GREAT article!
Saw this yesterday and agree! Nice, witty humor to boot!
People always say,“good beer! You should open a brewery!”
I can cook but I don’t want to be a chef.
I love my garden but I don’t want to be a farmer.
I can drive but I don’t want to be a bus driver.
Why ruin a perfectly good hobby?
The article didn’t mention anything about the groupies or blow. You get 45 year old pot bellied groupies and the job blows.
Awesome! It now sounds even more enticing. Becoming a professional brewer is on my bucket list right after Alaskan Gold Miner, sword boat skipper like George cluney, and astronaut
Hey, to some of us, 45 is young!
Ha ha! You made me spit beer all over my screen.
+1. Think I strained a stomach muscle laughing.
Dude you rock! Just gotta add rodeo clown, skyscraper window washer, and the guy paid to clean the inside of campground in-ground toilets (assuming he exists). At least there is a payoff in brewing.
Totally
There are some seriously cool perks involved with owning your own brewery, especially if you ignore you initial investment (which you hope to get paid back, eventually, right?): free beer, free brewing ingredients, lots and lots of free brewing gadgets. Beer trips are tax deductible. And probably the coolest part, you get to meet a lot of very cool people and have a back stage pass to just about any brewery in the country. It’s kinda like getting to sit with the cool kids at lunch in your high school cafeteria.
Man, I hate finding out I’m a stereotype. I’ve asked to volunteer in a brewery - and got the same bored response. Me, a 50+ year old pot-bellied groupie. Sad.
I’m going to go buy a lottery ticket. That’ll show em.
I’d go with the winning the lottery and opening a brewery option.
+1. Same here. The closest I ever got was washing kegs for a brewery for awhile, but the the brewer moved after getting a new job , and the new guy brought in his own staff. So far the brewery lottery fund hasn’t come through yet.
Looks like the boss may have an interest once his term is up
People always say,“good beer! You should open a brewery!”
Yeah, I’ve gotten that a few times. My response is something like “thanks, but I don’t want to borrow 50-100k from anyone to open a brewery.”
Tryy 500-1000k and you will be way closer to the mark. You need at least 250k to really even consider making enough beer to kinda even think about paying anyone even min. wage.
A guy around here did that maybe 15 years ago. Within a few years, both the money and the brewery were gone.
I know this guy speaks some truth, but he also sounds seriously jaded. I like this comment left by one of the readers:
I hope this article doesn’t leave every aspiring professional brewer leave them as jaded as the author. Consider his point of view – he has brewed at White Birch and now Henniker (as far as I know). White Birch makes sub-par and often flawed beer. Henniker is a production facility that makes uninspired grocery store beer – anyone up for a dusty IPA? I would write as negative of an article if I were wearing his rubber boots.
Think of Richard Norgrove of Bear Republic. He invites homebrewers to his brewery to give him inspiration. Think of Tony Magee of Lagunitas who was a home brewer and still has major impact on all the recipes created with his brand. Think of Sam Caglione who is a spokesperson for SABCO. The list goes on….
Brewing is hard work. Anyone who has mashed, boiled, fermented, and packaged knows that. Anyone with the intuition to use google knows brewers and cellarman make a minimal amount of money. I’m just wondering why in an industry that demands innovation and passion why anyone would write an article like this…
I think if people really want to be involved in the industry, they should be involved, but they should go in with their eyes open. I knew what I was getting into when I started Yellowhammer. I knew there was a high chance that the brewery would fail and I knew that it would be quite some time before it would become profitable, if at all. I knew it was going to be hard as work. I knew that in the summer it would be hot as hell.
Problem is, a lot of people don’t know those things. They see the brewery from the tasting room side and it looks so awesome they think it must be a dream job.
As a general rule I try to dissuade people from getting into the industry. Especially people who say “I’m going to open a brewery!” because they think they will make lots of money. I know a lot of brewery owners and none of them are rich and all of them made more money before they quit their day job. I make less money now than my first job out of college in 1991, and I work more hours!
I have a 23 year old kid working for me now who wants to open a brewery someday. He wanted to come by to just watch for a day and by the end of the day he was working and hired. I explained to him before the first day that it wasn’t probably what he thought it was going to be and that it was hard as hell work. But I really thinks he loves the job, so there are some people out there that are just meant to be brewers. I like to think I one of them, too. 