Hey all you lucky suckers who are already ‘livin the dream’
What kind of insurance do you carry for your breweries?
What about if you don’t own the facility?
What if you DO own the facility?
Does the number/nature of your employees make a difference? (are they all family so you can skimp on Workers Comp? etc)
is there brewery specific insurance products that you must have? some kind of liability?
Just trying to get all these expense items worked out in an orderly way.
We have something like 250 grand insurance on the brewery. We don’t own the facility. We also have individual life insurance policies on each founding partner that will pay the share of the brewery to the spouse should ill fate befall one of us.
Product liability insurance.
Equipment replacement insurance.
Car Insurance.
Friendly talk to your insurance agent will get you on right track.
If you have a tasting room or you start to go to certain festivals, you also will need some sort of liquor indemnification policy, sometimes referred to as dram-shop insurance. The festivals want it in the $1M range.
Whether you strictly require it for a tasting room will be determined by state liquor laws regarding imposed liability, etc.
Would not this be the product liability insurance?
We do festivals all the time and never had anyone question us about our insurance. Since we are not self distributing we do not need to have any type of product liability insurance, that’s on the distributor. Another nice think about having a distributor.
Product liability is not necessarily the same thing as a dram shop. Product liability refers more to the potential risks of the product itself, whereas dram shop addresses the alcohol specific risks.
Product liability: a toaster manufacturer sells a faulty toaster resulting in harm to the purchaser.
Dram shop: a bar owner overserves a customer resulting in an alcohol related crash.
The coverage (or indeminifcation thereof) can get very complicated very quickly, especially when jurisdictional differences are at play. Definitely talk to a local agent who specializes in alcohol related insurance.
I’m sure it is a much bigger deal if you self distribute. Along those lines; we are expressly forbidden to pour any beer at festivals. We can be there and talk but we must have volunteers who pour the beer and the volunteers are signed on with the company who runs the festival.
You nailed it there. The company who runs the festival is taking care of the insurance at that point. There are a lot of festivals around here where brewers or a brewery’s employees are doing the pouring at their own booths.
And wiley hit on the subtle differences between the insurance types. In our area, the dram shop insurance is to specifically cover serving folks alcohol in the tasting room and any sort of liabilities that may arise from that (they run over someone in the parking lot and are underinsured, etc.) Product liability insurance covers the instance that someone takes one of our bottles home and something bad happens. In our case since we (will) have a tasting room and a retail sales operation, we need to cover both contingencies.
Distributing or self-distributing won’t determine if you need those types of insurance; it depends on what your setup is (can people have samples at the brewery?) and if you have direct-to-public sales. You could self-distribute only kegs to bars and not need any sort of product liability or dram shop insurance, at least in our state.