Are you familiar with the brew on premise (BOP) businesses? These are places that usually have several large kettles where you can go and brew a batch of homebrew. The advantage is they have all the equipment, ingredients and know how to make beer. All the while you mess up their place and not your own kitchen. It’s a fun way to spend a couple hours with friends learning about brewing and seeing what goes into making an extract batch of beer. John and I have been to a couple of these types of places locally to us, and we’ve had a good time there. We recommend trying one out in your area if you are unsure about making the commitment to brewing at home.
Many homebrewers have dreams of turning their hobby into a full time job. One obvious way to make that happen is to become a pro-brewer; brewing beer for a commercial brewery or brew pub. But what if long hours in someone else’s brewery isn’t exactly your cup of tea. One idea would be to get a job where you can really share your passion for homebrewing (not just brewing) with more like minded people. We see two ways that can make this happen: 1. Open a Brew on Premise or 2. Open a local homebrew shop in your area.
Avoiding a lengthy conversation about the pros and cons of each one individually; I pose a new idea. What about a combined BOP and and homebrew shop? The profit margin on either type of business seems like it would be really tight. I’ve often wondered how would combining these two businesses do. For every new brewer you create at the BOP, you’d be able to sell them equipment and ingredients for making the transition to true homebrewing. For every homebrewer that doesn’t want some of the limitations that BOPs create, you’d be offering lower cost ingredients through the homebrew shop side because you’d be buying more ingredients than a solo homebrew shop.
All in all, you could create an environment where you get to physically demonstrate the brewing process to people, you get to share your knowledge with new brewers (and hopefully learn something from experienced brewers) and your business would have two different types of revenue streams; one supporting the other. (Coupling the brew shop with an aggressive mail order business as well would potentially add yet a third way to generate revenue to the store. I personally believe this is really the future for homebrew shops that want to be competitive and stay in business.)
What do you think of this type of approach? Are there any places like this in your area? We’d love to hear about them and any feedback or perceptions you have about their business offerings and success/failures.
Drop us a few comments on your thoughts.
BREW ON!