Making Progress!

Hi Y’all,

It’s been a while since I’ve posted.  You may wonder what we’ve been doing.  Well, Mark is working hard at getting our logo trademarked.  Apparently there are some hurdles and the trademark people need an education on their own law as well as the difference between a café and production brewery.  Mark promises to write a detailed post on his experience and learnings.

 

In addition, he has been hammering out the marketing section of the business plan.  He has really added some significant data on the competition and brewers located in the central south.  We plan to market our beer in Louisiana and should things go as planned, expand into Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.  The course in Bend did ground us somewhat.  What we realized was you have to have significant production to meet the demand, so perhaps a better strategy for us will be to try and meet the local market demand, and by local market we mean the Baton Rouge – New Orleans - Houma – Covington – Slidell areas.

 

We learned some other key points that will most likely be critical.  For example, most people buy beer at a store for at home consumption so bottling and canning are important.  Tap handles are hard to come by – as in space in bars; we thought the distributor worked with the bars to get the tap handle space.  In reality, we’ll need a sales team that goes out and meets with the bar owners so that the bar owners will request our beer through the distributor.  Basically, the middleman doesn’t have a whole lot to do except deliver the products to the seller and manage the inventory and the empty kegs…  Speaking of kegs, people who buy kegs for home consumption generally keep the keg for 8 – 10 weeks (unless of course it’s for a crawfish boil).  That means will need a bunch of kegs!  We were told 10 kegs for every account – we’ll work the math with our distributor.

 

Unfortunately, my day job has kept me somewhat busy and I haven’t had a whole lot of time to focus on the brewery.  My part of the business plan is finance.  With the help of my niece Amanda, I put together some pretty good financial statements now they have to be truth checked.  So what does that mean?  I need to call the utility companies in New Orleans and start to work on what the operating expense will be to more accurately project a breakeven point.  And, we need to start researching brewing equipment.  We’ve received multiple bid so now we need to compare and determine what this all means; it’s the apples to apples comparison that is a challenge.  One of the more important aspects of brewing is the equipment you use.  Apparently, the equipment will have an effect on the final product taste.  And, as a buyer, you really need to have a handle on the efficiency of the brewery. The more efficient the less it will cost to operate.  I think a lot of startups learn this the hard way.  Basically, people want to skimp on the cost of the brewery but they don’t understand the long-term impact of not spending 2 – 5% more in order to procure a more efficient brewhouse.

 

The one thing I’ve done in regards to the brewery is post an ad for a business partner / brewmaster.  I have received responses from several interested people; all of which are brewers and two of which already live in New Orleans.  That was a pleasant surprise.  We’re hoping to sign with a partner in the next few months.  We need the brewmaster to select the brewery equipment.  We’ve decided to leave that to the professional!

 

More to come in the near future.
Cheers for now craft beer fans,

 

Karen