The Sweet Spot

Need vs. Want

Nathaniel Miller of Big Choice Brewing. The Mash Tun he Needed.

I am working with a student laying out a floor plan, that his architect started and he doesn’t like. It’s crowded. What jumps out however is the size of his brewing equipment that he plans to buy. It includes a kettle, combination mash tun and hot liquor, a cold liquor, 6 conical fermenters and 6 serving tanks. All of these are 15 BBL tanks. As it stands, for this brewpub, the grain will have to be stored off-site, and I don’t know where we could put growlers, 32oz cans, let alone a walk in cooler for the kitchen. I suspect the brewer he has hired wants this system, but also our student is a very good business person, and simply doesn’t want to be short on capacity to meet the demand. I understand this fear, and really, who doesn’t want more tanks and larger equipment.

There it is, want vs. need. When you are planning your brewery, every step of the way you are confronted with this choice. Somewhere, maybe in 1950’s America, I believe we switched from a country fulfilling its needs to one in which we started fulfilling our wants. Marketing helped a great deal, and so did credit cards. Then you add in planned obsolescence (I’m talking to you Apple) and you have a spiraling sink hole of debt. How does this fit into the humble brewery? I’m getting to that.

I am an advocate of the sweet spot in brewpubs and taproom breweries, which to me is 5 to 10 BBL systems. I truly admire nano breweries and recognize that with limited financial resources you have to brew with what you can afford, but eventually you will need something bigger, and I think 5 BBL’s is the smallest I would go. However the cost difference between 5 and 7 BBL’s is almost non-existent. For a bit more you can go up to a 10 BBL system, but I would only do that if your market had enough potential to warrant it. Even for Colorado Boy in Montrose, with a population of 25,000, there is no need for a 10 BBL system.

Here’s the stats. In 2021, as reported by the Brewers Association, of the 2,693 brewpubs who reported their production, 357 of them brewed 1,000 BBL’s or more. So about 87% of the breweries made less than 1,000 BBL’s.

For Brewery/Taprooms, of the 3,280 that reported, only 437 brewed in excess of 1,000 BBLs. Again about 87% brewed less than 1,000.

So you see, in most cases a simple 7 BBL system can easily accomplish this with three or four fermenters. This will save you a lot of space and a lot of money. Let’s do the numbers.

If you brew twice a week, every week for a year, your 7 BBL’s will produce 728 BBL’s. If you are using a nice dry English ale yeast like we do, your turn-over of your fermenters is every 7 day. This means theoretically you could hit your 728 BBL mark with just 2 fermenters. But that would be boring, because we all want to play with different yeast styles. We have three fermenters which allow us to brew any beer we want.

In my theoretical example, 728 BBL’s sold at the tap for $6 gives you $1,048,320 in yearly gross sales. Now realistically there is waste, happy hour, beer donations, and growlers out the door which reduce greatly the retail sales volume, but you get the picture.

Another thing about brewing twice a week is it’s a one-person operation. Brew twice, transfer and clean tanks twice, then there is one day left for line cleaning, paper-work, and general maintenance. I speak from experience.

Just keep this in mind as you are planing on your new brewery, and also whenever you get the itch to buy something new. Oh, I am a sinner in all this. Our beautiful Zahm-Nagel CO2 tester just sits in the cooler, never being used because we didn’t really need it, just wanted it.

Granted, you may be in a location that you might truthfully expect that within 5 years you would be wishing you had that 15 BBL system, and our student may be well aware of that. This advice may not be for you then. However, most likely you fit into the 87%, and if you do, going to what you need will not only save you space and money, it could save you a lot of headaches going forward every time you write a check to your bank for your loan. It’s something to think about.