Chapter 1
Before You Begin

THIS IDEA BEGAN on Church Street in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2015. I realize the irony of this specific street locale, probably as some kind of Freudian nod to the higher power we needed to see us through on this journey.

My business partner, Reed Odeneal, the brewing operations expert in our two-man team, lived there at the time and we were actually exploring opening a brewery, this thing that we used to joke about as co-workers a few years earlier that we both knew would never come to fruition.

Except now it might. Or at least we were meeting to talk about it. A shift in my job responsibilities in Pensacola, Florida, was pending, and while my job wasn't in jeopardy, it was enough of a spark in timing to give this wild idea the smell test. I had returned to Pensacola, my hometown, about a year before, and I knew if I were ever going to do this, our best chance to be successful would be in this market that I knew well and knew was undersaturated compared to the burgeoning craft beer industry happening nationwide.

He was smart, with a professional background in IT and tons of homebrewing experience. I had grown up around business in my family and spent more than a decade in journalism, bringing at least a decent understanding of branding, communication, and marketing as well as some connections and credibility with local investors. Neither of us had ever opened our own business before.

But we texted about it. We split up some research for a few weeks. I texted back one day in November 2015 and wrote, "Let's open this brewery and just say f**k it." (I never said I was measured.)

I bought a plane ticket on a whim and flew up to Asheville. Worst case was a solid excuse for a couple days drinking beer in Asheville.

We were at Reed's apartment on Church Street in a quiet living room save for the claws of two ill-behaved dachshunds scampering across the hardwood floor.

Every few minutes, one of us blurted out something we found online, or a calculation for how much we thought our power bill would be to brew a 10-barrel batch, or a cool photo of a brewery we liked.

I remember a particular moment in this research. I came across a blog from a brewery (I forget which one), where they wrote this long, flowery post about their two-year voyage from starting the idea of a brewery to their grand opening. The trying times, the reward of getting it done, the sacrifices, all of that.

"Two years - what took them so long?" I remember asking out loud, both rhetorically and naively. "They must not have known what they were doing."

Neither did we.

So exactly two years and fifteen days later, Reed and I opened Perfect Plain Brewing Company in an old 5,400-square-foot print shop we purchased in downtown Pensacola. We learned a lot in those two years and fifteen days.

Humility, for instance.

Patience, too.

So many more things I can't wait to share with you in this book.

And I'll jump ahead, but we became one of Florida's busiest taprooms in our first year of operation and were among the top quartile in taproom beer production in spite of the fact that we distributed zero barrels. For us, that was a large accomplishment. We are tucked far from Florida's major population hubs. A town of less than 100,000, Pensacola is buried in the far northwest tip of Florida, just 10 miles from the Alabama state line. Our job was both quality and consumer beer education in this market, and all while doing things like making beer styles that had not been made here before and doing new things like our city's first-ever bottle release. We were fortunate enough to beat our Year 1 revenue projection by 74 percent.

In Year 2, completed a $400,000 expansion into an outdoor space and private event venue in a former horse stable while working on a second expansion to create the city's finest cocktail bar and the city's firstever barrel room.

I'm writing the Microbrewery Handbook so we can share everything we learned about becoming brewery owners, and more specifically, entrepreneurs in the constantly evolving craft beer business. I hope this handbook is impactful, that it saves you from missteps, and it puts you in a position to thrive while sharing your beer and your heart with your community.

For those homebrewers and daydreaming entrepreneurs whose minds wander in their cubicle like mine did a few years ago, this book should lay the groundwork for all the other stuff that lifts your beer above the rest.

I don't want to scare you - you can do this. And your chances of success should increase after reading this book. I wish I would have had a book to help guide us through some of this in 2015.

For breweries, cideries, vineyards, or craft beer bars in planning, this should be a reference for you on your desk during these crucial months. And for breweries or bars already established, we share some of our implementable secrets that have helped us master employee engagement, company culture, a strong brand, and what we see as a bright future.

The craft beer market is evolving rapidly, maybe even more than you realize. And what we're seeing in 2019 is a plateau on the overall craft market. What seemed to be an invincible business model even four to five years ago - hundreds of breweries of all sizes and formats opening and a mere handful closing nationwide - has sharpened. Competition, likely around you and where you hope to begin or grow your brewery, has sharpened as well.

In November of 2018 the Brewers Association even created a new "Taproom" class of brewers to go with Packaging Breweries and Pub Breweries. This is a class that serves more than 25 percent of its product on site with minimal food operations and that produces fewer than six million barrels per year.

It's like anything else in business. People see a trend that's successful, and the market saturates. Add that to the fact that this is beer we're talking about here - a fun industry in the grand scheme of life - and you find the market where it is now.

Dogfish Head Brewing Founder Sam Calagione said it best in 2018 when he lovingly summarized the evolving craft beer market as a "phenomenon I'll call smiling mouth, jaws of death."

He explained that there are two jaws that represent different strong sectors of the current craft beer market: taproom-focused models and the other side of the coin, "fairly scaled" breweries that are doing multi-state distribution. He advised not to get stuck in between those two models as our industry evolves.

"The bottom jaw, frankly, is more of those taproom-oriented breweries that can kick ass because they're in control of their sales and they can get so much margin by selling across the bar," he said. "So many of those business units, if they have quality, consistency, are well differentiated and focused, they're going to weather this storm with grace and aplomb."

This book centers around that bottom jaw of the industry that we've created at Perfect Plain. Amazingly, while other distribution-based sectors of craft plateau or fall, 15 percent of all draft beer sales in the U.S. were sold direct from breweries in 2018, according to the Brewers Association - an all-time high.

My hope is that the Microbrewery Handbook will give you the entire toolkit you need to kick ass as a brewery focused on a hyper-local taproom first and foremost - the place I believe is the most prudent and impactful to start in this industry today.

During the Florida Brewers Guild Conference in 2017, Sam Adams Founder Jim Koch told the audience that if he were opening Sam Adams today, he would do it as a taproom-focused model.

This book focuses on the construction and refinement of your entire microbrewery organization from start to finish, from planning, strategy, financing, and permitting to common pitfalls, employee culture, and best practices.

We're going to cover a lot of ground here.

To find some focus, I spent a week in Nashville to write this book, and when people asked me what I was doing in town, I would elevator-pitch the topic of my book this way: If you know how to make great beer, or you're already making great beer, my book is covering everything else it takes to start or grow a successful microbrewery.

This microbrewery book will not spend a lot of time focusing on the beer itself. I know - great beer is why we got into this business, right? It's what we're passionate about. Even though I'm not a professional brewer, I would never have opened any type of business other than a craft brewery. I'm a craft beer fan and love so much about the industry and how it has impacted communities. I would have never opened it anywhere other than my hometown.

There are plenty of product-focused books written by people who have forgotten more than I know about the creation of beer. If you are looking for the perfect imperial stout grain bill or techniques on rectifying a stuck mash, this is not your book.

However, we will talk some about sizing up your system for success and the marriage...