Starting out TOO large

[DTimblin]

Hey guys, I seems to me that everyone’s advice from a size standpoint of starting a brewery is ‘start out as large as you can because it takes the same amount of time to brew 10 BBL as it does 1 BBL’. My question is, has anyone started out TOO large and regretted it?

I have a brewpub in planning, I’d like to start out with a 5-7 BBL system, and my more conservative partner wants to go the route of less money risked with a 1-2 BBL system.


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[a10t2]

For a brewpub, I'd use your seating capacity as a sanity check - even accounting for growlers you can't sell more than maybe 15 pints/seat-day; it's just a physical reality. If you have 20 seats then the 2 bbl might be adequate (~5 batches/week) but if it's 100 even the 7 bbl could struggle to keep up (7 batches/week).

I'm sure you know this at this stage, but equipment costs don't scale linearly with volume. 7 bbl vessels will cost roughly twice what a 2 bbl equivalent would. And most of your ancillary costs (pumps, fittings, hoses, etc.) will be the same or nearly the same in either case, so your additional capital outlay for tripling capacity could end up being more on the order of 50%.

[dick murton]

Get suitably designed kit, you could brew 2 brls at a time in a 7 or 8 brl kit, then you have a fair bit of room for expansion. And having a couple of smaller fvs / conditioning tanks is often good for one offs or high gravity / low volume beers even when / if you scale up the "standard" beer volumes

[DTimblin]

Thanks for the solid tips guys!


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