Considerations for Choosing A Craft Brewery Location

Starting a craft brewery has become increasingly difficult due to strict government regulations and high costs. Starting a craft brewery is like starting any other new business, and there are many mistakes that can be made. If you choose the wrong location and space for your craft brewery, it will be an irreversible mistake. But by learning, you can avoid choosing the wrong location and space, which is the guarantee that your craft brewery will be on the road to profitability. When choosing the right facility, you need to consider the following five factors: local regulations, space requirements, aesthetics, public facilities, and facility design.

Know the Local Regulations

When you are considering where to open a craft brewery, you first need to know the laws in your state. Each state has its own set of laws and regulations that determine where you can and cannot open a craft brewery. State laws can help you quickly understand where in town you can open a brewery, and most importantly, where you are prohibited from opening a brewery. While the laws vary from state to state, most off-limits areas are near schools and churches. You can obtain this information through your local government website, as it is usually publicly available.

Another important part of local regulations are the regulations that govern signage, fencing, and building heights. While these can be long and strict, it’s important to fully understand and research them, especially for California. You’ll also want to be thorough with fire codes and building regulations, as these may affect your brewery design. Also, 

don’t forget to apply for a zoning permit, which can help you legally brew on the land you’ve chosen.

As you learn about and research state laws and local regulations, be sure to meet with local government officials in your area. There are unfounded misconceptions about the alcoholic beverage industry. Meeting with local government officials allows them to understand who you are and ensures that you are in compliance with local laws and regulations. This will lay the foundation for future government officials to take a more positive attitude toward brewery owners.

Estimate Your Utility Bills

Brewery rent is often the primary consideration for ongoing facility costs, but utilities will account for a large portion of your brewery's monthly expenses, so you'll need to estimate your utility bills carefully. Utility bills are broken down into two main parts: energy costs and water costs.

Energy Costs

Operating a craft brewery means you’ll need to use a lot of energy to keep your equipment cool during the brewing process, from mashing to fermentation to bottling. If you’re planning to acquire a brewery owned by someone else, get a report from the utility company on last year’s electricity usage and estimate this year’s energy consumption. If you’re opening a new craft brewery, get estimates and rates so you can work with the brewer to estimate energy costs.

Water Bills

Water is one of the most important components of craft beer (it makes up 80-90% of the ingredients in craft beer), so you'll need to use a lot of it. In addition to understanding water use reports and rates, you'll also need to understand the quality of your water supply and the different types of water treatment you may need. Most cities add chlorine or chloramines to domestic water, so you'll need to distill your water. If your craft brewery uses well water for brewing, it usually requires more stringent treatment. When you start researching the water you'll be using, check your local government website. Most cities will publish information about water quality and the different treatments they use.

Understand Your Space Needs

When choosing the right brewery location, the biggest factor to consider is floor space. Generally speaking, the larger the floor space, the higher the price. Therefore, we must carefully examine the space required. A craft brewery produces less than 100,000 gallons of craft beer per year, but even small-batch brewing equipment requires a lot of space. The best way to do this is to do a break-even analysis. How much beer do you need to produce/sell to break even?

Designing Your Brewery

When you start to narrow down your search for a suitable facility, you need to decide if the building is suitable for brewing beer. Now that you have a rough idea of the square footage you need, you can draw up a simple blueprint for the building and decide if it is suitable for brewing beer. This is another good time to get your brewery engineer involved, as CAD drawings are more professional than a napkin drawing.

Let's take a look at the production floor. We'll use the beer brewing process as an example. Here's how beer brewing works:

• Step 1- The malt is crushed in the grinder;

• Step 2- The crushed malt enters the saccharification barrel and is made into a paste;

• Step 3- The paste wort enters the filter tank for filtration;

• Step 4- The wort enters the boiling pot for boiling;

• Step 5- The boiled wort enters the cyclone separator for precipitation;

• Step 6- The wort after rotation needs to be cooled;

• Step 7- The cooled wort will enter the fermentation tank for fermentation;

• Step 8- After fermentation, the beer needs to be tempered;

• Step 9- The tempered beer needs to be filtered, and filling can begin after filtering;

Now that you understand the beer production process and capacity requirements, you can try to incorporate brewery equipment into your blueprint. To save energy and space, your brewery equipment and fermentation tanks need to be close to each other. The design of brewery equipment is related to your brewery capacity and the size of your brewery space. DEGONG's engineers can customize and design a brewery for you free of charge according to the size of your brewery space.

Aesthetic Design

The driving force behind the rapid growth of the craft beer industry is high-end. High-end means that consumers are willing to pay a higher price for a product they consider unique. Successful craft breweries not only sell delicious beer, but also tell their stories. When you are ready to make your final choice, look for brewing equipment like you would a brand. Think about what words consumers would use to describe your beer, and then look for brewing equipment in combination with these words.

With these 5 points, you will find the perfect equipment for your craft brewery. Keep in mind that this will be a difficult task. You certainly don't want any wrong moves (especially when it comes to brewing equipment) to jeopardize the success of your brewery.