories you have of personal sacrifices for your business, or for your family or community. Or, you could simply tell me life is too short to worry about such things. Either way, I’d like to hear your thoughts.

A friend of mine gave me a book he picked up years ago when he was a Park Ranger in Alaska. I thought I had a complete library of brewing books, but this one escaped me. It’s from a time when if you wanted a real beer, you had to brew it yourself. Dark times indeed.

The instructions in the book are simple enough and similar to Charlie Papazian’s excellent book the Joy of Home Brewing, which of course was my first book.

I have another brewing book I was gifted when I started homebrewing. Unlike the home brew books, this one is for professionals. The gift-giver was an actual rocket scientist, and he used it to make beer when he was in college. It’s quite the collectible, not only because it is a first edition from 1946, but that all four authors also autographed it! Incidentally, I Alsohave the most current Practical Brewer, but it has not seen an update since 2013.

The information in all these books really isn’t that different. In the Practical Brewer it goes more into the science and I have found it to be one of the best books for brewing. But still, brewing beer is really about simple principles outlined in these books:

· A decent recipe

· Proper temperatures

· Healthy yeast

· Adherence to water chemistry

· Hitting your pH for the beer you are brewing

· Following proven methods for brew-day

· Cleanliness, cleanliness, cleanliness.

I can almost feel professional brewers roll their eyes, but if you follow what’s in any of these books and the guidelines listed above, you will make a damn fine beer. Your beer might not be world class, that takes a good brewing education, a good palate, and some years under your belt, hopefully with a mentor. But your beers will be appreciated by your loyal customers and also something to be proud of.

I spoke at the American Homebrewers Convention some years ago, and the local homebrewers club provided the beer that was available to all of us in attendance. I thought the beer was as good or better than many commercial brands I have tried. Of course, they weren’t sparkly clear, and, maybe their head retention not quite up to par, but would I pay for a pint of it? You bet.

If you are thinking about brewing your own beer with the thought of one day maybe even of opening your own place, don’t be intimidated by all the great beers you see in your local liquor store.

Pick up a good, even old, homebrew book and get after it. Yes, you will make some swill at first, but so does everyone. However, your beers will improve fast the more you read about beer making and the more you improve upon your methods. You will even have fun doing it.

If you want to see how I have done it, my book, Colorado Boy SOP, is just my version of some of these old home brewing books, except with better equipment, and I think we make some really good beers with these methods.

Either way, don’t get mental about brewing. Like Charlie says, “Relax, don’t worry, have a home brew”.

If you are reading this, then you are an entrepreneur. I’m pretty confident about that statement because my posts are all about getting into the brewery business, and therefore, you, dear reader, want to own your own brewery and must be an entrepreneur.

It takes a certain sort of person to want to open their own business. First, it takes guts and risk-taking. Why else would you subscribe to the Affordable Brewery?

We entrepreneurs face overwhelming odds. However, as brewery entrepreneurs, it’s really not too bad. According to the Brewers Association, in 2025 there was indeed a decline in breweries, but that amounted to only a 4.4% failure rate. Compare that to an overall business failure rate of 20.4% in the first year and 49.8% in the first 5 years. I think those are pretty good odds, don’t you?

To me, the best type of entrepreneur is also a manager. A manager deals with the nuts and bolts of running the brewery, just like you thought. Things like scheduling, training, quality control, budgeting, and so on.

Another way to look at entrepreneurs and managers would be to look at artists and engineers. These, luckily, are not mutually exclusive. The entrepreneur (artist) comes up with the magnificent idea while the manager (engineer) walks around with a clipboard just trying to keep the lights on.

But getting back to that failure rate thingy. In my experience, those who succeed are a little of both.

If you are a true manager, you might crunch numbers all day long looking for that sure thing. If I have 50 seats and am open for 6 hours and each person drinks 1.75 pints per visit at $7 per pint and comes in twice a week, the sales will be ….

The entrepreneur just creates a brewery of beauty and goes with instinct. If I build it, they will come.

I feel lucky that I am a bit of both. I definitely don’t crunch numbers to see how many pints I will sell. I design something I feel is beautiful and really cool, “think great oyster”, and hope that sales will be sufficient. However, I also calculate what my true bottom-line break-even is so that I am comfortable enough to know that no matter what, I can make the nut. I will break-even and will not allow the brewery to fail. I also love checklists and systems and feel that is the better predictor of survivability.

That said, no sooner is the brewery up and running and making a profit that the entrepreneur side of me is looking for more opportunities. I didn’t open so many breweries by just being a manager.

If you are one or the other and not both, then I suggest you partner up with the part that’s missing. And when you do, make sure before you start a brewery that you have a very detailed job description for both of you to avoid hard feelings from the other that one is not pulling his or her weight in the venture.

So, which one are you?

Leave a comment

Here’s a good question I received from Luke. He wants to know if I have any techniques for winning beer competitions.

The obvious answer is to brew technically perfect beer rated by style, but of course it’s more important than that. Like any competition, players bend or look for ways to push the rules.

For example, I know for a fact that a friend enters and wins medals in the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) in English Mild/Bitter. But their own website lists the beer as 27 IBUs and 5.3% ABV, when the style guidelines list a proper Bitter ABV at 3% to 4.2%.

So, my first piece of advice if you want to get noticed by the beer judges is to brew your entry on the larger side.

The other thing I have done is to look at past winners’ lists. The GABF and World Beer Cup list them on their websites. Each category not only lists the winners but also lists how many entries there were. I believe I am not the only one to do this, but I try to concentrate my efforts on the categories with the fewest entries.

That being said, I also only enter beers I think I can do a good job brewing. For example, I love lagers, but mostly I am an ale brewer, so even though category 58, Bock had only 54 entries, I would skip that and instead go for category 71 Scottish Style Ale with only 31 entries. I know how to brew those styles and they fit with my house yeast.

Next on my list is to actually go to the websites of the brewers that medaled in that category. You can sometimes learn a lot that way. Often the site will state the IBU’s and gravity of the beers, as well as specialty grains used. This insight can inform your decision about that category.

With all that said, however, if I’m feeling lucky, I may enter a category where I don’t brew that type of beer, but the style is so intriguing that I think it’s worth a shot. I brew a Belgian Style Blonde though not for competition, but in seeing the results from 2025s GABF, that category only had 25 entries. It would be hard not to make a Hail Mary shot at that.

I know I’m not the only one who approaches competitions like this. It’s expensive, but the marketing feels worth it because it gives you street creds about your beer. As I’ve gone on and on (blah, blah, blah) the success of your brewery is so much more than the quality of your beer.

But at the heart of why we do what we do, it’s the love of the craft and we want to brew the best beers we can. It would be nice to have a little recognition, too!

I’d love to hear how you decide what to enter in competition.

Leave a comment

Here is a question from Dana. He took our class years ago and is working on his second location.

“Since you have so much restaurant knowledge, and to me our kitchen operations are so much more stressful than the beer side, I would LOVE to read more articles about the food side of things! Thanks for your amazing willingness to share your knowledge, Tom! We couldn’t have done it without you!”

Dana is a pal.

Anyway, with breweries these days, I am always recommending a food element. Every state has different laws regarding brewing licensing, and ours here in Colorado is very helpful to breweries that sell food compared to those that don’t. To be a packaging brewery, you actually need two licenses: one to brew and one to distribute. For a brewpub, however, you only need one license, and it allows you to brew and distribute, but also allows you to sell wine and liquor, and even costs less. But I digress.

First, if you have no experience with food, keep it simple. By that I mean something like panini sandwiches and a couple of salads. My experience with doing just sandwiches is that more people won’t think of you for a meal, and a sandwich is too much for a snack with a beer. If I were to pick something, it would be street tacos, or simple Mexican fare, or burgers and a couple of salads. Oriental bowls are great and easy, and of course my favorite, a great Neapolitan pizza. But even with these choices, I would still keep it as simply a selection as possible. At least to start.

If I chose pizza, I would have maybe 5 and then a couple of salads. You can add more later once you know what you are doing.

To make a menu, of course, first you come up with the items on the menu. Next, with each item, make a list of ingredients. Then do the same with each item. Your goal is to have as many ingredients also used in each item. For example, pepperoni pizza has, of course, pepperoni, but pepperoni is also on the Molto Carne, and Hero sandwich. The fewer ingredients, the easier it is to prep and to order.

Once you have figured out your menu, then cost each item out to find out what the raw cost is. You will get wholesale prices from your distributor. Then you have to weigh everything to figure out to the penny what each item cost. If it’s an item like pizza dough, you figure out the cost of ingredients for a batch, and then how many portions you get out of the recipe. Our dough recipe gives us 96 portions, which come out to about $0.26 each.

Adding up your menu item ingredients, let’s say your pepperoni pizza cost $ 0.86 to make. What should you sell it for? Well, if in your projections you had calculated a 25% food cost (basically, .25 of each dollar covers the cost of ingredients) all you need to do is divide the cost of the pepperoni pizza, $0.86 by your food cost goal of .25. But wait! That means if I sold that pizza for $3.44, I’d hit my target. Well, that’s stupid, so charge what you think is fair and your food cost for that item might be as low as 6.6% ($0.86 divided by $12.95, what you want to sell it for). While this is low, your Molto Carne pizza might be high, so this will even it all out.

OK. So you have your menu and have costed it out. Now, what is important is to put all your food ingredients on a spreadsheet so that you can do an inventory of what you have every month. You do an inventory at the end of the month, before the first day of the next month. Here is an in-depth article I wrote on the entire inventory process. By doing inventories, you know each month if you hit that magic 25% (or whatever you decide is right for you) food cost. Without doing inventories, you won’t know the cost, and you may have the busboys walking out the back door with expensive food items. Ask me how I know.

Training is the next important thing. If you have a crew that knows what they are doing, then a new person should spend 3 to 5 days training with one of the crew in a single position. After they have trained, schedule them on the slowest shifts to begin with.

Next, train your floor manager or runner (the one who just runs food) to inspect the food as they place it on the line to be delivered to the table. They should check for burned pizzas, salads overloaded with nuts, or tickets that have exceeded their time limit.

These things are dynamic and change all the time. Doing your monthly inventories at least lets you know your numbers, but actually watching the food that is produced makes sure your quality is up to your standards. Do both things.

As a side note, I’ve been thinking about doing a one-on-one training like we have done with beer, just on food, specifically pizza. Someone would spend a week with us learning the whole food operation. It would be intense, but if you were planning on serving pizza in your brewery, it would make an enormous difference. Is that something anyone would be interested in? Let me know. And please, keep the questions coming.

Leave a comment

I received a comment on service that I thought I would share and give some of my thoughts on.

“Hospitality. Maybe it’s only here in the PNW, but I feel a great differentiator is providing hospitality more than just service. Here it’s all about service: seat people, give them menus, bring food/drinks, get paid. It’s very transactional and unsatisfying for the customer. I believe hospitality is a huge contributor to the “oyster”. I’d love to understand your thoughts on this topic. For example, how to hire and train people to create a consistent and amazing experience for the customer. Also, how to incorporate hospitality into an Operations book. I think there’s an art to hospitality, but there’s also a science behind it too. When we eventually open, I want to make sure providing hospitality is at the top of our priorities. Thank you Tom for all you’ve done for the industry!”

I have written about this in the past, but there are some things that you need to make part of your operation if you truly want a service system that stands out. It doesn’t matter if you have just bar service, half service or full-on table service.

It starts with hiring. When someone applies, they aren’t showing you their true selves. They want a job and will put their best effort forward. But there are still clues they will give you.

· Do they look you in the eye when they talk?

· Do they smile easily or are able to make a joke?

· What do they like to do? This can tell you if their value system is a good fit with your brewery.

· How long have they lasted in their previous jobs?

Basically, I want to know if they have an outstanding personality. Are they people-people, if you know what I mean? How they treat your customers becomes the face of your brewery? If they suck at their job, the customer will think your brewery sucks. They won’t differentiate the service they received, from the brewery as a whole. There is that adage that say’s one terrible experience spreads to about 300 people, while an enjoyable experience spreads to about 12.

I will say that with all of the above, hiring and training, and keeping employees is, without a doubt, the most difficult part of running your own business. You can’t take this lightly.

Next, of course, comes training. One thing I mentioned in the past is to figure out some simple, almost gimmicks, in your service system that will help elevate the experience your customer has. In our pizza places, we gave a little pizza dough to kids so they would have something to play with and not bother their parents. Do an internet search to find out what innovative things other restaurants or breweries are doing. Steal those ideas, or change them up a bit and make them your own.

In your training, choreograph the steps of service. From the time someone enters the front door until they leave. There can be dozens of points of contact where you make an impression. It can be as simple as a clean parking lot, or the glass on the door, to crumbs under the table, or dust in the bathroom vents. The meat of the training, though, is when the customer sits down at the table.

· How soon before the wait person shows up?

· How soon before they get them a beer or something to drink. This is super important and needs to be lickity-split.

· Do they take the customer’s order or do they suggest? “We serve our beer by the pint or the English pint, which is larger. Would you prefer that?” You bet they would.

· This is big for me. “Did you save room for dessert?” vs. “Bill made an espresso stout gelato that we serve with home-made cookies. We can bring extra spoons if you want?” Which version do you think will raise the check average, give better service, and a better tip? Hmm?

But once you have trained your staff, train some more. At our large, upscale Italian restaurant, we conducted role-playing exercises as part of our training. We had the opportunity often as well, because we were open for lunch and dinner, and thankfully closed in between. Twice per day we had a service meeting before the shift, so we could talk about the specials and do a little training or retraining.

Not that mistakes won’t happen. The wait staff will spill red wine on a very expensive leather coat (ask me how I know), a customer will bite down on a piece of popcorn that has a small chunk of glass from the last bottling, and break a tooth needing expensive crown surgery (ask me how I know).

I am stopping myself because I could go on with ‘ask me how I know’ examples for pages. It should be my next book, really.

Great service or hospitality doesn’t happen by accident. Great entertainers aren’t just great; they work really hard to perfect their performances. And the truth is, that’s what running a brewery is, isn’t it? You are putting on a play that you have scripted, choreographed, and performed. The days of getting customers just because you make your own beer are long gone. But fear not, people will always seek a place where they can have a great experience. But it doesn’t happen on its own.

Leave a comment

Opening your brewery is just a dream until you figure out the money part. This article is in answer to a subscriber - Denise - who asked about investors. I don’t have answers about class A, B, and C shares, but I have strong opinions about investors. Avoid them.

I go through this in my books, but the first thing in your brewery project is not to need as much money, period. This is done, in my view, by finding a location that will save you construction cost up front. A location that was a brewery in the past, or a restaurant or bar. This alone can cut the cost of opening your brewery in half and save so much time and red tape you need to go through.

Baring opening in a space that was a previous brewery or restaurant, then something that already has a lot of the plumbing infrastructure in place. An old friend, Eric Wallace, opened his brewery, Left Hand, in a dairy building because it already provided great floor drains and a large walk-in cooler. That worked out well for him.

Next on the list is not to buy new equipment if you can avoid it. There is plenty of great used stuff for a fraction of the price. I typically argue that a simple 7-barrel system is most likely all you need, since over 90% of breweries in America produce less than 1,000 barrels of beer per year. A decent 7-barrel system will run you as little as $40,000 up to a nice system for $70,000. If you go with a turnkey new system, you will spend at least $150,000 just on the brewhouse. Save that for when you expand (but even then, you won’t need it).

And finally, you will need to put together a bucket of money to get your brewery open. First you pull all your own resources together; selling excess junk, savings, 401k’s and the like. For the rest I propose you borrow instead of getting investors.

Let’s say you are lucky and you find a little bistro that is for rent. You can use part of the kitchen and convert it into your brewing space. I usually need a space of 10 by 15 feet for my brewhouse and fermentation. A walk-in cooler, ideally located behind the bar would work for your serving tanks. Here I would want at least 4 with room enough for some kegs as well. But the more space the better. This bistro would already have a bar, so your job will basically be to redecorate. You may tear down some internal walls, but nothing structural, so no need for an architect or engineer.

If the landlord can give you free rent or even half rent during construction, so much the better.

In this scenario, you should be able to get a nice little brewpub open for around $150,000. If you managed to scrape together $50,000 on your own, you now need to come up with the remaining $100,000. Now is the time to avoid the temptation of bringing on investors. They will only bring you heartbreak and misery. Sorry for the hyperbole.

Instead, borrow the money. Make a list of friends and family members you can hit up. Of course, you can always go the bank route, but that’s much harder. You could look for 10 lenders for $10,000 each or any combination of that. This is what I would offer in exchange.

• I would pay 10% interest per month. At a later date, this would convert to principal and interest, and I can pay off a lender at any time. This can get the family member out of your hair who is always giving you suggestions on what beers to make. $100,000 at 10% will only cost you a little over $800 per month.

• A certain amount of free product per month, maybe $100 so they can come in and have a beer.

• Give them some sort of “phantom stock”. What this is, is pretend ownership. Let’s say you give me the full $100,000, and I give you 10% phantom stock. What this means is any profits I pull out, I will give you 10%, as though you were a 10% owner. Of course you aren’t. This is not real, and you have no voting rights. But you will have the benefit as long as I still owe you money. I may never distribute profits for the first couple years, but the idea is out there and it sweetens the pot.

Because you haven’t used a bank, what is owed to your lenders puts them in first place for collateral. What that means is if your project went belly up, your lenders get paid back first. If you have $70,000 in brewing equipment alone, and you sold that for $70,000 (remember it already depreciated), then their exposure is only 30% of their $100,000. Plus, you are signing a personal guarantee, something you would have to do with a bank, anyway. So, the likelihood is that your lenders will get paid back.

That’s not a terrible deal. Every month, they get a truly excellent return on their funds. They receive complimentary items such as beer and possibly promotional merchandise. Additionally, they have the potential for profit sharing and reduced risk.

What you get is the cash you need without having to go to the bank. That means you can pay interest only on those crucial first months, which helps your cash flow so much. A bank wouldn’t do that.

You also have this group of lenders who become goodwill ambassadors in your community because they feel a part of the project.

The most important part of this, however, is that you keep 100% ownership. It’s you that is putting it all on the line and making it work.

Lastly, because you know the people who lent you the money, you will do whatever it takes to make your business a success. Failure is not an option. I have been there, and you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “I will succeed.”

Leave a comment

A question I received from Bob. “You talked about enlisting service people like HVAC, plumbers, electricians, contractors etc. with some kind of benefits. Can you expand on that?”

Remember, first I’m Mr. Frankenbrew, and my lane is getting the brewery open for the least amount of dollars. So, this fits nicely into the conversation.

The first step in getting your brewery open is to find an existing food establishment or even a bar that is for rent or for sale. That’s because in a brewery or brewpub, most of the money you will spend is on things your customers won’t even see. Such as floor drains, grease traps, vent hoods, fire suppression systems, and even what goes into a couple of handicap-accessible restrooms. When you take over an existing space, these things are already there.

This approach offers a side benefit: they can use the space for a brewpub if they serve alcohol because it is already zoned for it. Perhaps not a packaging brewery, but a restaurant that makes its own beer, most likely. This saves a ton of time.

But for building out your brewery, even if it isn’t an existing restaurant, you can save a lot of cash by doing partial trades with the professional help you need. This could be plumbers, contractors, electricians, heck, even your lawyer, engineer, architect, and accountant.

You see, breweries are still cool compared to opening a clothing store or some other retail outlet. Your brewery will no doubt get a lot of publicity and that can be good for all these professionals.

I doubt any of them will do 100% trade on their work, but it is possible to negotiate 10 to 30% trade. This reduces the bill by thousands, which the professionals can take out in gift cards to use for their employees, or gifts for good customers, or perhaps just for the company Christmas party. For you, your outlay of money is only the product’s cost and perhaps the wages of your employees. It’s a good deal all around. Plus, it gets these people coming to your brewery and even acting as goodwill ambassadors in the community; wanting to show off something they had a hand in creating.

You are a home brewer most likely, so I would also suggest you bring in your little kegerator to the site so after work (construction phase) everyone can have a beer. The crew will love you for this, and it will make them feel more invested in your place. In fact, bring donuts on some mornings and be around helping if you can, just with cleanup, etc. That way you aren’t some un-known entity paying the bills, but a real person putting it on the line. They will want you to succeed.

There is some accounting to this, but the accountant you hire (part trade) can set this up and make sure all the proper tax reporting is done.

Does this work in the real world? Hell yes. I’ve done it many times. It’s just part of the contract negotiations. I always ask if they would be open to a part trade. Asking doesn’t hurt, and you may be surprised at how many accept your offer.

Every penny you can save on this brewery counts. The less you owe once you are open, the sooner you can be debt-free and have extra money for equipment upgrades, better employee wages, and a cool annual corporate retreat to Belgium to check out the brew-scene there.

Just put this thought away for when you need it. Don’t go solo. We could all use a little help from our friends.

Leave a comment

I received excellent article ideas last week -Thank You!

Of the many I did receive, the one that repeated itself was how to sell your business when you are ready.

Since we don’t live forever, everyone will have to pass their brewery on to someone else.

There are two major ways you will sell your brewery. The first is through a third party. The second will be internal. I’ll tell you which one I prefer in a bit.

By selling to a third party, I mean selling to someone not currently connected to your brewery. This could be a good customer, or someone you have never met. The tricky question is how to do this without your employees finding out and quitting on mass? What most people choose to do is to sell their business through a business broker. The brokerage firm will help you calculate what your business is worth, then advertise the business without giving away what brewery it is. That can be hard to do if you are the only brewery in your town and they advertise a brewery for sale in your town.

The brokerage company will screen interested people and make them sign a non-disclosure agreement before they show the prospected buyers any of your financials and the name of your brewery. That’s not to say that they won’t leak that information.

What the brokerage company will do is charge you about 12% of the sales price. You can come up with the terms you will accept., Hopefully, that will be a cash offer. However, brokerage firms most often expect you to carry the business loan after a 20% or 25% down payment. That’s enough cash up front to pay your commission and a little left over.

That is not my first choice, nor how I’ve done it.

Rather, I think you should sell internally. This would be either to your existing partners, or to a key employee or two. The reason is simple: it ensures a smooth transition, and from the customer’s view, nothing really changes. Also, you know, and hopefully trust who you are selling to.

To do this, you first need to figure out how much you are going to charge. I’ve covered this in the past, but it goes like this:

· Total net worth for the year

· Add depreciation, interest, and amortization expense

· Add any expenses that don’t really have to do with the business, such as your personal cell phone, maybe some salary you receive if you are not actively working in the business, and any other expenses you are writing off that don’t really have anything to do with the business.

· Do this same thing with three years-worth of profit and loss statements, then take the average adjusted net.

· Give this number a multiple. For example, if your business has a healthy growth rate, multiply by 5. If it’s just growing a little, multiply by 4. If it’s not growing at all, multiply by 3. If business keeps going down, multiply by 2. Or 100 times if you are some stupid AI start-up!

Once you have a price for your business, you can negotiate a payout. Your partners or key employees will not cash you out. You will need to come up with something that works for them and you.

There should be some sort of down payment. Even if it is only 5 or 10 thousand dollars. It’s important if you sell the business to your general manager that they feel the financial pain like you did when you started the brewery. It’s up to them to scrape that together.

Next, pick a reasonable interest rate and a timeline that is long enough, say, 7 or 10 years that your new owners can actually make a profit after paying you each month. And speaking of payment, have the payment in a direct deposit to your bank account, so you aren’t waiting for a check that may be late occasionally.

To protect yourself until they pay off this note, you have complete access to the books, and if you follow my business system, you will also audit the brewery on a monthly basis. This ensures that they are following your systems and keeping the business healthy. If they want you out of their hair, all they have to do is pay you off.

Personally, you would start this process years before you actually pull the trigger. That way you have groomed the new owner, and also given that manager a reason to stay with the organization.

If you have more than one location, you could do this with each general manager in each location and then you would have multiple income streams every month.

What I like about exiting this way is:

1. You are getting paid well for the hard work you put in creating your brewery

2. You are ensuring the longevity of the business

3. You are creating a path for the people behind you to grow and prosper.

There is a third way, of course. You can keep running your brewery until you die, and then will it to your heirs. However, that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me.

Leave a comment

I am stumped at what else I could contribute to this thing. Over the last 5 years I’ve published, pretty much, everything I know about the brewing business. That’s why I haven’t written anything lately; I can’t figure out what to write about next. I’m open to suggestions. If I don’t get any, I won’t be writing for a while until I see something that needs addressing. Cheers! Tom

There’s a scene in a favorite movie of mine with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, where Wayne is returning to his birthplace in Ireland to try to find a quiet life after a career as a boxer. After being picked up at the train station and given a ride to the town on a horse cart, they stopped on a bridge and looked down into the valley at a small farmhouse. The cart driver notices Wayne looking at the house and says, “That’s just a wee humble cottage”.

I loved that phrase, and when I opened Colorado Boy in Ridgway; I told everyone it was a wee, humble pub. It was small and unassuming and radiated charm.

I keep going back to the idea of a wee, humble pub, and I still believe, with all my heart, this type of small brewery will not only succeed, but it’s what communities need in this digital, AI, smartphone hell-scape we find our lives in these days.

But how do you create something so special?

First, the location should either be a stand-alone building or an old building/space in a historic district. A strip center just won’t do. Whatever cool interior you create will just feel artificial.

The space shouldn’t be too big. Personally, I think less than 2,500 sq. ft. That’s plenty of room for a 7 BBL brewing system, a small kitchen, two restrooms, an office, storage, a bar, and a seating area. The cramped space will be part of its charm. Going small means you need fewer employees and fewer people to fill the place. And that is important: you want the place to feel busy. People like to go where people are.

You don’t want to spend a lot of money to do this. So ideally the space would have been some sort of food or drinking establishment in its prior life. You don’t have to own the space, but your rent should be no more than 7% of your monthly gross income. Any more than that and you are working for the landlord.

You need to create a great pub vibe inside. Look at the pubs you admire and steal ideas from them. This is the Oyster I’m talking about. If you don’t know what that is, it’s in my books and also in past free Substack I’ve written.

You also need your business system that tracks your money, employees, and the care and maintenance of your pub. It’s also in my books and free in my previous posts.

I think people of all ages are yearning for places like this where they can connect with friends and make new ones. You won’t be pulling people from across a large metropolitan area. It will more likely be from your neighborhood, and that’s a good thing.

The pub will be full almost all the time. It will be profitable because it is small and you are following the business system. And it will be less stress than most other business ventures, because you didn’t spend too much to open it. If you borrowed money, you should be able to pay back the bank or your relatives within 5 years. You can run it for the next 30 years, or sell it in 5 or 10.

If you come across a wonderful location, send me the link and I’ll let you know what I think. The bottom line is; don’t sweat the big brewery projects. Build a Wee Humble Pub and be happy.

Leave a comment

I recently read an excellent article in the New York Times titled, The New Key to Restaurant Success? A Simple but Clever Model, by Brett Anderson. Basically, the article shows examples of dinner restaurants that are using their space for breakfast and lunch, even if the concepts differ completely from what the restaurant typically serves for dinner.

This is something I have written about in the past. It goes something like this: You already have your brewery space that may or may not sell food as well. Tables and chairs are in the space, and you’ve covered the utility bills, rent, and Wi-Fi. So why not use that free space to generate extra revenue and attract new customers?

I can hear the collective groan, thinking about how difficult it would be to find extra help and manage the different inventory. Yes, that’s true. But it still deserves serious consideration.

I was reminded of this recently because February 3^rd marked the 40^th anniversary of our first restaurant. We were onto this concept even back then. The restaurant was in a downtown location in Albuquerque, where after work everyone left for home and the entire downtown resembled a post-apocalyptic cityscape, void of all humans. However, it was jam-packed during the day. To make enough money, we served breakfast, lunch, of course, and then happy hour. We were only open during the week because no one was downtown on the weekends. So, then we used that time to cater.

We refused to fail. We would do whatever it took to survive a brutal industry, and through a lot of hard work and even more luck, we survived and grew.

I would do the same thing today. I would turn my brewery into a coffeehouse in the morning because it would take less labor than a full breakfast set-up, and if you have noticed, a tall latte costs almost as much as a pint of beer, for a lot less hassle.

That concept could stay open through lunch where you had coffee, pastries, and something very simple and fast (and not expensive) that you could serve for lunch. Perhaps rice bowls with different toppings.

These new customers who come in for coffee in the morning or a bowl at lunch will most likely be comfortable coming in for a beer at night and whatever food you are serving.

The way I would do it would be to hire a coffee manager. They come in early and set up. The kitchen can pop pre-baked or ready-to-bake pastries and breakfast items into the oven first, as they need to be there to prep for dinner, anyway. A second coffee person then comes in to work the espresso machine, because the biggest mistake I see in coffee houses is one person behind the counter who takes the order, then turns around to make the drinks, while the ordering line grows longer. Better to have someone take the order, get the customer out of the way to await their drinks and allow the next customer to order.

I would not do full service but take the customer’s name and call it out when the coffee is ready.

What could you get for this extra work? Perhaps an additional $30,000 in monthly sales and an additional $4,500 in net profits (assuming 15% net). And you know what that means??? You have raised the value of your brewery by $270,000! $4,500 x 12 = $54,000 per year, times a multiplier of five for a growing business = $270,000, just by adding coffee and pastries in the space you already occupy. Add this to the value of your brewery as it is, and it becomes serious money.

I’m not the only one thinking this way either. Another good article by David Nilsen of CraftBeer.com showcases breweries that have gone this route, including one of our past students’ breweries, Living Waters. This is not necessarily a new concept.

Another example would be Sip Coffee and Beer House in Phoenix, AZ. They do a great job of appealing to morning and night crowds.

It’s best to develop your business as much as possible on the inside before you think about growing outwards. Remember, you can’t thrive unless you can survive.

Leave a comment

I enjoy looking at posts on Facebook, Instagram, Tic Tok – no wait; I’ve never looked at Tic Tok, to see how people promote their breweries. To me, they are doing it all wrong.

Regular advertising is so expensive, and when you think most of the eyeballs are on social media and not legacy media like radio and newspapers, you want to get the greatest attention for your effort.

Many of the posts I see are like, “Hey, try our new…. Or here’s a long list of the beers we have on tap.” That sort of thing.

But in my experience, the folks that actually will look deeper into a brewery are big fans of breweries and most likely are home brewers, or past home brewers. I believe they want to be educated.

If you own a brewery, you can look at the reactions your posts get in likes or comments. Now, as an experiment, try these ideas instead and see how they work.

· Show a video explaining how the dark lager was made.

· Show someone scrubbing the toilets to demonstrate how clean your bathrooms are.

· Take a picture of the malts you use so people can see the quality of the ingredients.

· Create a video–and add music–showing the journey from grain to glass, to tap, to mouth.

· Show the person who made that great dessert holding it proudly and what’s in it and why it’s so special.

· Make your posts funny

The primary goal is to make your posts informative. Instead of “hey try this…”, it should be “this makes this special”. Then compare the likes and comments with the posts from the past. Your home-brewer customers will become goodwill ambassadors for your community.

Leave a comment

I wrote a book in 2012 called the Brewery Operations Manual, which outlined 3 steps to open an affordable and profitable brewery. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then, and to me, there are more opportunities in 2026 than there have been since then.

There had been a big bloodletting of breweries in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then the horrible recession that hit the end of 2008, when I opened Colorado Boy in Ridgway. By 2012, it was just picking up. Now we are back to where we were in 2009, and I thought I would offer my take on the 3 steps as of 2026.

This is another great opportunity, I believe, to open a brewery.

Step One. A cheap and good location.

Because many breweries and tasting rooms have closed, there are many great locations available cheaply. I have always suggested buying or renting existing restaurants, but now many of those spaces are breweries. One problem with breweries closing is they spent so much getting open. Most of the money that was spent is in the infrastructure to make the space compatible with their operations.

Finding an already outfitted space saves you money on infrastructure, and you might not need an architect or engineer for any remodel you do, provided you don’t move structural walls. This makes the permitting process a breeze.

Step Two. Equipment.

In the past, when looking for used equipment, there wasn’t a lot available. Now, however, it is, and at close-out prices. Of course, you can always add some Frankenbrew ideas into the mix to save even more money, but I still say you can build a nice 7 BBL system for 35k to $ 60k. I bet a lot of the breweries that went under spent a hell of a lot more.

Steps one and two get you into business for a fraction of what previous breweries have opened for, which means you can operate on a shoestring. To me, that is crucial for survival in those times that are lean. Remember, even during the Great Depression, people found money to go out for a beer. That doesn’t work, however, if a bank calls your loan.

Step Three. Your Operating System.

The other reason many of these breweries may have failed is that they didn’t follow a good operating business system. Here, in a nutshell, are the steps to that.

• Identify the positions in your operation (GM, brewer, bartender, etc. )

• Make a training checklist for each position

• Make a daily side-work checklist for each position

• Make a weekly side-work checklist for each position (the things that need to me done just every so often.

• Make a GM Book (general maintenance) reminders of things that need to be done on a specific calendar day of the month

• Internal Audits where each manager is responsible for an area of the brewery that keeps it running well. They check the area themselves

• External Audits where someone from outside the organization comes in and audits the entire brewer to make sure it actually is running as expected. This is really important if you eventually have multiple locations.

• Weekly manager meetings. Keep them short but go over what is happening and suggest changes to make improvements.

• Your Oyster. Let me explain this

The Oyster is another big key to your success and may be a reason the previous brewery in the location you are interested in failed. Your Oyster is your vibe. It involves the music, lighting, temperature, cleanliness, and finally stage setting, or, what your brewery is about in a sentence or two: “A traditional English pub serving cask ales in a warm and cozy atmosphere”

If you know your oyster well before you start this project, you are way ahead of the game.

I hope this overview sends a little oxygen to the spark you have maintained in wanting to open your own brewery. It was my career for decades, and I always enjoyed going to work. I hope the same for you in 2026.

Leave a comment

When is $50 just a $50? Hint: it’s not the plastic in your wallet. At the very least, not for the individual you’re paying. What I’m talking about, of course, is credit card fees.

We live in a tap and pay society now. In 2024, 73% of all retail sales were done by credit card, which comes out to 5.42 TRILLION in credit card sales. Somebody is making a lot of money.

So that $50 you are paying your brewery only becomes about $48.50. That might seem fair to you, Mr. and Ms. Consumer, but your purchase cost that brewery $1.50. This means that if the brewery is doing $100,000 in sales, they are losing $3,000 in credit card fees. But it’s of course more than that. There is also an additional fee of up to .30 each time you swipe a card. Therefore, you sometimes see a sign that says, “Credit card purchases must be $5 or more”. If you buy a pack of gum with a credit card, the merchant takes a tremendous hit in fees.

Each credit card is different in what it charges. Visa and Mastercard can start at about 1.5%, while American Express is 2.5%. But that’s just the starting fee. If the credit card is a rewards program, like free air miles, or cash back, the fees easily go beyond 3%. You see, it’s the merchant that is paying for those benefits, not the credit card company.

At Colorado Boy, we typically pay about $3,000 in credit card fees per month. Personally, I can think of a lot better uses for the yearly $36,000.

Then there are gift cards. This is a huge topic with pluses and minuses, and I should go into it in a separate article, but for now, understand there is a swipe fee for the gift card as well. First, when buying a gift card of $10 to $74.99, the fee to the merchant is $2.95. It goes up from there.

Our business blood is being drained by all these fees. There was a time when people simply paid cash. Of course it’s slower, takes more time in accounting, and is less convenient for the customer. But America operated that way for close to 250 years.

There is a small revolution going on, however, that deserves some consideration. Eating at Counter Culture, a wonderful little bakery/café in Santa Fe, with Sandy recently reminded me of this. At the cash register was a sign that said, “A 3% fee will be added to all tender types”. That meant even cash, though at the time I thought it meant only credit cards. I still like this idea, however. If the sign said, “A 3% fee will be added to all credit card transactions”, I think that would be reasonable. The customer can decide if they want to pay for the convenience.

You are rightly saying to yourself, I want more customers, not less. I don’t want to piss anyone off. You are correct that it might piss people off, at least at first, but if you can weather the storm and your place is good enough that people want to come, it shouldn’t be a big deal.

Take for example Mountain Sun Pub and Brewery in Boulder, Colorado. They take only cash and have been open for over 30 years. They have an ATM if you need to get some cash, and if you forget your wallet, they will even give you an IOU with a self-addressed, stamped envelope for you to mail the payment when you get home. And get this, they never lose money this way, and their customers just accept that it is a cash business. It’s obviously working for them.

Then there is my friend at Brass Ring Brewing, Chris Gibbons, who took a different approach to gift cards. Instead of paying about .90 for each card and then all the swipe fees every time a customer used it, he minted special Brass Ring $10 coins.

If a customer wants to give a $50 gift card to someone, they hand over $50 and get five coins. Then, the customer treats the coins like money. No fees, and they look cool, which acts as good advertising.

So, yes, I’d love to see a revolution against credit card companies, and don’t even get me started on stablecoins, which I think could bring down our financial system. 2026 might be a good time to try something a little different. A cash discount, and added fee, or make up your own gift coin.

As always, I’d like to hear your ideas.

Leave a comment

The Immersion Course that I started in 2009 has been really amazing to look back on. We have helped over 130 breweries from all over the world open and succeed. Daniel and Dennis Richards joined me in teaching for a while, and early on, Nathaniel from Big Choice Brewing started teaching, and he has been truly amazing. I always called him the chief on saving money. I point to the 6-head canning line he built for under $20,000!

After owning, operating, and teaching in the brewing business since 1993, I have stepped back and Nathaniel has taken over the school. But I still want to write these articles and also give back to the community that has been so good to me. I just couldn’t think of a good way to do it without getting sucked into working for free.

Finally, I think I have a decent idea. I invented the term Frankenbrew when I made a VCR video tape in 1995, about how to build breweries for under $20,000 (that is the equipment only!). I’ve also made a lot of posts called “Ask Dr. Frankenbrew”, which were a lot of fun to answer brewers questions that way.

But now I want to do it differently. Much like a person would talk to a counselor, or a coach. I would like to offer the service to help open a brewery in the same way. I DO NOT want to be a consultant. I like the idea of a counselor or coach to be used on an as-needed basis.

I already know from experience that I can save someone tens of thousands of dollars on their project in less than an hour of conversation. I would do a free intake interview, and if you want a coach for your brewery, I’m in.

To start the ball rolling and see how it feels, I would like to take the first client for free. I’m putting this out there. If you would like to have someone to bounce ideas off and also point you in the direction that will save you buckets of money and avoid a lot of headaches, I think I’m your man.

If, on the other hand, you want the full immersion course, you should definitely sign up with Nathaniel at Big Choice. Either way, I can absolutely guarantee it will not be a waste of time!

So, write to me and let me know if you are in the planning stage and are serious about opening. I will take only one project on a free basis. So please pitch me your idea. After that, I will charge by the hour, but it will be a lot less than someone fresh out of college or law school.

I think this could be fun.

Leave a comment

I saw a posting from a fellow brewer who said they had been waiting years to open up their grain delivery and see a nut roll inside. I used to buy Briess Malt, and I think they are great. They would send us a box of malted milk balls at the end of the year. Yum. But then we had switched to BSG (Brewers Supply Group) and, low and behold, in the middle of a pallet of malt, there would be a couple of nut rolls. That didn’t happen every time, but it got to where we would be really looking for those nut rolls. It’s become a thing with brewers too. They all know about the nut rolls.

If you just went out and bought a salted nut roll, it would cost you $1.25, maybe more. So, a couple of them cost less than $3.00 inside a grain delivery that cost about $1,500 or more. Would you say that advertising costs were effective? Hell yes.

I talked a couple of weeks ago about the glassware you use for your beers. That is just one example of adding value to what you are doing. Like adding a couple of nut rolls to your grain order. You give your customer something they are not expecting. Something new and better than what’s normally done, and if you’re clever, something no one would expect.

There are countless examples of things you can do at every point of contact your business has with a customer. Those points of contact start at the parking lot and include the front doors, host stand, table, service staff, restrooms, and on and on. At each point, what can you do that would add something to your customers’ experience?

Here’s an example, and one I may have cited before, but I really like it.

At our first fancy Italian restaurant called Scalo, in Albuquerque, we made a dessert called dolce torinese. It was a simple flourless chocolate cake. But on the side, we served it with a couple of imported Amareto cookies. A light tissue paper wraps these cookies. We would teach the servers, in their long white aprons, white shirts and real black bow ties, to have a conversation with the table as they dropped the check. Not always; sometimes they just don’t have time. But if they did, while they were talking, they would reach down and take up the paper the cookies were wrapped in, form it into a cylinder and place it back on top of the empty dessert plate. By then the customer was watching, wondering what the server was doing. Then the server would strike a match, light the top of the cylinder and all would watch as the flame worked its way down to the plate, like a fuse. At the very end, the light-weight paper would shoot up about two or three feet, and the server would grab it. The table would applaud.

I heard from so many people for years about that. It didn’t cost us anything, and practically guaranteed a great tip.

I could give lots of examples. In our pizzeria/brewery, we would send out a little piece of dough for kids to play with while their parents talked. That cost us about five cents.

In your brewery, what can you think of that will add something unexpected at each point of contact? 99.9% of your competition probably isn’t doing this, but you can. I’d like to hear about some of your creative ideas if you don’t mind sharing. Right now, I’m jonesing for a salted nut roll.

Leave a comment

I received an interesting question the other day that I thought deserved some attention. The question involved step infusion mashing and decoction and whether another vessel needed to be purchased. So let’s break this down.

First off, for decoction, you don’t need an extra vessel as you are removing part of your mash and transferring it to the kettle to boil, then sending back to the mash tun. There are a lot of arguments for this method in bringing out subtle flavors in your beer. For me, it’s too complicated, but I’m just an ale man.

But the genuine issue is step-infusion mash. When I was at Siebel, one professor said that they were no longer needed because malts were so modified now, he felt you couldn’t tell the difference between doing a step infusion and a single infusion mash. There are plenty out there who would probably disagree with this statement.

However, a nice Frankenbrew solution would fit this question nicely. I would suggest starting the new brewery out with a single-infusion mash tun, however, either use a dairy tank, or find a used steam-jacketed mash tun. That way you could start with a single infusion mash, but whenever you decide you MUST do your lagers in a step infusion system, you could add an electric steam generator (boiler) to the mash tun.

Many process dairy tanks have glycol jackets. These will work for low-pressure steam as well. Just make sure you keep your pressures below 15 psi and have the jackets pressure tested before you buy. Just search on eBay or a simple google search. You may have to remove the mixing paddle and make a false bottom, but you will save thousands. Here is an example, but small.

For your boiler, I would suggest an electric one. If you go with a gas-operated boiler, it will need to be in its own room and have an inspector come every year to make sure you will blow no one up. Electric is so much simpler to plumb and operate. Yes, electricity costs, but you aren’t running it that often. Only when you are doing one of your lagers.

If this hassle delivers a quality lager with nice dry, tight foam on top, then it’s worth it. But I also think you can make a fine beer without going through all of this. That’s why you might consider a jacketed mash tun that, at the moment, you won’t be using the jackets, but when the time comes that you are so bored and you want to play with step-infusion, you will be half-way there.

Leave a comment

I was surprised when I heard Rogue Brewing closed. To me, it was such an excellent brewery, and fit its market so well. But then I just saw that Bosque Brewing in Albuquerque/Bernalillo, New Mexico, was filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy, I felt I had to say something. They aren’t closing but needing to go through financial reorganization. I hope they can figure it out.

First off, I don’t know the financial situation of either place, but when Bosque Brewing opened its new multi-million-dollar brewery, I expressed to friends my belief that they were doomed. Not because they are bad, but when you incur that much debt, you are working for the bank or working for your investors. I just don’t think the stress level is worth it.

I used Bosque Brewing’s fun early videos with my students to show them how you can make an impact with hardly any money. Here is one of them. They were small, but profitable.

It reminds me of another story I used to tell people about two friends who each owned their own breweries. One was a small brewpub in a little rural college town. The other was in a super-hip metro area in another state. That one was a microbrewery and produced thousands of barrels of beer a year. The brewpub, on the other hand, produced way less than 1,000 barrels. The friend who owned the large packaging brewery travelled all the time. Mostly talking to distributors and retail outlets about shelf placement, etc. The friend with the little brewpub also travelled all the time. ON VACATION WITH HIS FAMILY!

If you have a successful brewery, don’t let your ego get in the way of your happiness and growth. What I mean by that is, by all means, grow. Just grow smart. Get the best deal you can and keep it small. With multiple locations, make the brewer and the manager a partner. Owners make the best employees. Also, have a great system in place that manages one brewery or multiple locations.

What I’m getting at is keeping it small. Sell what’s the most profitable (by the glass instead of the packaged) and crunch your numbers with a good accounting system. Then you can go on vacation with your friends and family. At least some of the time.