It's Not Just A Brewery
Unless you’ve been in a deep sleep, you have read that beer sales are down, and when another brewery opens, most people’s reaction is ‘Meh’. But the thing is, you are not just opening a brewery. You are opening an experience. Keep that in mind while you read on.
I mean, yes you are opening a brewery because you are a beer geek, like me, and you want to brew beer for a living. But the thing is the days of brewing beer and hordes of thirsty customers stampeding to your door to get a pint are having a bit of a cool-down period. So your brewery MUST offer an experience. Beer drinking (or wine, seltzers, spirits, food, craft sodas) are just what you serve. The people have come for something else though.
They want to see their friends. They want a really cool environment to sit in. They don’t want to break the bank for their night out. They want to be entertained. It’s a tall order for you to manage. And here you thought you only had to brew beer!
Understanding the Oyster will help. I’ve talked about this probably too much but here we go again. It’s made up of five things:
1. Music. The type and the volume
2. Lighting. No fluorescent, bright when it’s light out, lower to a glow when it’s dark, and make your own interesting fixtures.
3. Temperature. Gauge it on your customers not your staff. If the customers don’t take their coats off in the winter, you have a temperature problem.
4. Cleanliness. Is everything clean and in order including the way the tables are set and bussed? There is a system to keep it that way.
5. Stage Setting. My favorite. If you can tell me what your brewery is in a sentence or two then you understand it. “It’s a cask ale brewery similar to an English pub.” With this powerful thought-out information, you can now design your place to fit the stage setting. This is the most important of the five.
It also helps if you didn’t spend a fortune to build your brewery. Hopefully you started with a space that was zoned correctly (existing use - restaurants to brewpubs) and don’t need too much structural work. I like using restaurants that are just for lease if you can fine them. Heck, restaurants are always failing so sooner or later one may show up.
Also, I hope that you followed Dr. Frankenbrew’s advice and didn’t buy a new turn key system, when a sweet 7-barrel system with a couple fermenters and five serving tanks will cost less than 50k.
You see the thing is you want to keep your loan payments as small as possible. And if you are self-financing, the business should be paying you back, so again, small payments are the best way to go.
Lastly, I think the size of your brewery matters as well. I like small pubs. If you have 40 people sitting in your place having a good time and your total square foot is 2,000, it’s gonna feel really good in there. However if you have 40 people in 5,000 square feet, people will leave thinking something is wrong with your place because it’s not full. People want to be close to each other. Just look at a party you have at your house and everybody is crowded into the kitchen. When it’s crowded it’s just more fun, and a better experience.
And that’s really what it’s about. What are you going to do to give your customers an experience?
