Resources for going pro?

[Adam]

Then he knows how difficult and intrusive the paperwork is. In his experience financing was more difficult that the paperwork. In my experience, financing was much easier than the paperwork.

[Adam]

Wow, there's some really good responses in this thread, and I appreciate all the ideas and feedback.

The general plan I'm looking at is something along these lines: CA is a self-distribute state, so I can sell directly to consumers without having to deal with distributers, which would make the entire idea fail. San Francisco is also a pretty hefty foodie area, and there's a surprising number of not-quite-hipsters around. I say not-quite, because they've got a lot of hipster-esque attributes, but they're also a lot cooler than the hipsters I knew on the east coast. Meaning: there's possibly a place for a niche brewer who makes high-quality beer on rotation, clever brews with seasonal ingredients, and operates on a more-or-less subscription model. Plenty of people subscribe to wineries, including a fair number of people who really cannot afford to do so.

Explain what you mean by subscription model, please. Usually people subscribe to magazines, not breweries.

At a roughly 5 hL scale with a few storage tanks, my reading of the brewing literature indicates that it is reasonable to run this level of business either solo or with a partner. If you can retail your product for $5-10 / liter, between subscriptions, case sales, and $5/pint pours in the "tasting pub", there looks to be enough revenue to support a 1-2 person brewery. Brewing seems very capital intensive, and very rewarding to larger-scale operations (with higher revenue, you can get an automated bottling line, for example, instead of the much slower 2-4 bottle fillers that require a lot of operator time). That's assuming, of course, it's possible to acquire space and permits to operate a bare-bones tasting pub a few nights a week and sell beer from the brewery the rest of the week.

Figure out your overhead, use your margin to dictate the break even point, provide for growth. Businesses cost only how much you want them to cost. You can spend as much or as little as you want. The proper amount is "enough". Too many businesses are underfunded and fail. They try to go big out of the gate and don't have the capital to do it. They fail instead of being smart and starting smaller with backup cash for emergencies and growth. Your packaging will also be a labor factor. I read about a nanobrewery that only packages and sells in growlers for less labor. 64oz means he bottles 62 per barrel.

Of course, at this point everything is super-hypothetical. I've got a job that's pretty decent and is definitely lasting for a while. It's a time-bomb job, and I know I'll not be able to keep it longer than three years, so I'm mostly kicking around ideas for what I want to be when I grow up. As if I'll ever grow up.

You're going about it the right way. Seek knowledge, cover every angle you can think of, get a solid executable plan in place. Don't ever rush into business.

There's also clearly the biggest hurdle: product. I can run the numbers and interview people (and if I'm working on a real business plan, I can write off trips to the bar as market research, right?) all day, but if I can't consistently brew quality beer then it's all an exercise in futility. I feel like my base recipes are pretty solid and I've gotten good at consistently repeating (and planning on modifications that seem to go as planned) at the 5 gallon level. That's probably worlds different from the 5 hL level, and I'm probably deluded in thinking I could scale to that level easily.

Everything I'm reading about going bigger, scaling from home brew size to a multi-barrel system is not linear. You cannot take deductions prior to business startup. Talk to your CPA about this.

What I should probably do is seek out an internship (paid or unpaid) during the summer at a brewery or brewpub nearby. I've got summers off (yay, teaching) already. That'd be a pretty big first step, and probably makes sense regardless. Easier to establish whether or not I'm cut out for making this hobby a vocation if I try it on someone else's system first.

Great idea. Learn about the back end of the business from there.