Building a Small Brewpub - Intro

I was thinking about what to write about this week and not having a lot of luck. Mainly I write about the business aspect of building a brewery for less, and sometimes delve into inexpensive equipment sourcing. I even talk about actual brewing, but then I had a eureka moment: Let’s walk through the entire process of building a small, profitable brewpub from scratch.

What I will be going over - oh, I don’t know how many articles this will take - everything I would do to build a small Colorado Boy type of brewpub. I pick that style because of the seven breweries I’ve owned and built, it is still the simplest and most profitable. More importantly, the most repeatable. Personally I wouldn’t hesitate to do another one of these.

This model will work just about anyplace I can think of and almost any size of town. So in the coming weeks, together we will build a hypothetical small brewpub. If you already have a brewery, you still might get something out of this, but if you are actually thinking about opening one, this will shine a light into all the dark corners of the process.

Here are the parameters of the project.

• I won’t be starting with an existing restaurant. Starting with a restaurant is my number one thing I suggest but in truth, you can’t always find one so you need to start from scratch.

• I want it to be small. This will keep the staffing headaches to a minimum.

• I will use a 7 BBL system, which should be more than adequate to supply my brewery with enough beer.

• I’m going to shoestring this. I’ll assume I have some money, but I will need to borrow some more and come up with creative ways to do that. To make this less complicated I want to do whatever I can, not to spend too much money.

There you have it. I think this should be a fun exercise.