Open a New Brewery Now? Some Say It’s a ‘Great Time to Start’
The hospitality sector has been devastated. Brewery on-premise business has been significantly down for months. There is a national shortage of cans. And no one knows for sure when the pandemic will be behind us.
But some in the industry say now is a good time to start a brewery. It’s not going to get any tougher, brewing equipment is cheap and so are building rents. And if you can devise a business model that works in the middle of a pandemic, it will likely work in the long haul. After all, it’s probably no harder now than starting a brewery in the early 1980’s when most people had never heard of a “microbrewed” beer – and there was no such thing as email or Google search.
“I think it’s actually a great time to start,” Dan Kenary, CEO of Mass. Bay Brewing Co, said at a virtual panel hosted by the Mass. Brewers Guild and quoted in the Boston Business Journal. “If you can attract capital, and get going now you’re going to start bare bones — you just have to because of Covid. I don’t want to say it’s all up from here because it’s not. It’s going to be hard work throughout, but that’s good, you get that into your bones.”
