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In the grand scheme of things, I really haven’t been a beer geek for very long, but I remember back when I first got geeky about beer, the places people dreamed of going to visit on beer holidays were exclusively in Europe.

You went to England for the sessionable, malty ales, Belgium for the abbey beers and the sours, and Germany for the exquisite lagers, hefeweizen, Kölsch, and alt. That is still mostly true. I just returned from a trip to Brussels and it wouldn’t have been complete without a visit to Cantillon. There are plenty of beer mecca sites in Europe, but now there are some sites in the United States that qualify as well. Continue reading ‘Beer Mecca’ »

I don’t hide the fact that I am not a fan of pouring beer at public beer festivals.

While there are some passionate craft beer lovers mixed in the crowd, there are usually more people there trying to get insanely drunk for as cheap as possible. Continue reading ‘Tasteless’ »

I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking, but somehow I had this idea in my head that I’d take all my risk up front in getting Heretic off the ground and once it was past a certain point, there would be a lot less risk. Ah, poor, simple fool.

We started out sharing a building and some brewing equipment with another brewery, so our costs were lower, but we still had to come up with a considerable sum to fund the fermenters, kegs, delivery vehicle, malt, hops, yeast, employee wages and more. Once the beer started flowing Continue reading ‘Risk and Reward and Risk and Reward’ »

“A barrel full of certainties won’t roll very far.” – Gerd de Ley

From the beginning, I was certain that we would make barrel-aged beers at Heretic. We are close to Napa so it is easy to obtain used wine barrels and I really like the interesting character that develops from aging beer in a barrel.

I have had many people ask me why barrel-aged beer sells for significantly higher price than non-barrel aged beer. Continue reading ‘Uncertain Barrels’ »

A reader asked me, “At what point does someone have enough knowledge to become a [professional] brewer?

Or do you hire someone to do the brewing and then learn from them?” That is a really good question and one that I think many more people should ask themselves when opening any kind of business. Continue reading ‘Brewery Nightmares’ »

The current craft beer market is booming. Passionate beer lovers seek out new beers and are willing to pay a premium price for new experiences.

These aficionados are a tremendous boon to the craft beer world, especially when it comes to the success of new breweries.  The fact is, without those customers, new breweries would struggle to stay in business. The larger a brewery grows, the better their cost of producing beer becomes. Continue reading ‘The Price is Right?’ »

Before we sold our first kegs of beer, I spent a tremendous amount of time investigating what similar products were selling for in our markets. I wrote about this in an earlier post, about the need to be careful about under or overpricing your product for a given market.

But that leaves you thinking you can just set a price that is competitive, as long as it seems like you can make money at it. Not quite. Continue reading ‘It Makes Cents’ »

Float is that portion of your kegs that are out in the market. Generally, the number of kegs you need for every tap handle you want to support is somewhere around three or four.

You will need one keg hooked up to the handle, at least one keg standing by for when the current keg goes empty, and another sitting empty, waiting to be picked up from the account or returned by the distributor.

Don’t think you can get by with less. Continue reading ‘Kegs Revisited’ »

So, one year of blog entries down. Normally I need to think long and hard about committing to another year of writing anything, but these blog entries are different for me. I get to say just about anything I want. I get to ramble on about random thoughts, and as long as the topic somehow relates to beer, everyone seems to be OK with it. Cool gig, huh?

But don’t take that as an indication that I don’t care. Continue reading ‘Year Two’ »