Beer Forum

I am very happy to listen to the Brew Strong Going Pro series. I haven’t heard the Q&A podcast yet so maybe this has already been asked.

What are the fixed annual costs for running a Brewery. I don’t mean rent or utilities. I mean licensing, insurance and fees directly related to keeping a brewery open. Does it cost $1500 per year just to keep, specifically a Nano-Brewery, licensed? Are there annual fees related to keeping a LLC?

I am working on a business plan to open a nano-brewery. I would only brew beer, no tasting room or brew pub. It would be an advanced hobby brewery since I don’t plan on quitting my day job. I just want to legally sell a few barrels of beer a year. There are some very interesting nano-breweries opening up. I hope the Brew Strong Going Pro series will discuss how to get, what is basically a large homebrew operation, licensed and legal.

There is some great info and links here:
From the Hess Brewing web site, “The Great Nanobrewery List”
http://hessbrewing.blogspot.com/2009/11 ... n-usa.html

Their Complete Guide to opening a NanoBrewery is interesting but is completely miss named. Should be a Rough Outline for Opening a Nanobrewery.

My WTF moment on the list is this section:
“LLC or Corporate Articles of Incorporation: Done through a lawyer and usually a yearly fee associated with this as well ($800-1000 per year)”

For Example:
Beetje Brewery in Portland Oregon.
This guy doesn’t know it but I’m using his business as a model.
I want Brew Strong to help me understand how he pulled this off. Seriously, I want to know!
http://www.beetjebrewery.com/

Apparently he’s done well.
http://thenewschoolbrewblog.blogspot.co ... -more.html

Hope you guys can help.

HopRunner wrote:Beetje Brewery in Portland Oregon.
This guy doesn’t know it but I’m using his business as a model.
I want Brew Strong to help me understand how he pulled this off. Seriously, I want to know!

So... have you tried asking this guy? Seems like he'd know better than anyone else.

siwelwerd wrote:

HopRunner wrote:Beetje Brewery in Portland Oregon.
This guy doesn’t know it but I’m using his business as a model.
I want Brew Strong to help me understand how he pulled this off. Seriously, I want to know!

So... have you tried asking this guy? Seems like he'd know better than anyone else.

I'm working on it.

What I really want is for Jamil to interview him.

It might work for Jamil to interview him, I think one of the bigger problems with trying to estimate an annual cost is that is a very location dependant thing. Licencing will be a state issue and the fees associate to a large extent would be dependant on the state you are in.

I do realize some of it is federal and therefore somewhat more standardized.

Though, let me be the first one to wish you the best, it is nice to see when one of us takes the leap towards living our dream. I know personally I would love to have a brewery. The costs are so large to entering the market that most of us just can not reasonably do it. However, I do think you are on the right path, stating this as a small side business that you can build upon. GOOD LUCK and MAY THE BREW BE WITH YOU!

HopRunner wrote:
This guy doesn’t know it but I’m using his business as a model.

Apparently he’s done well.
http://thenewschoolbrewblog.blogspot.co ... -more.html

Looks like he did pretty well... enough to launch out of the nano!

Show ideas are probably best e-mailed to the brewstrong@thebrewingnetwork.com e-mail... I'm looking forward to this new series on going pro though!

Just wondering if the Brew Strong team are going to do any more podcast on going pro ??

They just did a live show on Going Pro yesterday. Look for it to come out in archives soon...