Breweries "in-planning" around Texas

Does anyone know anything about these new Houston breweries? Please, someone in the Greater Houston Area start a rustic/farmhouse/wild ale brewery. My wallet is exploding from these Austin trips.

 

As if I needed anymore reasons to move to Austin...

 

does anyone know anything at all about Allen's Landing? that place is less than a mile from me.

 

Blue owl is looking insane, they will be competing for my jester king money

 

Nice list. We're looking forward to Silas bringing back Darkside Fermentation. - Jeff

 

I met a gentleman last week that has a new brewery underway in Arcola (near Sugar Land)....Flight School Brewing

https://www.facebook.com/FlightSchoolBrewing

 

Mark of the Yeast!

 

When I retire from my day job, I'm gonna buy up some of the used equipment from some of these new breweries since gone under and start a brewery in my garage. I'll use the back yard for my farmhouse brews to keep them separate. I know nothing about brewing at this point, I do like to drink beer though, but it shouldn't take long to go commercial and make my fortune based on current examples.

 

It will be interesting to see who survives this influx of breweries.

 

I find it interesting that in a state with 26 million people we worry that 150 breweries can't be sustained. I get that craft beer drinkers are a huge minority in the state, but that number is growing all the time and more access to better beer is helping grow that number all the time. I can't tell you how many times I've been to Freetail and seen people there that only drink La Rubia or Freetail ale, and yet it doesn't matter that they are not adventurous, they are drinking craft beer from a local brewery. The same thing will happen at other places. It's those people that are the reason Freetail can build Freetail2, it's not because 'we' show up every couple of months and line up to buy their special beers. Look around the country, TX is at the bottom of the list for number of breweries per capita. Austin alone has twice as many people as Vermont and look at how many breweries they are able to support.

 

Warning - long and rambing: While the number of craft brew drinkers in TX is growing, it really isn't making a dent in BMC market share. Texas craft brew production (excl Shiner) is 1.36% and total craft brew sold in TX is less than 10%. So, while it appears there is room for growth seeing as how TX craft production is miniscule compared to overall beer consumption, what you end up with is a lot of competition for that <10% of craft brew consumed here. Over the last few years, there has been an enormous boom in out-of-state breweries' getting their products onto TX retail shelves and into bars, which is a craft brew drinker's delight. Most of these coming in have products that are better than many of what the new TX startups are putting out. While consumers are likely to prefer local if the products are equal, rational craft consumers are going to seek out the better ones. If a good percentage of these new local startups produce average or worse brews, they won't have much of a chance, IMO, and they shouldn't, unless they are content in not growing. As it is, some really good brews are gathering dust and many good IPAs/IIPAs sit past their prime. This is gonna result in some good brewers reducing the volumes they send here or pulling out altogether.

See, part of the problem is that the 90% of BMC beer consumption is by people influenced by advertising and low prices, neither of which can be competed against fairly by little craft breweries. Only way to grow the number of craft beer consumers, IMO, is 1) word of mouth, 2) market to wine drinkers. One buddy convincing another to try craft brew only works on a small percentage as many prefer to stay with what they like. Getting those BMC drinkers switching to craft is a hard sell. Wine drinkers, on the other hand, while they may look down on beer as a poor-mans drink, they are often into trying other wines. If marketed properly, say a beer and cheese tasting or food & beer dinner, has a decent chance of impressing these folks that their beliefs were wrong and gaining some more craft beer lovers.

 

Good lord, how long has 28th Day been in the "planning phase"? I remember reading about them in 2012

 

They must have come down with City-Acre-itis, a sort of walking pneumonia of brewery planning progress.

 

Anybody can start a brewery, or plan to start one. There is a huge difference between a homebrewer and a good business person with a plan. The way I see it, if all these breweries get past the planning stage, financial, building, and permitting stage (which some have been in planning for years, with seemingly no headway) then they have a lot of other obstacles. That @TexasStout has already touched on. While there are certainly mediocre breweries that succeed...bottom line, good beer/product and good business trumps all. How many on this list will be able to do that? I have no idea, but certainly not all.

Edit: I wish I could access the old site This was years ago now, but I remember a thread that listed a bunch of startup breweries in Austin. I would love to see how many on that list actually opened. Cause I really don't know, it would shed some good light on this thread either way.