Brewery idea would love feedback

I'd swing in for a pint or nine.

 

sounds interesting. While I've never seen anything specific to brewing...culinary schools and beauty schools do this type of thing all the time: offereing their services to the general public as part of their training for a discounted price. I think a question for the padawans you're to hire would be, might they be better off just cutting their teeth at a Rock Bottom etc for the same experience plus benefits?

 

That's basically what's happening here in Bellingham. The Bellingham Beer League is the brewer of record, and is being located in an expansion of The Local, which is owned by the folks that own Menace Brewing. Better details in the links in this thread: http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/bellingham-beer-league-finally-walks.307604/

 

For home brewers I would contact your local home brew club. I would think you would generate a lot of interest for part time brewers. I like the idea of having a few brewers take control of some brews and highlight them in the taproom. I would definitely stop by to see what the guys were doing. The hard part is all the training it will take to get brewers up to speed on your equipment. You may be better off having a full time brewer that is an expert on your equipment and maybe use your other talent for recipe development.

 

There is a place that sounds similar to this in Denver called Factotum. Their website explains a little better but stopped in there during GABF and if I was local I could see myself visiting more often.

 

I'm thinking that @bluehende has made an important point about having at least one in-house expert with the equipment, etc.

So the model I'd give some thought to is having a head brewer and a line up of house flagship beers that are always on tap and then have a couple of "open" or "guest" taps which are basically dedicated to the work of "guest" brewers who are doing their thing. E.g., every month you could showcase the work of one of these brewers with a tap and some PR to let the community know who and what, etc.

The head brewer would be responsible for keeping the flagship beers in the line up and s/he would be engaged in working with each of the guest amateurs in both recipe development and making sure the recipe scales up from homebrewing equipment to your much larger size equipment.

You'll also want someone to be worrying about scheduling which "guest" brewer does a tap take over in which month because if you have something like back to back stouts on the "guest" tap that may not be what your clientele would want to see or spend money on.

To help motivate the head brewer you'd also want to have a monthly tap devoted to his own "new" recipes or things he wants to showcase once in a while so he doesn't get bored just brewing the same old flagship beers time after time without a chance to get his own ideas into reality.

 

It's an interesting concept that would (obviously) depend on execution. I think one thing that is missing from the recent proliferation of small breweries/brewpubs is a place that puts an emphasis on really high quality beer. Here in the Northwest you can't drive ten miles without bumping into one of these places and almost always the beer is good/very good but rarely great.

 

That might interest me but I would need a solid lineup to come in. I am not going to stop by because there are 2-3 different aspiring brewers in house. I'm stopping by because you brew good beer.

 

So a revolving door of unproven brewers using unfamiliar equipment in attempt to parlay the experience... I'd pass.

 

My recommendation if you want this business venture to be a success is just hire one very experienced and successful brewer. There are lots of folks who think they make good beer but.....

I would venture a guess that a small brewery in Oregon needs to make excellent beer if you want to maintain a successful business. Having just some folks jump in every once in a while to brew is not a path to success IMO.

Cheers!

 

Sounds fine to me.

Seeing as one of my degrees is in Business, I always view it from a different stand point. I know you don't want to hear about the financial aspect but you really need to think about it and ensure your area is good for it. Something that isn't profitable is bound to sink unless you have a large sum and are basically handing out free beer in which case, you're a generous person.

Either way, If I were in the area I'd stop in.

 

I dig the concept, definitely seems like a good way to get a variety of stuff. What I might do is instead of paying your apprentice brewers based on labor, pay them on the speed their product moves. For example, let's say every batch is 200 gallons (7 bbl = 217 gallons). If the batch moves in a week, he gets $2 a pint, if it moves in two weeks it's $1.50 a pint, if it's a month, $.75 a pint. Definitely some opportunity for abuse (like anything in the restaurant/bar business) but it would certainly reward quality beer and hopefully brew up (pun intended) some friendly competition among your people.

I assume that if you have any real winner batches, the brewer would enjoy continuing to cash in by making it his flagship. You may want to retain ownership of the recipes though or something so you don't just become the talent pool investors in your area just decide to recruit from.

 

I'd pass. I'm tired of going to new brewpubs and agreeing with people at the table that "... this tastes like homebrew".
(yes, often that phrase is used pejoratively)

Why not focus on hiring a good professionally trained brewer as the core person, but then give the apprentices some incentive by occasionally doing one of their beers if is deemed adequate by the educated and professionally trained brewer?

Regardless of how tasty your beer is, make sure you hire a good person to run the social media well, and make sure there's a lot of use of the word 'local' in your content.

 

You need to have a Brewer of Record for the TTB paperwork, it is not Homebrewing, and those guys/gals coming in won't what needs to filled out, signed, and filled. I have done some commercial batches, but there is a Brewer riding shotgun, and filling all of the paperwork.

I know of one place that put brewing on hold until they got it straightened out.

 

This. You need "adult supervision" to make sure everything gets cleaned & stored properly, that the various yeasts the brewers are using don't infect each other, schedule brewers and times, stuff like that. The nuts and bolts of the thing. I encourage you to get ahold of Ben at Menace Brewing and The Local up here. Shoot some Emails back and forth and hear what he has to say.

 

Another great point. The BBL near me is doing that by brewing under the Menace Brewing name, until each brew "hatches" out from the "incubator".

 

I mean, if theyre experienced why not. If they know how to brew, thats all you need. I salute you. I wish someone in NJ would give me a foot in the door. I even offered to do a 7 day a week unpaid internship at a brewery, cleaning, whatever just to be taught and nobody ever got back go me. So cheers to you.

 

Noble Brewer has a somewhat similar concept:

http://www.noblebrewer.com/

You might want to reach out to them directly to see how things have been going. Seems like an intriguing idea, but hard to establish the identity of the brewpub beers with a revolving brewing team(s).