Brothers who homebrew!?!

[NIZZLE]

I'm the professional brewer and avid sour homebrewer as well as a bunch of different non-sour belgian ales mostly with a strain or more of brettanomyces.

I have a piece of advice for starting out on your own. Try and find some part time work or something to gain more commercial experience to make sure you REALLY like it. Brewing is a monotonous profession. Its not much like homebrewing where you are making a different batch every time or very often. I guess it could be, and that might work in today's market where everyone's looking for "what's new". In addition to figuring out if you like the repetitious nature of brewing professionally the chemicals are hazardous and you need to know how to safely handle them and how to properly use them.

I have a dream/desire to strike out on my own and buy a small farmette near my current home in PA. I would just contract brewing and buy wort from a place with excess brewing capacity but maybe limited fermentation capacity. I can just get stainless pallet tanks for them to fill hot wort with and then I will let it passively cool and pitch my own yeast culture I've built up and refined through successive sour fermentations. It gets nicely funky and sour like a lambic but rather quickly giving me a lightly hoppy sour saisonesque beer that I can drink by the gallon at about 4.5%abv. I want to do almost a whole farm to table thing with the wife (who has returned to my life and is actually supportive of my idea now). She wants to do food I want to do beer. I think if we combined efforts and desires it could be a lucrative business but I'd still keep a day job of course because I wouldn't be brewing fulltime just blending and packaging for myself.

Anyhow head over to beerfora.com and start posting. If you have any technical brewing questions I was a biotechnology major and focused my projects and internship on the brewing industry from a QA stand point. I deeply researched contaminate organisms, which caused my obsessively geeky passion for sours, as well as different quality aim points for the brewing process.

So glad I caught this thread. I have been homebrewing for several years now and am in the process of trying to open a small production brewery with a taphouse with some partners. We actually pitch our business plan to some investors in Nashville this weekend. I have found through this process that a.) it's way more work (paperwork, planning, etc.) than I had ever imagined even after hearing countless pros say that, and b.) it's not as glamorous as it seems. That being said, were a group of guys that are super passionate about the beer and the craft beer community and we wouldn't have it any other way. Hopefully we are only 90-120 days out from getting our brewhouse in if the pitch this weekend goes well. In the meantime we are working our "pilot system" out quite a bit and playing around with some 100% brett beers and will be making a lambic style beer fermented in a red wine barrel as soon as our barrel gets delivered. Cheers fellas!

Sounds like your making progress Hooligan and that spider is the way to go.

We are and I agree. It catches quite a bit of hot break too

I want to brew bad trying to kill my keg of Kona coffee brown ale or bells two hearted ale clone to Make room. Anyone want to help?

 

[dharbolt]

I'm the professional brewer and avid sour homebrewer as well as a bunch of different non-sour belgian ales mostly with a strain or more of brettanomyces.

I have a piece of advice for starting out on your own. Try and find some part time work or something to gain more commercial experience to make sure you REALLY like it. Brewing is a monotonous profession. Its not much like homebrewing where you are making a different batch every time or very often. I guess it could be, and that might work in today's market where everyone's looking for "what's new". In addition to figuring out if you like the repetitious nature of brewing professionally the chemicals are hazardous and you need to know how to safely handle them and how to properly use them.

I have a dream/desire to strike out on my own and buy a small farmette near my current home in PA. I would just contract brewing and buy wort from a place with excess brewing capacity but maybe limited fermentation capacity. I can just get stainless pallet tanks for them to fill hot wort with and then I will let it passively cool and pitch my own yeast culture I've built up and refined through successive sour fermentations. It gets nicely funky and sour like a lambic but rather quickly giving me a lightly hoppy sour saisonesque beer that I can drink by the gallon at about 4.5%abv. I want to do almost a whole farm to table thing with the wife (who has returned to my life and is actually supportive of my idea now). She wants to do food I want to do beer. I think if we combined efforts and desires it could be a lucrative business but I'd still keep a day job of course because I wouldn't be brewing fulltime just blending and packaging for myself.

Anyhow head over to beerfora.com and start posting. If you have any technical brewing questions I was a biotechnology major and focused my projects and internship on the brewing industry from a QA stand point. I deeply researched contaminate organisms, which caused my obsessively geeky passion for sours, as well as different quality aim points for the brewing process.

So glad I caught this thread. I have been homebrewing for several years now and am in the process of trying to open a small production brewery with a taphouse with some partners. We actually pitch our business plan to some investors in Nashville this weekend. I have found through this process that a.) it's way more work (paperwork, planning, etc.) than I had ever imagined even after hearing countless pros say that, and b.) it's not as glamorous as it seems. That being said, were a group of guys that are super passionate about the beer and the craft beer community and we wouldn't have it any other way. Hopefully we are only 90-120 days out from getting our brewhouse in if the pitch this weekend goes well. In the meantime we are working our "pilot system" out quite a bit and playing around with some 100% brett beers and will be making a lambic style beer fermented in a red wine barrel as soon as our barrel gets delivered. Cheers fellas!

Sounds like your making progress Hooligan and that spider is the way to go.

We are and I agree. It catches quite a bit of hot break too

I want to brew bad trying to kill my keg of Kona coffee brown ale or bells two hearted ale clone to Make room. Anyone want to help? View attachment 41621

I'll be there in 6 hours

 

[NIZZLE]

I'm the professional brewer and avid sour homebrewer as well as a bunch of different non-sour belgian ales mostly with a strain or more of brettanomyces.

I have a piece of advice for starting out on your own. Try and find some part time work or something to gain more commercial experience to make sure you REALLY like it. Brewing is a monotonous profession. Its not much like homebrewing where you are making a different batch every time or very often. I guess it could be, and that might work in today's market where everyone's looking for "what's new". In addition to figuring out if you like the repetitious nature of brewing professionally the chemicals are hazardous and you need to know how to safely handle them and how to properly use them.

I have a dream/desire to strike out on my own and buy a small farmette near my current home in PA. I would just contract brewing and buy wort from a place with excess brewing capacity but maybe limited fermentation capacity. I can just get stainless pallet tanks for them to fill hot wort with and then I will let it passively cool and pitch my own yeast culture I've built up and refined through successive sour fermentations. It gets nicely funky and sour like a lambic but rather quickly giving me a lightly hoppy sour saisonesque beer that I can drink by the gallon at about 4.5%abv. I want to do almost a whole farm to table thing with the wife (who has returned to my life and is actually supportive of my idea now). She wants to do food I want to do beer. I think if we combined efforts and desires it could be a lucrative business but I'd still keep a day job of course because I wouldn't be brewing fulltime just blending and packaging for myself.

Anyhow head over to beerfora.com and start posting. If you have any technical brewing questions I was a biotechnology major and focused my projects and internship on the brewing industry from a QA stand point. I deeply researched contaminate organisms, which caused my obsessively geeky passion for sours, as well as different quality aim points for the brewing process.

So glad I caught this thread. I have been homebrewing for several years now and am in the process of trying to open a small production brewery with a taphouse with some partners. We actually pitch our business plan to some investors in Nashville this weekend. I have found through this process that a.) it's way more work (paperwork, planning, etc.) than I had ever imagined even after hearing countless pros say that, and b.) it's not as glamorous as it seems. That being said, were a group of guys that are super passionate about the beer and the craft beer community and we wouldn't have it any other way. Hopefully we are only 90-120 days out from getting our brewhouse in if the pitch this weekend goes well. In the meantime we are working our "pilot system" out quite a bit and playing around with some 100% brett beers and will be making a lambic style beer fermented in a red wine barrel as soon as our barrel gets delivered. Cheers fellas!

Sounds like your making progress Hooligan and that spider is the way to go.

We are and I agree. It catches quite a bit of hot break too

I want to brew bad trying to kill my keg of Kona coffee brown ale or bells two hearted ale clone to Make room. Anyone want to help? View attachment 41621

I'll be there in 6 hours

OK cool I'll put a pot of coffee on 😁

 

[MoldMan]

Finally! Brewing a Rye saison to work the cobwebs out of my system.

 

[BrewinHooligan]

Brewing 10gal of IPA hopped with Nelson, Galaxy, and simcoe tonight. My woman was able to run out and pick up these 2 30gal conicals that a local nano was giving away. Too bad I don't have the hardware to fill one up tonight.

 

[dharbolt]

Nice score. I just ordered 2 myself

 

[danmdevries]

I got really lazy with my brewing and haven't turned out anything that great lately. Really need to get back into brewing as a hobby, and not just the drinking part

 

[NIZZLE]

Just brewed a sweet orange pepper corn saison on fathers day.man it smells awesome

 

[rfraser]

I'm the professional brewer and avid sour homebrewer as well as a bunch of different non-sour belgian ales mostly with a strain or more of brettanomyces.

I have a piece of advice for starting out on your own. Try and find some part time work or something to gain more commercial experience to make sure you REALLY like it. Brewing is a monotonous profession. Its not much like homebrewing where you are making a different batch every time or very often. I guess it could be, and that might work in today's market where everyone's looking for "what's new". In addition to figuring out if you like the repetitious nature of brewing professionally the chemicals are hazardous and you need to know how to safely handle them and how to properly use them.

I have a dream/desire to strike out on my own and buy a small farmette near my current home in PA. I would just contract brewing and buy wort from a place with excess brewing capacity but maybe limited fermentation capacity. I can just get stainless pallet tanks for them to fill hot wort with and then I will let it passively cool and pitch my own yeast culture I've built up and refined through successive sour fermentations. It gets nicely funky and sour like a lambic but rather quickly giving me a lightly hoppy sour saisonesque beer that I can drink by the gallon at about 4.5%abv. I want to do almost a whole farm to table thing with the wife (who has returned to my life and is actually supportive of my idea now). She wants to do food I want to do beer. I think if we combined efforts and desires it could be a lucrative business but I'd still keep a day job of course because I wouldn't be brewing fulltime just blending and packaging for myself.

Anyhow head over to beerfora.com and start posting. If you have any technical brewing questions I was a biotechnology major and focused my projects and internship on the brewing industry from a QA stand point. I deeply researched contaminate organisms, which caused my obsessively geeky passion for sours, as well as different quality aim points for the brewing process.

So glad I caught this thread. I have been homebrewing for several years now and am in the process of trying to open a small production brewery with a taphouse with some partners. We actually pitch our business plan to some investors in Nashville this weekend. I have found through this process that a.) it's way more work (paperwork, planning, etc.) than I had ever imagined even after hearing countless pros say that, and b.) it's not as glamorous as it seems. That being said, were a group of guys that are super passionate about the beer and the craft beer community and we wouldn't have it any other way. Hopefully we are only 90-120 days out from getting our brewhouse in if the pitch this weekend goes well. In the meantime we are working our "pilot system" out quite a bit and playing around with some 100% brett beers and will be making a lambic style beer fermented in a red wine barrel as soon as our barrel gets delivered. Cheers fellas!

That is great your chasing your passion. So I just ran across this thread and I m wondering how everything is going?

 

[dharbolt]

Currently retooling my brewery. Haven't brewed in a while. I'll have to post some pics of the new setup soon

 

[smokinghole]

So I made an observation about myself. I've gotten so good at brewing sour beers with minimal effort I hate brewing "easy/quick" pale ales and IPAs anymore. I have to cool them, and use a lot of fresh hops, control the fermentation temperatures, and them crash cool for a while before kegging/bottling. They seem like so much work compared to making a sour for me. Heat mash water, mash, boil with old and some fresh/fresher hops, throw in stainless fermentor, allow to cool over night, pitch a tiny amount of very old sour yeast culture with shitty viability, wait 6-9 months and bottle. So much less actual effort on my part. I'm such a lazy homebrewer but then again as a brewer by trade that might be part of it. I have a feeling you either stop homebrewing, go stupid detailed, or get lazy. I'm lazy and patient hahaha.

 

[danmdevries]

Yup. I got lazy myself.

 

[BrewinHooligan]

I'm the professional brewer and avid sour homebrewer as well as a bunch of different non-sour belgian ales mostly with a strain or more of brettanomyces.

I have a piece of advice for starting out on your own. Try and find some part time work or something to gain more commercial experience to make sure you REALLY like it. Brewing is a monotonous profession. Its not much like homebrewing where you are making a different batch every time or very often. I guess it could be, and that might work in today's market where everyone's looking for "what's new". In addition to figuring out if you like the repetitious nature of brewing professionally the chemicals are hazardous and you need to know how to safely handle them and how to properly use them.

I have a dream/desire to strike out on my own and buy a small farmette near my current home in PA. I would just contract brewing and buy wort from a place with excess brewing capacity but maybe limited fermentation capacity. I can just get stainless pallet tanks for them to fill hot wort with and then I will let it passively cool and pitch my own yeast culture I've built up and refined through successive sour fermentations. It gets nicely funky and sour like a lambic but rather quickly giving me a lightly hoppy sour saisonesque beer that I can drink by the gallon at about 4.5%abv. I want to do almost a whole farm to table thing with the wife (who has returned to my life and is actually supportive of my idea now). She wants to do food I want to do beer. I think if we combined efforts and desires it could be a lucrative business but I'd still keep a day job of course because I wouldn't be brewing fulltime just blending and packaging for myself.

Anyhow head over to beerfora.com and start posting. If you have any technical brewing questions I was a biotechnology major and focused my projects and internship on the brewing industry from a QA stand point. I deeply researched contaminate organisms, which caused my obsessively geeky passion for sours, as well as different quality aim points for the brewing process.

So glad I caught this thread. I have been homebrewing for several years now and am in the process of trying to open a small production brewery with a taphouse with some partners. We actually pitch our business plan to some investors in Nashville this weekend. I have found through this process that a.) it's way more work (paperwork, planning, etc.) than I had ever imagined even after hearing countless pros say that, and b.) it's not as glamorous as it seems. That being said, were a group of guys that are super passionate about the beer and the craft beer community and we wouldn't have it any other way. Hopefully we are only 90-120 days out from getting our brewhouse in if the pitch this weekend goes well. In the meantime we are working our "pilot system" out quite a bit and playing around with some 100% brett beers and will be making a lambic style beer fermented in a red wine barrel as soon as our barrel gets delivered. Cheers fellas!

That is great your chasing your passion. So I just ran across this thread and I m wondering how everything is going?

Well, we are no longer working with the investors from Nashville where we had hoped to secure 100% of our funding. We are reaching out to friends and family that may be willing to invest anything at this point and have a few people committed but we don't have solid figures on their commitment yet. It's coming along, but as you would imagine, it's not easy to get someone to give you a half million dollars. We will get there, it's just taking longer than we would like.

 

[Whtwtrman79]

I want to home brew but haven't had the time to get started or know where to start.... But will follow the thread

 

[rfraser]

Too bad on that falling through. Good luck on securing more. Maybe that Kick starter website could work. There are a ton of people who home brew or like to go to microbrewery bars.

 

[The_Maduro_Side]

Big time newbie here. New to the forum, new to cigars, and still in my first year of homebrewing. I found this site through Homebrewtalk and am looking forward to getting to know some of my fellow smoking brewers!

 

[rfraser]

Big time newbie here. New to the forum, new to cigars, and still in my first year of homebrewing. I found this site through Homebrewtalk and am looking forward to getting to know some of my fellow smoking brewers!

Welcome. Its a great community, a lot of great people on here. And I am looking to be a new homebrewer soon myself.

 

[smokinghole]

Have you considered the contract brewing route? Get a beer brewed to get your name out there, removes serious capital requirements. Brewhouses are expensive not to mention the cost to buy/lease/rent the property that it will reside. I don't even want to make the beer for myself at this point. I will let someone else sweat their balls off brewing. I'll blend and bottle. Don't get me wrong I enjoy the brewing aspect and you have ultimate control over your product but sometimes when funding is a crunch you have to adapt.

 

[BrewinHooligan]

Have you considered the contract brewing route? Get a beer brewed to get your name out there, removes serious capital requirements. Brewhouses are expensive not to mention the cost to buy/lease/rent the property that it will reside. I don't even want to make the beer for myself at this point. I will let someone else sweat their balls off brewing. I'll blend and bottle. Don't get me wrong I enjoy the brewing aspect and you have ultimate control over your product but sometimes when funding is a crunch you have to adapt.

We have actually discussed contract brewing and I'm going to really push that with my partners. There are several breweries we know that may be willing to work with us there, but the one that would be a definite is waiting for us to open so we can brew for him since his system is too small and he doesn't have room to expand. We are opposed to crowdsourced funding like Kickstarter because a lot of start ups here have done that and even a few that hit their goal couldn't open because it wasn't enough. In the meantime we are selling shirts, hoodies, and snifters both locally and through our website. We are also brewing our asses off to host tasting events where we shamelessly ask for donations and for people to invest whatever they can.

 

[rfraser]

Can you post address to website?