Last Night I had the Strangest Dream

by Dick Cantwell

There have been times, when for various reasons I have decided to limit myself to one beer a day. What this usually means, of course, is that I make it count, either packing as much flavor or alcoholic punch into my sole libation as occurs to me in my selection, or making it as big as reasonably possible. A half-liter or Imperial pint bottle fits within the definition of one beer, certainly, and it really isn’t much of a stretch to make it a 22-ouncer. If that large-ish single beer happens to be barley wine or double IPA, well, then you’ve got all the bases covered. It’s important, after all, to stick to one’s declarations. I remember a market around the corner from my apartment in New York that sold half-gallon “bottles” of a pale lager called Canadian Ace. I also remember a 48-ounce draft I was served once at Oakland Coliseum in the late seventies. In my memory it came in a popcorn cup, and it was a bit of a challenge to finish it without the integrity of the container becoming severely compromised. By these standards a 40 seems almost moderate, and one of those juice-can-sized triumphs of Japanese technology simply laughable—you could drink six of those while deciding what your single beer was going to be.

Matters of volume, therefore, are somewhat relative. If a single serving can cover all the ground between around six and 64 ounces, then a brewery of appropriate size to a particular set of parameters can similarly be just about as small or large as imaginable. We’ve seen them all, haven’t we?—half-barrel –sized rigs just large enough to fit through some loophole of legal definition, and the facility in Golden, Colorado, with its own can factory, glass factory, and at least in my memory, its own proprietary gauge of railroad track. Each is appropriate to what it has to do.

People walk into my bar all the time, eager to bounce their ideas off me about the kinds of breweries they want to open. Most of them started as home brewers, and as such have little interest and often a great deal of fear about the tavern and restaurant industry. What they most often outline is a small, three to five barrel production-only brewery somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where they can brew idiosyncratic beers and fish or something, away from the hurly burly of the city, or often in our part of the world the software or aircraft industry. Of course we all mostly know that as far as brewery placement is concerned, the middle of nowhere isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. With sewage issues, labor issues and market issues, it’s usually better to be at least close to the protective and sustaining umbrella of incorporated civilization. And the small brewhouse, well, to a certain way of thinking that just seems prudent, but unless you’ve absolutely nailed your market survey in your business plan—you do have a business plan, don’t you?—then you’re tying your hands for the future, most likely to a brew paddle.

For it’s all about flexibility, and the ability to apportion your production, and your time, to what makes the most sense as your business evolves (or pursues elements of your own intelligent design). You want people to like and want your beer, right? Well, if you’re brewing twice a week on your four-barrel system and the market wants more, you’ll find yourself needing to brew four or eight times a week. Wouldn’t it have made sense to get a brewhouse two or three time the size—and probably one and a half times the price—and brew on it once a week until demand dictated that you add another brew or two? I used to work on a four-barrel system. We brewed twelve to fourteen times a week, and that was nothing, I found, when on a visit to Portland Brewing in the old Flanders Street days, Fred Bowman told me and a couple of my co-brewers that they were cranking out something like 25 brews on a stretched seven-barrel system.

Then there’s the other way to go, which we used to see more often than we do these days, when new breweries were so routinely reckoned as “can’t miss” that a hundred-barrel brewhouse was de rigueur for any credible business plan. Within a few years, of course, many of these hundred-barrel brewhouses were littering the resale market like so many junked cars in Alaska.

The are formulae, of course, for figuring all this out, easily accessible on the websites of equipment fabricators, alterable to the specific requirements of any prospective professional brewer. What’s the population of your market area? How much competition is there? If you’ve decided to conquer your hospitality industry-related fears, what’s the square footage of your potential commercial space? How many beers do you plan to brew? Will they be ales only, or lagers and Belgians as well? Where in this variously enthusiastic country are you planning to locate? The list of factors goes on, but the fact is you just don’t know where your business is going to take you, and for that reason you need to be sure that you can respond to change. And there are lots of kinds of change. The market can become more or less crowded, the word can spread faster or slower than you figured, the laws governing distribution and sale in your state or municipality can change, and you’ve got to be able to respond.

It’s tempting to think that making more beer always makes more sense, but if the margin on that growing volume isn’t good, it might make more sense to make less—beer, that is. If you add tanks to meet a specific burgeoning wholesale demand and that demand dries up overnight (and this is the way some chains do things) you’re operating drastically under capacity overnight, unless you can scramble effectively. If on the other hand you can tailor your labor and activity to absorb a slow period and step up for a faster span of time—especially in a pub setting, where your margins will be better—then you’re winning by outwardly losing. Keeping volume up also makes sense beyond just the margins, too. If you’re finding a market, even at a lower margin than retail, for all the beer an active schedule can produce, your beer is generally going to be fresher and better. There’s no end of things to think about.

So in the end, the quest for volume needs to be closely tied to real-life factors while maintaining flexibility. It isn’t just about achieving your dream, it’s about remembering your dream as you gradually wake up.