The Laughing Buddha Brewery is one of those recent start-ups here in Seattle. The brewery started sometime last fall, but didn't really get up and rolling until this spring. I visited the brewery in May, right after they got some great publicity on the front page of the Seattle Times Business section. From what I can tell, they have been rolling ever since.
They started off with a 15 bbl system and brew 4 different regular beer. They sell their beers to various draft accounts as well as to beer outlets in 22 oz bombers. An interesting thing that is available in the Seattle area is contract bottlers. On the given bottling day, an outside company comes to the brewery with all the necessary bottling equipment and does the bottling for that batch of beer. This would be a great service to have for a start-up, but I doubt the availability of such a service in Boise. This has allowed L.B. to sell their beers directly to consumers and grocery stores without the need for the capital investment in a bottling line. I am sure they plan on having their own bottling at some point, but it sounds like this works out nicely right now.
The two owner operators are former home brewers who left well paying corporate jobs to start LB. from what I have found out, they started with about $100,000 in cash and have built there brewery since. I don't know if they have other small business loans on top of that, because I don't think they could have gotten their equipment with only $100,000.
The niche that Laughing Buddha is going for is the Asian beer market. They use different ingredients that are generally used in Asian cooking. I have sampled three of the four beers and I am impressed with what they do. Their mango-weizen is a very tasty beer.
I could see PBC using a very similar start-up model. I like jumping in with a 15 bbl system off the bat, if there is the money to get that. 15 bbls allows for some good brewhouse efficiency and enough capacity for a lot of beer for the first few years. The bottling with have to be quite different though. A bottling line would be nice from day 1, but that will have to be examined based on the amount of start-up cash and physical size of the initial brewing space.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
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How do these outside bottlers function? What could be a cool service is to design a 22oz bottling system that fits into a trailer, so you can basically share a bottling system between 4-5 breweries that are reasonably close to one-another. My guess is that most of the costs involving portable bottling system are the system itself...after that it's just the cost of bottles. You could also set up a distributorship that owns the bottling system...then you can just cruise around your local breweries and bottle their stuff and then load it up and take it to your warehouse. What beer man wouldn't love that type of service...the hop heads get to focus on the beer and not worry about the business side as much. I know you're not keen on setting up distribution, but there's definitely good money to be made there...something to consider
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