Building a Brewery - Part Two - It's All About the Money, Money, Money

So if you’ve read our first article in what will inevitably be an award winning mini series you will have seen that, as far as to do lists go, things didn’t quite go to plan.

I guess with that there is really no problem. There was no real pressure on us to launch the brewery on a specific date and we always knew that there would be bumps and unexpected hurdles in the road and as long as we got there in the end that would be fine.

When it comes to financing the project though we had a budget, we had absolutely no contingency and if we ran out of money that was it for the project.

Without going into the specifics (if you’re interested in the nitty gritty feel free to drop us a line, we’re happy to share) this project was going to wipe us out financially but although this is a bit of a passion project for us there was a serious undertone to it too. With no real prospect of mega pay rises on the horizon, the cost of living spiralling and a mortgage renewal looming (anyone who has been through that recently - we feel ya) we felt we needed to seek out another source of income, no matter how small it may be. We figured we could spend our savings on life or we could invest it in something that gave us a little sideline project and help towards paying for, like, living and hey who knows maybe a bit more further down.

I’m sure we’ll touch upon how that’s going in a future post but for now let’s look at the costs that were involved in getting the brewery started in the first place.

The costs we were looking at were:

Brewing kit

• HLT

• Mash Tun

• Boil kettle

• Fermenters / Unitanks / Brite Tanks

• Coolers and temp control

• Hoses and connections

Canning kit

• Can filler

• Can seamer

Furniture

• Stainless steel tables

• Sink

Building materials for

• Boarding out loft for ‘garage junk’

• Partition wall in garage, including doorway

• Flooring

• Electrical items (for work we could do ourselves)

‘Outside help’

• Electrician for electrical works

• Plumber for connecting garage to water supply and drainage

There’s a fair bit on that list there but we merrily put an estimated cost against each item and hey presto we were in budget. Lovely jublie.

The only things we hadn’t put a firm price against was brewing kit and trades though a bit of Googling gave us a decent idea. Everything else we were doing ourselves or were able to find prices for online so had fully costed all that stuff out. Time get some quotes for the expensive stuff then. 

Now, I’m a naturally pessimistic man, I don’t know why it’s just in my nature. A kind of plan for the worst hope for the best kind of guy. So off I trotted to pull in my quotes wholly optimistic that I would be saving a but of money against what I had budgeted. 

My my my was I wrong. The first quote I got was for the HLT, Mash Tun, Kettle and a couple of small fermenters. Let’s just say that quote ate up the whole budget….for the entire project. Wowzers. Was our plans for our little brewery scuppered at the first hurdle? We didn’t know. 

Next up was a quote for electrical and plumbing work. Ouch. They came in at DOUBLE the cost I had budgeted.

So with that it was firmly back to the drawing board. What do we do now?

Well first up was to spend some time scouring eBay. We were right at the start of the project but knew if the right kit came up we had to snap it up. I don’t know what happened, maybe the beer gods were smiling on us or something, but we stumbled upon a listing for pretty much the exact kit we had on the wish list (save one unitank for a brite tank but you can’t have everything!). The even better news was it was in a never used condition and the even better thing? It was absolutely bang on budget. Fantastic. Turns out someone else had the same idea as us but never got around to finishing the job and needed rid of the kit pronto. No problem, I’ll be there by the end of the week. A few days later we hired a van and headed down the motorway, returning with a brewery in the back. It was way sooner than we had planned to have a load of kit clogging up the garages but needs must and we made it work.

Next up the trade work. This was a tricky one. The absolutely uncompromising work was the electrical stuff. The garage needed its own high capacity supply to feed the electric brewing kit and there was no way on earth I could that myself, it needed sign off and certification. Lucky I found an absolutely superb fully qualified electrician literally around the corner who was able to do the work for me quickly and he did me a solid on the price too (that reminds me, a year on I still owe him that bloody good review!).

Next up was the plumbing. Well with the electrician booked the plumbing was going to have to be a DIY job. I worked out I could hook up the garage to the mains supply myself without too much problem but the drains were an issue. So I cracked on with the supply and settled for a bucket under the sink for the drains. That’s still a job I need to get done but only as and when funds allow.

So with that we. were. CRACKING! Everything else pretty much came in on budget give or take a pound or two. The only thing that caught me off guard was the cost of clamps and connectors. Not a great cost on their own but add it all up and it really can be expensive. Take for example our plate chiller, kindly thrown into the eBay purchase of the brewing kit, there was no way of easily connecting my cooling lines to it so a few failed online purchase and too much money later I finally found something obscure that would work but when hardly anyone is doing it there are very few off the shelf solutions on the market.

Then of course was the cost of brewing up our first batches of beer. I so very naively didn’t factor that into the budget. I was aiming for 4 beers from launch. When you factor in ingredients, cans, lids and labels that’s a £1,000 cost! So yeah that hurt a bit. We managed to do 3 before we launched but we had a fourth almost ready so we had to front up that cost ourselves.

….and then all sorts of marketing and POS. I’m talking packaging boxes and bags, branded stamp, card readers, branded table cloths and banners and ways to make your beer look pretty on a market. It all adds up.

As we go into 2024 there will be new types of events we do too, away market stalls. We’ve had a few conversations around providing bars at some events this year. That will be additional cost but I think we’re finally at the point where we can wave goodbye to putting money in ourselves with any future cost being covered by income from the brewery. 

Then maybe, one day, we can start to take some money back out to pay ourselves back and a little bit more.

We live in hope… 

Next up, now we’ve got our lists and our finances covered it’s time to sort out all of the legal 'stuff' and get 'permission to launch'.