Three groups of my friends (6 people, total) are attempting to start breweries, brewpubs, or cideries.
I have a number of thoughts for these friends. (Advice not totally unsolicited -- I've been homebrewing for about 17 years.)
- Brewing a good batch of beer - better than most of the what's sold in stores - is easy. Almost anyone can do it with their first batch.
- This tricks people into thinking that brewing is easy. But...
- Consistency is hard. That recipe that turned out so well the first time? It might be good the second time, or it might spoil, or it might be too hoppy, or it might be cloudy, or taste of yeast, and so on. At any rate, it's unlikely that it will taste exactly the same as it did the first time.
- Brewing large batches is hard. Even transitioning from 5 gallon to 10 gallon batches requires different equipment. Recipes don't scale in a simple way. And when you get into backwatering high gravity beers everything becomes even more complex.
- Making wine and cider is hard compared to brewing beer. The former two have fewer ingredients, which, being fruit instead of grain, tend to be less consistent. Conditioning takes MUCH longer which means feedback and learning take much longer.
- And yet, I bet actually making a consistent, high-quality beverage is the easy part compared to running a profitable brewing business.
- Brewing is expensive. Startup costs are high. Even an enthusiastic homebrewer can easily spend thousands. Think $10,000 for a bare-minimum commercial brewing setup built around e.g. a SABCO Brew Magic.
- The legal stuff is hard. Licenses, bonds, a legal location -- all that stuff takes time and money.
- The food industry is brutal. Combining a brewery and a restaurant seems like it must tremendously increase the probability of failure.
Anyway, brewing is a fun hobby. But one of those that sort of lulls people into making hasty business decisions.
My friend has been working on a TV series for years which finally was picked up last season by Esquire Network featuring craft breweries across the country. Awesome to watch it go from custom videos for the Craft Brewer's Association, to pilot, to first and second seasons. Super proud of them.
At first I thought "well that's an unforfunate name collision with the Brewdog brewery". But it turns out the show's headlined by brewdog's founders. Nice. They make fun beer (though I'm still sad they retired the tac' and the bismarck, those two were interesting experiences).
So true. Add to this that brewing to the tastes of your target market will be much less interesting than trying out that new farmhouse yeast you located at 28*C in the garage.
> Brewing large batches is hard. Even transitioning from 5 gallon to 10 gallon batches requires different equipment. Recipes don't scale in a simple way. And when you get into backwatering high gravity beers everything becomes even more complex.
As an ignorant software engineer. I have to ask this.
¿Can you keep the batch size constant and increase the number of batches?
Generally speaking, the cost of scaling beer production is paid once. You need bigger, more expensive brewing equipment (and can't just repurpose mass-produced consumer items like turkey fryers and drink coolers) and the recipes have to be adjusted to the new capacity and setup, but your unit cost is much, much lower.
Surface area doesn't scale linearly with capacity, so both cost and cleaning time actually get _better_ as you scale up. Grain, cleaning supplies, and tools get cheaper as you scale, too.
It also only takes a tiny active culture of something bad to ruin an entire batch of beer. Each vessel, airlock, valve, and spoon is another potential source of contamination, so having fewer things to clean is a Good Thing.
You could probably do something like that, but it'd be a huge waste of time. The time to brew a batch is pretty much the same no matter the volume. I.E. Brewing a 5 gallon batch takes about the same amount of time as brewing 20 gallons, assuming you have the equipment capable of doing that volume.
I think huherto is suggesting beer concurrency. That is, instead of having a 20 gallon setup, having four 5 gallon setups. It will take longer because you will have to do whatever mixing,testing, etc four times but if the longest part of the process is waiting- you win in that aspect.
The question is- would this make it easier to be more consistent?
As a homebrewer I think this would be a pretty rough way to try and scale. The actual brew time would be the same, but you've increased your cleaning and maintenance significantly, you need a solution to pipe from multiple stations into fermenting vessels, you need a significant amount of extra space dedicated to brewing that could otherwise be used for fermentation vessels, etc.
I think the right answer is to get your equipment and do test batches to rework your recipes at scale. If you're successful as a brewery it's a process you'll have to do multiple times as you grow anyways, so avoiding it once seems like a silly optimization.
Thanks latj, this is what I was thinking. Big batches may be a good model for a large brewery but not necessarily for a small one that is growing organically.
I can imagine several advantages. You can replicate without having to extrapolate quantities, pressure, etc. You get to run more experiments, I can envision a supervised machine learning system that learns which parameters make the best beer. You don't throw out big batches, etc. Sure, it may require more labor, but you get other advantages.
How about a coop of home brewers- everyone agrees to brew a certain recipe of beer that month; All the beer gets blended together and redistributed. What does that taste like?
I visited a village once that did this with their wine and distilled liquor.
Take a look into the sherry making process if you can find a good resource. The (highly generalised) idea is to use several batches created yearly say, so that by the time you have made seven batches for example, the first batch is fully matured. You siphon off half of the first batch and this is your starter - it tells you the character of the finished product, but only really hints at what you'll get. Now you take each batch and tow it down the line, taking half the second batch and topping up the first and so on until you are left to top up your most immature batch. By the time you've got this working as a production line the consistency of the final product will be pretty solid. Personally I can't stand sherry, though.
I'm at work and don't have access to my brewing books so I can't be any more specific than this but I found it an interesting solution to the problem of consistency.
It's referred to as a Solera, and it's more for making a product consistent over a timespan of years. Non-vintage champagne is also blended together for consistency. As is scotch (even the single malts are usually blends of multiple years). The Solera is slightly different in that the wine is commingled over the course of years, whereas in most champagne and whiskey production the blending is done just before bottling. Some beers that are aged are blended (rodenbach comes to mind), and even Budweiser gets blended together from different tanks to ensure the end result is consistently "Budweiser".
That's exactly it, cheers for that - the brewing book I use mentions it's a traditional method but seems to imply for Sherry, but maybe I'm just not remembering correctly. Thanks for clearing it up. I'm in half a mind to set one up for my elderflower champagne (the hard stuff ~16%ABV). But this year I'm just going to focus on method and produce as many small batches as I can.
Most important thing that comes to my mind is space. I have no idea about the size occupied by a single "batch" but I can say that two small ones require more space. One more thing is, maintaining one large "reactor" is easy when compared to 10 small ones.
> Anyway, brewing is a fun hobby. But one of those that sort of lulls people into making hasty business decisions.
Well said. I started brewing as a hobby about 20 years ago (egads!) But always knew that I would lose the joy of it if I tried to turn into a professional gig.
A friend is in the process of opening a brewery right now. He drastically underestimated the legal paperwork involved to get started. He's sitting on a great space with all the new equipment installed and still waiting in the local government to finish their end of the process....
And this is unlike moving a small business to large how? This is like saying; I shouldn't start my own company or try to grow it because the complexities are too great to overcome. If you know the right people, this is why you bring in a master brewer from Sam Adams who wants to have his own stake. It's all about business, and not about brewing at some point in the game - and you need to put your SKIN in the game if you want to grow. Sad that people put the idea of opening a brewery down because of how "hard" it is. Pull up your big-girl pants and bring in a skilled person or two and go to the next level. Takes initiative. :) I say this with love, mind you.
Ah, yes, it is plausible that I was being too literal minded and it was merely grammatically awkward with a different intent.
I usually wouldn't comment but I think many here are not native English speakers (so might appreciate it), but more telling the setup appealed to my sleep deprived brain. Always perilous, amusing yourself.
I could almost replace "beer" and "brewery" with "food" and "restaurant" and feel like it would be talking about the same thing.
My restaurant ends up focusing so much more on keeping up with cleaning, food safety, and local regulations than actual cooking food it feels almost silly. And most people only want to hear about food or money (lol, money) when they ask me about how the restaurant's doing. I hope I don't accidentally convince someone that they should look into running one.
Start with one, period, do a truckload of due diligence and then add another truckload before the sale closes, and then cross your fingers and hope that your employees don't burn the place down. ;) Starting a restaurant from scratch is something I don't want to wish on even my worst enemy. It's very, very difficult and time consuming to the point that I will try my best to talk people out of it if they even think about it. I know 3-4 talented chefs that almost went bankrupt trying to open their own restaurant instead of just buying one and remodeling/revamping it.
Big ones can be iffy, they'll all but guarantee you some kind of (positive) cash flow but a lot of them sink so much money into necessary wages that I definitely recall wondering why the fuck anyone would think I would spend $1+ million to buy a wildly popular business that gives me all of $10k/month back before I can pay off any business loans. I seem to recall the broker trying to sell that particular one to me with "you can take the place of a few employees because owner/managers tend to work way harder and save like another $10k+!"....sure, if I wanted to work my ass off from 7am to 1am every single day?
That's what I get for idling on HN between dealing with misbehaving employees and hiring new misbehaving employees on the one day this week I deal with the restaurant
tl;dr basically. if you're lucky not to lose it altogether. :(
Same with the franchise restaurant biz. In another life, I was in a position to get a franchise from the Golden Arches. The restrictions were amazing. You'd have to come up with X dollars, and be willing to relocate. Profit after controllables was typically 10-14%, and after that you'd have to pay franchise fees! and then taxes. So on a million/year in sales, you'd have 100k less a franchise fee and taxes. Not exactly driving a Beemer... And each franchise sold for multiple millions unless you were in a program that focused on leasing the facilities to up and coming store managers.
Do you think the regulations are over-the-top, or are they reasonably balanced? It sounds like you spend all your time satisfying regulations, and actually providing the product falls far down the list. In your opinion, could the regulatory burden be lifted and still produce a safe product, or are they all necessary?
I have an acquaintance who made good money on Wall Street for about ten years and then invested it all in a brewpub out in the country (near a ski area.) I don't think he's making much money and I hear he works all the time. But I think after Wall Street he realized he wasn't motivated by the money, and he was used to working all the time.
Now he gets to work with his hands, make something real people enjoy, and be accountable only to himself. I think he's pretty happy.
Yeah, I like brewpubs as a customer, but I don't see what the business model is, over just running a brewery or a bar. You get the beer at cost, but the price of a keg of beer is not really a problem most bars feel the need to improve upon.
The cost of beer made on-premises is roughly half what vs. buying from a distributor. If you can create real demand for your product at your own pub, you can make an extra $100 per barrel (a.k.a. $50 per keg). At ~2000 barrels a year (which is 200 brew days per year on a _tiny_ 10 barrel system) that's an extra $200k added to your bottom line.
Yes, you need decent chunk of financing + equipment to get started. No, it isn't "real money" to most of the folks on HN. Compared to the margins on most foodservice businesses, though, it's amazing.
Brewpubs can skirt around the regulatory insanity that some states impose on breweries. I'm not sure how close South Carolina is to the norm but you cannot sell more than 48oz of beer to the public per day and only after a tour (and only 16oz can be over 8% abv). You have to sell to an independent distributor who sells to independent (of both distributor and brewery) stores. If you operate a brewpub you can sell "freely" but only up to 2,000 (IIRC) barrels a year.
I know several states have tough regulatory environment but I don't know if they go as far.
That could be a loophole, here's the relevant legislation:
SECTION 61-4-1700. Definitions.
For purposes of this article:
(1) "Brewpub" means a tavern, public house, restaurant, or hotel which produces on the permitted premises a maximum of two thousand barrels a year of beer for sale on the premises.
(2) "Permitted premises" means those areas normally used by the permittee or licensee to conduct his business and includes, but is not limited to, the selling areas, brewing areas, storage areas, food preparation areas, and parking areas.
(3) "Person" means an individual, partnership, corporation, or other form of business organization.
If it's a labor of love, he knows what he's getting into, and the financials make sense, then good luck to him :) It's not impossible, it's just not what the average person thinks the business is all about.
I actually visited Hill Farmstead Brewery last month in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. If you're not aware, they're sort of the Magnolia Cupcakes of breweries - people drive hours to get there, wait in line for hours, and generally get very hyped up about the beer.
While I waited over an hour to buy my 2 allowed bottles, I was able to read a little about the guy who started the brewery. I'm paraphrasing, but he basically explained in an interview somewhere that once you realize you're not doing something for fun or for yourself, you come to see other elements about the work that matter, and that those are what ultimately make it worth while. (His motivation has a lot to do with maintaining his family connection to the land he's brewing on, which has been in his family for like 200 years.)
I thought those were pretty wise words for anyone considering a new venture. Novelty and fun wear off. If you can figure out what about the work really matters, you'll be less likely to burn out.
FWIW I saw the founder of the brewery, and I can tell you he was not showing any signs of having a good time or a good day.
FWIW I saw the founder of the brewery, and I can tell you he was not showing any signs of having a good time or a good day.
Eh, Shaun's almost always like that, at least on days the retail shop is open. Pictures of him actually brewing or hanging out with other brewers or at his (amazing) festivals confirm that he is definitely doing what he loves.
Hill Farmstead is a very interesting case. Shaun has said many times that there is an absolute limit on the amount of beer he can reasonably brew on-site, and that he has no interest in expanding beyond that limit. As a result, given the quality of his product, he will inevitably be swamped by demand unless he raises prices, something he has generally been reluctant to do. Imagine if Napa's highest-rated winery were selling the vast majority of its juice in $20 bottles.
Hmm, but at least he can reasonably resist pressure to lower prices... :]
[This is not something to be sneezed at... like 75% of the conversation on U.S. beer websites seems to be complaining about beer prices—which seems a bit crazy to me, as from my point of view, U.S. craft beer prices are already extremely low (craft beer prices where I live are probably three times what they typically are in the U.S.)!]
Got into craft beer in the US and then lived in Japan for a year. Japan taxes beer based on malt content. There are some really great breweries over there, but $9 pints (at a brewpub even) add up fast. (If you're ever in Tokyo check out Baird Beer, they've got a few taprooms now- the one in Harajuku is amazing for the contrast between the insanity of the street outside and the calm of the pub. Anyway, big fan of their Barleywine.)
> the one in Harajuku is amazing for the contrast between the insanity of the street outside
A slight nitpick: the Baird Harajuku Taproom is near Takashita-dori (presumably the insanity to which you were referring), but its actual location is on a quiet backstreet about 50m away -- and that 50m makes an incredible difference... The ambience on the street outside the taproom is amazingly quiet.
[I make the point because I'm always struck by how amazingly quiet the location seems, despite the proximity to T.D. It always feels sort of surreal...]
An afternoon at Bakushu Club Popeye sipping Baird and others remains one of the top beer drinking experiences in my life. Japan's beer scene is really exciting, and it's too bad so little of it makes it to the states—what does is often pricey even relative to European imports.
Low prices for food, drink, clothes, cars, computers etc was something I observed in my brief time in the US. Its great when you see home grown stuff for sale cheaper than it is at home when you have flown 12 hours to get there.
I am glad the author actually does enjoy his work, but this is just another reminder that your dream job might not be as dreamy as you initially imagined. Sometimes the grass is just greener because you haven't looked close enough to notice all the brown patches.
For anyone interested in starting a brewery,
my startup [1] does Flavor Profiling and Statistical Quality control for small to medium sized artisan beer, coffee, and spirit producers.
We use machine learning and data-science to quantify the flavor profile of products, detect flaws, and pinpoint the sources of batch variation.
Looks great but too much subscription money for a startup. I'd suggest per-test pricing with discounts for repeat business or agreement to be listed in an "as used by..." page as an alternative sales strategy.
Maybe. We've considered lowering prices - but $500 / month is far less than what any company (startup or not) would need to spend on hiring an employee with quality control experience.
We do far more than most QA/QC teams ever could... unless they have individuals with an advanced math degree, expansive analytical chemistry knowledge, and production experience - and paying that team won't be $500 / month!
That's one way of looking at the market: as an alternative to hiring someone and getting them access to appropriate lab gear. Another would be looking at the probably much larger layman's market... if you can get your flavour profile priced low enough to become normalized as a standard record at some competitions, for instance, then you may have ten times the market in half the time.
That is very interesting to me... When this first became a business a few years ago, I had hopped that we could get `laypeople` to review products, and then use a mass of consumer data to sell our services.
This has not paned-out in practice; doing reviews on our system is not difficult but it is involved - you have to care about flavor and what you're tasting to do it.
Also, going Standards/consumer route puts us into direct competition with many of the trade organizations that our clients belong to, like the SCAA and the BA - they try to sell their own sensory systems from 'partner companies' (that then donate money back to the organization...).
I think it is better for us to gain the trust of a set of clients who are looking for a better way to taste products for quality control (based on science), and charge them for a service than to gamble on general consumers in the short term. In the long term.... I would love to have 1M+ random people using our app to review beer, coffee, and etc.
[Do you still live in Kunming? // I use to live right around KNU!]
Sounds fair enough, I hadn't considered trade associations and existing claws in the pot. Still, you could try approaching the infinite number of local wine competitions with freebies for their winners in order to garner discount promotional coverage.
I live just south of Kunming on Fuxian lake. Kumming aint what it used to be, but it's still clean and relatively natural down here!
Replace all of the brewing talk in the description of cleaning, tedium, and notetaking with chemistry, and then you will understand why I became a developer after spending 4 years studying chemistry.
My father-in-law, who used to be the brewmaster of one of the biggest breweries in the world, has a PhD in Chemical Engineering. I'm glad he did not end up as a developer, although perhaps my wife would understand me more!
Interestingly, the t-test, probably one of the most relevant pieces of mathematics in modern science, was invented by Gossett in the Guiness brewery in Dublin in 1908.
The problem was that for testing the batches, the sample size was too small for the estimate of the standard deviation to be consistent, so the distribution was wider than would be expected from a Gaussian normal distribution. So, the lad used resampling from a bag of a thousand chicken bones (measuring the lengths) to derive a distribution. Somehow, the mathematical underpinnings were later defined properly by Fischer.
Brewery incubators are coming... Some of them might work out pretty nicely to help test and get your feet wet with bigger equipment before taking the leap.
There are some (extremely good) "breweries" around here which I'm told are "recipe only," i.e., the actual physical site/equipment used is that of another, larger, brewer.
However I'm not sure exactly what that really means... do they typically really just give the recipe over to the larger brewer and say "make this!" or is the "originating" brewer more involved in the actual brewing process, just using the larger brewer's equipment?
I'm not in the industry, but I understand that those are generally called "contract brewers", and the originator of the beer recipe may be more or less involved as the contract brewer begins production, but they definitely don't continue to be unless they find that the product isn't up to snuff.
Again, take that with a lump of salt, I hope somebody who knows more will chime in.
Right, as far as I understand it, that's a general pattern for breweries expanding production beyond their current capacity, or to geographically remote areas.
What I'm talking about seems a little different though: it's very, very, small craft breweries which don't have any of their own equipment (except presumably small-batch/homebrew equipment used in creating their recipes in the first place), and do all their actual production brewing on the premises of another brewery, usually located in the same city.
Maybe they work the same way, but I can't help but think that the latter type would be more involved in the process... :]
I know someone with a brewery - it's a pretty small operation with a small bar. It's not a trendy location or operation but he has been going for years.
The biggest problem is governments. Either the local government, which decided to arbitarily start charging commercial premises 90% of the metered incoming water as wastewater, on the assumption that 90% of what comes out the tap goes down the drain. Breweries use a lot of water, so that added costs.
Then the federal government decided that young people were drinking too many strong pre-mixed drinks (alcopops), so they added a massive alcopops tax (a 70% increase) to try and stop young people drinking (yeah, as if that was going to work [1]). While the young people switched to spirits, wine and cider, his business got smashed because one of his big product lines was ginger beer, and for whatever reason some politician or bureaucrat decided that ginger beer counted as an alcopop.
Most of us in the software industry don't realise how much freedom we have. We can start pretty much any type of software company we like, where we like, when we like. Most of us don't even have to tell a single layer of government what we are doing, save for reporting the income to the taxman. The horror stories of random regulation changes on small businesses like breweries and restaurants is the stuff of nightmares. I mean, imagine if a government somewhere decided to arbitrarily add a 70% tax to mobile-app sales. Lots of small developers would go under. But governments routinely do this sort of thing all the time to lots of other small businesses.
Alcohol has to be one of the most over-regulated things in existence. It seems like every state and municipality has it's own laws saying that you can't sell it at certain times or places, or that you can't drink it in certain places, or that you have to sell a certain amount of food in addition to it.
Another factor I didn't see mentioned is that it is very hard to scale up a brewery. The equipment is a big expensive investment and it makes a certain amount of beer. If you want to make more than that, you need more equipment.
I'll leave the brewing to the professionals. I can get Pliny the Elder pretty easily here in San Diego. Stone Brewery is close by, and always releasing new and innovative brews.
If you're interested in building a nanobrewery, we've developed plans and software for a brewery made out of 3x 55 gallon stainless steel drums at the openbrewery.org project. The software uses Processing; the hardware is less prescriptive since a lot of it will depend on what parts you can get your hands on.
Our goals are to achieve greater consistency and to automate the process as much as possible, so brewers don't have to sit and watch the beer cooking for an entire day.
Our nanobrewery is already running for a year or so and there are at least two more under construction around the world (that I am aware of). So far, the project comprises just the brewery itself-- no tools for downstream analysis of the beer, though that is an important future improvement.
Shameless plug, brought to you by one of the project founders :)
Not true, cider is the new deal. ;-) After becoming a homeowner, I throttled back on my beer brewing hobby and focused on brewing hard cider from my own fruit.
Second this. My roommates go to an annual swordfighting festival and always bring back as much homebrewed mead as they are allowed to buy. It's the nectar of the gods.
Depends on how obsessive you are about clarity. I've made apple cider and drank it after only a month in primary. It was still a little cloudy but otherwise fine. I also have ciders that I've aged for 1/2/3 years, which have gotten crystal clear and taken on an even more wonderful flavor with time.
Some years, apple harvests where I live are good, and other years not so great. Not so great apples = not so great cider = benefits more from aging.
I began harvesting fruit for my 2013 batch around Labor Day, and drank some for New Years. It improves with every month of aging. Carbonation takes time and helps to build character.
Given the massive ramp up in popularity in cider in the UK over the past 10 years I wouldn't be at all surprised at that being a good bet in the USA. In the UK we went from the cider section in the local supermarket having a handful of generic brands to being the same size as the "non generic beer" section.
One snag with distilleries is that the local law may not allow on-site tasting, which is critical to a small production business that won't have good distribution. In Connecticut, they just changed the law on that last year.
Working on the winemaking side (with arbitrary fruits) as a side project here in southwest China. It's an interesting place to work, much different to recipes like "pay x to buy y at your local brewing supplier" like in the west. More experimentation!
Brewing (and wine making) seems like the rare field(s) that consumers think they can do better.
I don't think I can make a better computer than Apple just because I use one. I don't think I can block better than the offensive lineman on the 49ers, even if I think he's incompetent. I can't make a car better than GM, even if I might drive one.
Yet why do so many people think opening a brewery is easy?
Beer Wars is a great documentary on the fight craft brewers have against the big beer companies. [1] The war is all in distribution.
Didn't Ray Kroc say something to the effect of McDonald's product not being hamburgers -- anyone can make a better hamburger than McDonald's in their kitchen. McDonald's burgers aren't the best; they're easy to obtain.
Just like Bud Light -- it sucks, but you don't have to spend a whole day cooking it and then a whole month waiting for it to be ready to drink it.
might be because with homebrew it really is so easy to make good beer. even easier than becoming good at grilling burgers. scaling up is the problem.. and then all that entrepreneur stuff.
I find such attemps are so shallow. "Hey, this brewery thing is popular, everybody is opening one. And I like beer. I should open one myself".
How many people have a genuine passion AND business sense for the stuff, instead of merely going with what other people do and what's considered a hip and trendy thing to do (with some of them even thinking they won't have to do much work to run such a business).
It's like when I see tons people attemting a career in designing skateboarding gear or some such non-industry...
At least due to the startup costs and necessary experience involved, there are many fewer breweries opening than frozen yogurt places. I can't believe the number of frozen yogurt places. And they're still opening. In a mid-sized city with a really long and cold winter. I almost want to go in and ask what the heck they're thinking.
Homebrewing is lots of fun and not terribly expensive. I highly recommend John Palmer's book "How to Brew" if you're just starting out. It's a long read, but you'll have an understanding of the process before you make your first batch. Then grab a couple of friends and make next Saturday Brew Day.
I found scheduling consistent brew days is the best way to improve your craft. Don't let it fall by the wayside and make two beers a year or you'll forget everything and lose interest.
For what it's worth... I live in the heart of Washington's wine country. Every year there are dozens of new wineries, and the same number that go bankrupt. Very few people who move here to be a "gentleman farmer" enjoying the imagery of the harvest find that to be the case - most end up bankrupt. While I am not in the wine business, it's pretty clear there are a lot of shenanigans that go on, like buying wholesale wine and putting a nice label on it - like most businesses, the marketing matters at least as much as product quality.
I make cheese, and have spoken to some of you here about that as well. Producing commercial dairy products blows away the health and safety regulations in beer and wine making. Think it is hard putting a fermented grape in a bottle for sale, try something that comes out of the backend of a live animal...
Bread's even more extreme: I caught my own wild sourdough a few times. (You can catch your own wild yeasts for beer too, but that's more hit and miss, I believe?)
I make cider using wild yeast. It's always worked fine so far. I think this is fairly common with small-scale cider making in the UK. I do add some sulphite to the juice (amount depends on pH) to discourage the undesirable micro-organisms. If you want consistency then it's probably not a good technique, but that's not what I am after.
Yes, I think it is common for cider still. Its entirely doable with wine, but only high end places tend to, cheap wine, like cheap cheese, is more industrial...
This sounds like a lot of fun, can you explain the process you went through to catch your own? How did you ensure you were catching something useable and not something you didn't want in your bread?
There are lots of good resources on the web for the details. The gist is: the micro-organisms you want are already on the flour in traces, so you start with equal parts unpasteurized (eg organic) wholemeal rye or wheat flour and water, mix them, and let them stand in a container for a few days (or even two weeks, if you don't heat your home in winter, like I did when I started in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire).
That's mostly all there is to it. Reading up, will teach you what to expect the starter to look like, how to troubleshoot, and how to turn the starter into bread.
I like the simplicity of flour, water, salt. (And air, time and kneading.) The simplicity leaves no room for covering up mistakes like cakes allow you to do.
> How did you ensure you were catching something useable and not something you didn't want in your bread?
Humanity is very lucky that the most probably natural occurring fermentation in grain dough is not only perfectly safe, it also improves taste, nutrition, digestibility and shelf-life of your bread.
Your nose will tell you if something is off. I think mold is the most common invader. But even mold will have a hard time in a healthy sourdough, because the low pH (=high acidity) and some enzymes keep the symbiosis of yeast and lactobacillus exceptionally stable.
I just came back from a commercial cheese making class and you are spot on. Not only is cleaning/sanitizing a major topic, but the construction of both equipment and facilities for cheese / yogurt / etc all revolves around making it easy to clean and hard for unwanted bacteria to grow. Let's say they make cheese on Friday and then close for the weekend. They will clean and sanitize before the close on Friday and then when they come back in Monday, they will clean and sanitize again. They are fighting everything from cheese mites to Phage, plus trying to keep their own (desired) strains from spreading between cheeses, IE: trying to maintain consistency. Plus, they are fighting the cheese itself in a way - the whey is acidic and will eat away at grout between tile, for example, which is a place where bacteria could then grow.
I've done both wine and beer, recently planted my own home vineyard of 650 vines. In my experience, much more can go wrong with wine than beer but both are worth it when you open the first bottle.
I would tend to agree with this, on about four points that come to the top of mind (though I am not a commercial producer of either, I observe what my friends and neighbors in the business experience):
1) Grapes have more bug problems
2) Grapes have more potential frost problems
3) With grapes, you have to watch your sugar contents really closely. With hops, you grow, you harvest, and often you turn into a dried pellet form, IE: the end-product with grapes is more temperamental.
4) You are (typically) aging wine longer than beer, so there's more time when something can go wrong. Had a friend who was cellar master at a winery. New guy comes in and does something stupid, ruined wine that had been sitting in barrels for two years.
Regarding 3: the same goes for beer, except you can mess up over the course of just a few minutes to an hour instead of a few months. Crush your malt too fine or too coarse, mess up the mash temperatures, and you end with things like a too high or low efficiency, a stuck sparge, or too many fermentable and unfermentable sugars. Of course, in a fully automated industrial brewery this usually isn't a problem, but your typical nano or micro-brewery is a still a lot of manual works, and thus many ways to mess up manually.
Edit: and now that I think about the other things:
Regarding 1 and 2: some hop varities have mildew problems, and bad weather has negative influence on the growth and other things like alpha acid, so bad weather can have quite the impact on hop quality and availability. The 2013 hop harvest in Germany was quite the disaster, apparently. AA% is a lot lower, and young plants of some new breeds got way too much water.
It seems like making wine is basically farming, making beer is basically an industrial product. I'm glad I live in Oregon where there are plenty of people doing either one.
So glad you said that! It's very challenging to find beer that's not overhopped but they do exist. Coming from Germany I'm still looking for some good lagers that aren't insanely hoppy.
Good luck! I studied in Muenster way back as a university student. Thankfully Pinkus Mueller is much more available these days in the US and I don't need to negotiate with a distributor to get a case or two. Koestrizer is still hard to come by though. Hard to find a really good beer in the US. The big name brewers produce corn-flavoured water, the micro-brewers produce over hopped barley soda pop (ok, I exaggerate a little, I know they are all trying to produce interesting products).
The overhopped style drives me nuts because there is so much variety out there that offer more flavors than stereotypical hop and bitterness. Then you have crazy yeasts like they use at Bells that give beers like Oberon the flavor of a spiced or fruited beer without any spice or fruit.
There are good west coast breweries but the culture created a style and has stuck to it like gospel. Variety is what makes beer fun.
I think you're greatly exaggerating the difference, unless you want to name any highly rated East Coast "Imperial IPA" that isn't as hoppy as, say, Stone Pale.
Hoppy flavors are the distinctive feature of west coast beers. A matter of taste, of course, but that's like complaining that there is too much stout in Dublin.
It's all really hard work and a winery is likely even more work. You need to always be watching the grapes, you have to hire seasonal workers to pick the grapes (actually not much automation in this area) plus the unpredictability of the weather.
Do you mean geographic area, or grape-picking? Because these [1] are fantastic at picking grapes automatically. Sure you still need a driver, but it's slightly faster than doing it by hand.
Three groups of my friends (6 people, total) are attempting to start breweries, brewpubs, or cideries.
I have a number of thoughts for these friends. (Advice not totally unsolicited -- I've been homebrewing for about 17 years.)
- Brewing a good batch of beer - better than most of the what's sold in stores - is easy. Almost anyone can do it with their first batch.
- This tricks people into thinking that brewing is easy. But...
- Consistency is hard. That recipe that turned out so well the first time? It might be good the second time, or it might spoil, or it might be too hoppy, or it might be cloudy, or taste of yeast, and so on. At any rate, it's unlikely that it will taste exactly the same as it did the first time.
- Brewing large batches is hard. Even transitioning from 5 gallon to 10 gallon batches requires different equipment. Recipes don't scale in a simple way. And when you get into backwatering high gravity beers everything becomes even more complex.
- Making wine and cider is hard compared to brewing beer. The former two have fewer ingredients, which, being fruit instead of grain, tend to be less consistent. Conditioning takes MUCH longer which means feedback and learning take much longer.
- And yet, I bet actually making a consistent, high-quality beverage is the easy part compared to running a profitable brewing business.
- Brewing is expensive. Startup costs are high. Even an enthusiastic homebrewer can easily spend thousands. Think $10,000 for a bare-minimum commercial brewing setup built around e.g. a SABCO Brew Magic.
- The legal stuff is hard. Licenses, bonds, a legal location -- all that stuff takes time and money.
- The food industry is brutal. Combining a brewery and a restaurant seems like it must tremendously increase the probability of failure.
Anyway, brewing is a fun hobby. But one of those that sort of lulls people into making hasty business decisions.