Taproom By The Numbers: Why Data-Driven Breweries Succeed with Nancy Trigg and Kary Shumway
Running a profitable taproom isn’t all flowing tap lines and good times. There’s a method to the madness, and it’s DATA!
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Attracting (and Keeping) Top Talent: ESOPs vs. Profit Sharing with Brandon Selinsky of Beer Law HQ
Good employees can be difficult to keep around. Never has this been more true than in the Great Resignation. So how do you stay competitive as a workplace?
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Selling Your Brewery – Three Paths to Consider with Jason Sleeman of Craft Beverage Lending
When the time to retire arrives and the conditions are right, a brewery owner must decide what to do with the company. In some cases they can simply decide to close the doors, sell the equipment and walk away, living happily in consumers’ minds as a memory. In other instances a decision is made to sell the business.
There are options but the plan to an eventual sale should be a long process in an owner’s mind, thinking about what they would like to see the business become and who will be at the reins. Three possible paths for finding a suitable new owner are a generational sale, creating an employee stock ownership plan, or selling to an outside company or individual.
Jason Sleeman, the Vice President for Craft Beverage Lending at United Community Bank in Woodstock, Georgia spoke with Beer Edge editor John Holl about the three options.
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The ABC’s of Trademark Law With Attorney Mark Traphage
With nearly 10,000 breweries operating in the United States, and countless beer brands available, trying to come up with an original beer name has never been more challenging. Knowing some basics about trademark law and how to protect your brands is no longer the province solely of larger breweries but all craft brewers.
Attorney Mark Traphagen agrees and sees an inevitable increase coming in the number of such disputes. “I think it’s becoming a crowded field and when a field is crowded, it’s always more likely that there’s going to be some sort of conflict between brand names, product names, and other trademarks,” he notes. Traphagen previously worked as an attorney at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the federal agency tasked with handling trademark registration for products and intellectual property identifications. Attorney Traphagen walks us through some basics of trademark law.
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Safety Considerations with a Brewstillery
The following article was posted on Sept. 21, 2016. It has been reviewed and updated as necessary by the ProBrewer editorial staff.
Safety is the most important element in any manufacturing facility, and a distillery is no exception.
According to the American Distilling Institute, OSHA defines a distillery as “a plant or that portion of a plant where flammable liquids produced by fermentation are concentrated and where the concentrated products may also be mixed, stored or packaged. The main cause of distillery incidents is fire or explosion. This is caused from vapors being released into a confined space with an ignition source. The vapors can be released by leaking equipment components such as mating surfaces, leaking tanks, gaskets, valves, casks, even transfer pumps.
Ignition sources include:
Regulation Considerations for a Brewstillery
The following article was posted on Sept 21, 2016. It has been reviewed and updated as necessary by the ProBrewer editorial staff. Footnotes have been included where updated content has been added.
Craft Distillation Tax structure: Craft distillers pay a federal $2.70 per proof gallon (PG) on the first 100,000 PG, $13.34/PG on the next 22,130,000 PG sold, and $13.50/PG on anything above that. More on the federal tax structure for craft distilleries here. (1) There are also state taxes which vary by state.
CQ – What additional licensing were you required to obtain in addition to the Federal Distillers Permit? Was it difficult?
Nano Brewery Basics
The term “nano brewery” may be a fairly recent addition to the craft brewing lexicon, but the concept of small breweries with a pint-sized brew length is nothing new. Although Anchor Brewing in San Francisco might be considered the first American craft brewery, it was New Albion Brewing of Sonoma, Calif., that showed other entrepreneurs they could build a brewery from the ground up. New Albion opened in 1976 using a 55-gallon brewing system.
There is no denying that as total craft beer production continues to skyrocket, so does the number of breweries that are starting with smaller than traditional batch sizes. Just as the definition of “craft beer” can be a slippery subject, there is no definitive answer as to what constitutes a nano brewery. And, likewise, there is no comprehensive list or accounting for how many nano breweries are operating in the United States.
The most-widely accepted description of nano breweries is a brewery that produces in batches of three barrels or smaller. Based on that criteria, there are upwards of 300 breweries operating in the United States as of summer 2014 that would qualify as nano breweries. That would mean nano breweries account for nearly 10 percent of the nation’s craft breweries.
Selling your beer – the basics of self-distribution and brewery sales
The following article was posted on Feb. 18, 2015. It has been reviewed and updated as necessary by the ProBrewer editorial staff.
So far, all of the considerations we have discussed have centered on the expense side of the ledger. But there is good news: Good beer is worth money. And, once you have navigated all the red tape to get licensed, scavenged the money to build a brewery and actually brewed some beer, there are people out there willing to pay you for your efforts.
But there are still many choices you have to make. The biggest is who is going to be your customer – the consumer across the bar at your own taproom or the retailer at a pub, bottle shop or growler station.
Self-distribution versus using a distributor – off-site draft sales for breweries
The following article was posted on Feb. 18, 2015. It has been reviewed and updated as necessary by the ProBrewer editorial staff. Footnotes have been included where updated content has been added.
As brewpubs continue to proliferate across the country, many are opting to sell their products through retail accounts to utilize excess capacity and increase revenue. Off-site sales can also increase your walk-in business by creating exposure and interest in your brewpub. As attractive as this may seem, off-site sales entail a great deal of time, resources and effort to successfully achieve these objectives. And in some states, brewpubs are not allowed to sell their products outside the confines of the licensed premise.
Where allowed by state law, the practice of off-site distribution has been employed successfully along a full spectrum of implementation. Some brewpubs have grown into full size production plants with the majority of their sales sold off-site through a far-reaching distribution network. This, however, is the exception rather than the rule. Most brewpubs sell their products in draft only to a handful of local accounts. Whatever the applicable scale, it is important to understand the basics of off-site distribution.
Some Words of Wisdom
by Jamie Martin, Brewmaster, Dells Brewing Co.
Controlled Experiments – As a brewer you should always be learning and trying to improve your beer. Running a controlled experiment from time to time can give you situational knowledge specific to your equipment that you can’t get from a textbook or article. First and foremost make sure you have the basics of brewing down before you start to change things; you can only learn from experimentation if you understand the process and what normally happens. A few guidelines: Only change one thing per brew. This could be anything like using 2-Row Copeland instead of 2-Row Metcalfe barley, mashing a degree or two higher or lower than normal, or adding your hop addition 10 minutes sooner or later then normal. These incremental changes are small and subtle, usually only you will notice in the final product. If someone has a pint at your brewery and then comes back two months later, they shouldn’t be able to detect a change in the beer, but if they come back a year later, they should find your beer has improved 100%. Those subtle changes may not change the flavor profile much, but our goal should always be improving the overall quality of the entire beer.
Write everything down – Everything that happens in the brewery should be written down; the good the bad and the ugly! First of all it’s the law. We produce alcohol and need to have detailed account of the process and the materials involved in producing our beer. Second, if something goes wrong you’ll need to be able to research that particular batches process and material bill to locate where the problem occurred and correct it. Recording each step also creates a great reference library for you. If you document mistakes and your troubleshooting process, then later, if a similar problem arises, you’ll have a record of the steps and missteps you took previously and you can avoid wasted time and frustration. Your record can also be used as an invaluable training tool for your support staff.
Brewpubs and distribution – Special considerations for brewpubs
What’s wrong with this picture?
A loyal customer, one of those regulars who act as goodwill ambassadors, comes into your brewpub with five friends in tow. He adores your pale ale and he introduces his friends as pale ale lovers who have never had your beer. They are here to drink, have dinner and run up a good-sized bill.
Sorry, you have to tell them, but you are out of the pale ale. It will be back on tomorrow, but a sudden run on the beer by outside accounts has left that tap dry. You suggest that they head to the Italian restaurant down the street because you know you just sent them a fresh keg earlier in the day. You watch a sizable ticket and five potential customers head out the door.