Homebrew Store?

Op,
I have a little insight into this and must agree with most on here and yourself that it has to be more a destination place for it to work. Your starting with a limited market to begin with and most people will order equipment on-line for cheaper than you can offer. I am opening a brewery in April and my partner who is our brewer owned our local brew shop for that past three years, he has never paid himself and barely turns a profit. He basically put up his inventory as equity into the new brewery. Our new venture is to be a brewery with tap room with an on-site home brew supply store and brew school. I think teaching classes is important to not only increase your customer base but also people are more likely to purchase supplies from you right after the class especially if you give them a discount. It doesn't hurt if they've had a few beers from the brewery while taking the class also. We also reached out to the local home brew club and offered to host monthly meetings at the brewery and will be hosting competitions to brew-on-premise and serve people's home brew's on tap. We actually cut down our inventory quite a bit because we knew we could not compete with on-line shops. We now focus on fresh ingredients and service, two things that we can do better. At the end of the day if someone wants to brew tomorrow the internet is not going to help them, they need to come to us. So like anything else it's definitely possible to make a go of it but I would stay clear of just running a retail shop. I think you have a good idea to make it more of a beer hangout kind of like we are doing. Good Luck.

 

sounds awesome...maybe you could even put a tap of your own beer in there so customers can get a taste of what they could make. and for the record, i dont notice a difference in prices between my lhbs and online. i enjoy going to the store not only to get ingredients, but bounce ideas off the dudes that work there.

 

The shop I frequent these days has a couple taps for free tastes while you shop. Its pretty cool.

 

I opened a shop in New Rochelle, NY, last October (I'm actually part of a chain). The best piece of advice I can give you now to make sure you have enough money to keep the shop running for two years.

 

Not to pick nits (but you're asking for feedback, right?) but I've never shopped at a homebrew store where the employees grind the grains for you, and if I did come upon one, I wouldn't go back. That would drive me insane. I don't like waiting for people to help me if I am fully capable of doing something myself. I've read about other stores where they don't let you buy specific amounts of grain either; you can only buy pre-milled, pre-bagged grain by the pound. I would also recommend not doing that if plausible.

 

Its not so uncommon. I've been to several that do it. One, the mill was behind the counter, and I actually never went back. Another one though asked to let them handle the mill because it was finicky and prone to jamming unless held just right. I was fine with it and still shop there.

 

My LHBS grinds them for the customer, its really not that bad talking to the employee a little more or taking time to browse other ingredients.