The Most Commonly Overlooked Things When Building a Brewery
You’ve decided to make the big move and get a brewery up and running. That is a commendable step forward in your career. While it is undoubtedly exciting, the reality of what setting up a new brewery entails probably has already been set in your mind. There’s quite a bit that you’ll need to get set up before you can start brewing for real, but you aren’t alone, and you can make it work.
Building a brewery from scratch is the best way to ensure you have exactly what you need, but it has its own share of pitfalls you want to try and avoid. Breweries aren’t houses, requiring a little more consideration regarding their location and overall design.
To ensure that you don’t fall into traps that might throw you off down the line, we’ll go through some of the most commonly overlooked things when building a brewery. When you understand the mistakes that others have made already in their breweries, you can skip past their unfortunate effects and see real success in the long term. Keep these in mind as the design and build process progresses so that you don’t wind up with headaches later.
Location, Location, Location
While a brewery is certainly no ordinary house, one of the critical rules of real estate still applies to it. Where you locate your brewery will be crucial to your success or failure. Not every brewery has the luxury of being in the exact place they want to be, but the more centralized to major shipping centers you can be, the better off you are.
An extremely remote location for your brewery means far more costs in shipping and bringing in brewing ingredients and more time needed to do both of them. Staying in larger population areas also helps provide a more convenient place for customers to go when they want to try out your products.
Layout Convenience
Once you have your location locked in, you can think about the building itself on a deeper level. The layout of your building may depend heavily on how much space you have to work with, but how you set up the layout will either help or harm your efficiency significantly. Having ingredient storage areas on the other side of the building from where you do the brewing means more time and energy spent shuffling between those two areas.
Try to keep your layout as simple as possible, with clear paths from one area to the next. The fancier your layout gets, the more time it takes to learn, and the more potential problem areas might develop over time.
Hygienic Flooring Options
The floor is one of the most commonly overlooked things in a brewery build. We tend not to think about the floor of a building as incredibly important, but for a brewery, your floor is everything. Besides the fact that regulations from the FDA and USDA require particular kinds of floors, you want to make sure that it’s easy to manage and clean your floors.
With all the liquid in a brewery, the floors must be non-porous and preferably sealed completely. You don’t want any chance that something from your beer might slip into the cracks or porous surface of the floor and rot over time. Epoxy coatings are popular in many big breweries because they don’t let anything linger for too long.
Safe and Efficient Drainage Systems
Along with your flooring, you’ll need a similarly effective drainage system to go with it to prevent employees from slipping or liquid from hanging around for too long. In many breweries, this can look like a simple grate in the floor that everything slopes towards, but that’s a more old-school and less effective solution.
Slot drain systems allow for a much more level floor with nothing sticking up that someone might trip over. The openings are small enough that liquids can seep in, but you won’t stumble over them. All drainage systems should feature materials highly resistant to corrosion and bacteria to prevent mold from settling and growing.
Reliable Brewing Equipment
It might seem obvious that you need high-quality brewing equipment in your new brewery, but the costs that add up over time can surprise business owners and force them to make less-than-ideal decisions. If you focus so much on your building that you don’t have enough funding to source high-quality brewing equipment, you’ll regret your decisions sooner than you think.
Stainless steel brewing tanks are your first go-to item, and you’ll want to get larger ones than you might think. In addition, storage tanks, yeast brinks, fermenters, boilers, and more will also be essential. Investing in quality now will prevent hefty repair or replacement costs in the future.
Additionally, be wary of purchasing used brewing equipment hoping to save some money. You never really know what you’re getting with used equipment. Perhaps the seller damaged it and is trying to pawn it off on someone else. Used equipment also comes with no warranties or customer service to help you in a pinch. You’ll definitely wish you had customer service you could count on when the equipment inevitably breaks down.
Space for Growth
Why would you want to get a brewing tank bigger than what you expect to make? Because you must leave room for growth. If you’re moving into a larger brewery that you’re building from the ground up, you already expect your business to grow from its current level. Once your demand increases, you might find that you don’t have the equipment to keep up if you make too conservative purchases.
Allow yourself to have the space you need to grow over time. Go for more extensive storage and larger brewing tanks if you think your business will grow quickly; otherwise, you’ll need to pay for upgrades sooner rather than later.
Utility Requirements
A brewery needs standard utilities such as water and electricity, but your requirements will likely be much higher than a typical home. This is important to remember as you start your build. Many new breweries underestimate how much access they will need to electricity, water, and waste services. As a result, their building isn’t equipped to handle what they need.
For new breweries, requirements for steam and electricity can be difficult to determine. That’s why you should always consult a qualified utilities integrator before making any final decisions. Unless you are an experienced utilities expert yourself, this is one area you don’t want to speculate too much about.
As makers of high-quality brewing equipment, we’ve been a part of many breweries’ beginnings. We would love to be a part of yours and help you find the long-term success you’re looking for. When you need reliable equipment for your new brewery, we’ll help you find what you need.
