Are any of you BA's aware of any franchising opportunities within the craft beer industry, whether it be distribution, canning, transportation or otherwise? Thanks.
I recall reading somewhere that the American locations of Hofbrauhaus are franchised. But sometimes I don't trust my memory; neither should you.
IF I was to get involved in anything involving the production side it would be mobile canning. I've heard brewers here in MI at smaller operations complain that there aren't enough mobile systems and it causes some scheduling nightmares.
That would be a lucrative market IF the company could consistently provide a service that wouldn't send a brewery's reputation and batches of beer down the drain. We've had some notoriously huge mobile canning line mishaps out here that make most breweries consider buying one together and sharing it rather than hire a company who might botch the whole thing.
Having worked with mobile packagers at my job (not for a mobile packager), I tend to lay any blame at the feet of the brewery. There's only one or two employees from the packager, but several from the brewery required to get it packaged. The packager puts fluid into containers 5 days a week, the brewers only periodically.
On a related topic, my dream as a consumer is a brewing cooperative facility that houses one brew house but a beer garden court of sorts where there are multiple breweries under one roof that all have a tap room area and specialize in different styles. Does this exist anywhere? The closest idea I have seen to this concept is the Industrial Way in Portland- several breweries a stone throw from each other, but they all have separate operations. The Group that brews Narragansett now is similar, but I think it is more of a contract operation and not independent breweries utilizing shared space.
This place is somewhat along those lines. Smaller breweries without a home use their equipment to brew their beers. It is less of a co-op than when first started, but there are still a bunch of brewers who use the space to produce their product. https://peoplespint.com/pages/our-story
The Firkin group of pubs is a franchise. Most locations are in Ontario but there are a couple in the States.
Southern California and I can mention a specific canning shit-utation with Phantom Carriage who is one such brewery who's sworn off the cans because of their only two canned batches being botched in a row with under carbed cans, and infected product being sent out with the brewery effectively trusting the mobile canning company only to have shoddy product go out. Live and Learn I guess. But in talking with a few breweries I visit who have great beer the conversation always leads into how expensive a canning line is because they'd rather consider getting their own than trust an outside company to do everything 100% correctly after calibrating and recalibrating for each brewery and making sure outside equipment is cleaned to spec so as not to infect the beer.
I guess I should have really qualified my hyperbole of "notorious" and "huge." But since I'm around the area where this stuff was happening and often perhaps it seemed like a larger deal down here lol my bad.
