Opening a brewery, even a little one, is an expensive and daunting proposition.
There’s real estate. There’s construction. There’s equipment. There’s permitting — and the potential for revenue lost in the time it takes to wade through the permitting process.
We in the Bay area are lucky to have such a wealth of local breweries, most of which at this point have an on-site tasting room where we can sample at our leisure, learn a bit and benefit from the combined years of experience that have gone into these dozens and dozens of enterprises located all across the region. But not every expert homebrewer with a passion for beermaking has the resources to open up their own place, whether it’s a production facility or a little taproom with a system in the back, particularly if he or she already has a business to run.
There’s more than one way to get a locally crafted brew into the hands of the thirsty public, however, and if the local beer scene has taught us anything, it’s that brewers are an inventive and tireless bunch. Breweries have sprung up over the years in, if not the weirdest places, then just basically anywhere they can, from an Italian restaurant off Tyrone Boulevard in St. Pete to the kitchen of a beach bar to a brewing supply store in Seminole Heights.
This week we’re celebrating four of the newest local businesses to incorporate on-site brewing into their business models, simply for the love of beer: Avid Brewing and Growing Supplies, Right Around The Corner, Pesky Pelican Brewpub and Troubled Waters Brewing (formerly Copperheads Taphouse). A majority of the principals we spoke with are longtime homebrewers who were finally able to add that part of their lives to their jobs; several said it was part of the plan all along, and they just figured out how to make it work in concert with their existing gigs. However they’re doing it, they’re doing it, and all of them stand as examples of the fact that while it helps to have a lot of resources if you want to open a brewery, it helps more to have a love of the craft and the drive to make it happen.
This article appears in Aug 16-23, 2018.
