The Immersion Course

I have received a lot of questions lately about what the hell our immersion course is about in the last 6 months. I thought I did a good job of explaining it on our web site, but maybe not, so I’ll use this week’s article to layout exactly what it’s about.

After I had been professionally brewing for about 6 months - basically taking what I knew from home brewing and scaling it up - I was still brewing pretty crappy beer. I approached an acquaintance, Bill Carver, of Carver’s brewing in Durango, CO, who was very helpful to me answering any questions I had. This was now 1994. He said his brewer, Shawn Wendling would come brew with me and offer advice for a fee. That fee was $1,800 for one and a half days. I thought that was steep, but I wanted to make better beer, so I paid him and we brewed. He also wrote down a lot of steps I should do to improve my beer.

That lit a fire under me, that has never gone out. In 1995 we won out first GABF medal for IPA. Then next year a gold for the IPA and Brown and the first World Beer Cup, followed by a silver at the GABF for Brown. And we were off to the races. The $1,800 was the best money I ever spent. In late 1995 I made a video on how to put breweries together for $20,000 ($41,425.72 in today’s dollar). BTW, that $1,800 is about $3,728.31 today. All for just one and a half days of consulting.

We now charge $5,000 for a brewer and another, typically a partner who runs the business or however the combination is made up. It’s for one or two people. Same price. It runs 4 days and the schedule is up to the student based on their needs, but it goes something like this.

The first day we spend most of our time working on the brewery concept, which includes location, type of brewery, how much money is available and so forth. I want to distill the concept into something workable.

The next two days one person is in the brewery doing everything you would normally do while the other is learning all the business systems like accounting, inventories, the POS system and the like. All of us are always sitting down in between tasks and working out hours of operation, service systems, and if there is already a building picked out, I draw up workable floor plans for everything. Then based on all the inputs we get, I will put together a brewing system that usually saves the students $50,000 to $100,000 from what they were originally planning. That’s not an exaggeration.

Next I like to put an estimate on the cost of the project, and most importantly calculate a break even to show what the minimum amount of sales are required to make a profit. The idea of not making money for a year or more to me is so much bullshit they teach in business school. I try to be profitable in 3 to 6 months.

We also go through food production, make pizzas for lunch, trying beers and talking about their brewery. The last day both students brew a beer.

After they leave the real work begins. They leave with a workable plan to proceed and a good idea on how much it will cost, and even where to get the money. I put them on our student forum, where past students answer questions, and it’s a real exchange of ideas from our students breweries.

I continue to work with the students as they go through the process of building the brewery and opening.

There’s one thing however that I ask of them. That after they are open, they, like our past students, will help future students with their brewery. We are like a fraternity and we all help each other. That’s what I learned when I started from Bill Carver. It’s one of the things I love about this business.

Student Forum

We opened over 130 breweries this way in the US and Canada, Mexico, and almost a dozen other countries. It’s a long way from my friend Shawn Wendling spending a day and a half with me. But thank God for Shawn. He passed away in 2022 in Alaska. He changed my life.