1: Concept to Reality: Cigar City Brewing

Anyone who gets into craft beer to any serious degree has that moment when they think, “Man, I wish I could make beer for a living.” Some of us have gotten as far as fantasizing about a brewery name and the names of each beer we would produce. When you get to that point subtle changes take place in your life. You can no longer drive around town without surveying for prime places to put a brewpub or brewery. In my case, I even started imagining what my labels might look like.

But, there it stayed for a long time, growing in my imagination. In the meantime, I tried to find work in the beer biz to expand my knowledge of the industry. I worked as a brewery rep for a local Brewpub/Production brewery named Dunedin Brewery. I quickly learned that the little guy has an uphill battle. I learned about large distributor operations and where micros fit into that hierarchy. To get an idea of where they stand imagine the distributor is a person standing on the sidewalk, the gunk on the bottom of his shoe, that is the local craft brewer. But, hey ten years ago that gunk would have been scraped off immediately!  I also learned about how poorly understood the craft product is in much of the Tampa Bay area market. As I traveled from retailer to retailer, trying to convince them that fresh local beer would add value for their customers, I learned that name recognition is still a major factor in selling beer.

Around that same time, I also began working for a beer importer named Shelton Brothers on a very part time basis. Basically, I agreed to work for beer. Shelton specializes in the most traditional and esoteric of beer styles out there. Things like Lambic, Saison and Biere de Garde. Basically, beers that most consumers have never heard of.

 With Shelton I learned how difficult it can be for even interested customers to find low distributions products. The bulk of what I did for Shelton was following up on e-mails from Florida residents trying to find retailers that carried Shelton’s beers. The rest of my activities consisted of helping to compile orders for retailers and trying to get the distributors to pay up.  Shelton Brothers was a tiny operation consisting of three people and a smattering of what amounted to volunteers working for beer. I learned a lot at Shelton Brothers even if I did not earn anything.  At both Dunedin and Shelton I learned one powerful lesson; if you can get people to taste the beers a large percentage truly love them.  Tastings always generated multiple requests of, “Where can I find this? I never even knew it existed!”

Around this time I met Jessica Raia-Long and Tina Hurless of the NoHo Bistro at a tasting I was pouring for while with Dunedin Brewery. We struck up a conversation about doing a beer dinner and along with Matt Abdoney, then of Unique Beer Distributors, we put it together and began hosting monthly dinners. The response was great and the intimate atmosphere allowed us to showcase craft beers and speak to the beer’s history, origins and flavor profile. I became convinced that these beer dinners were excellent marketing tools.

Before all of this, I had owned a pub that specialized in craft beer and local music. My earlier experiences at the pub showed me there were better margins in craft beer and that standing out by offering beers no one else carried built a loyal customer base.  Through the pub I met several employees at Bay Area distributors and become friendly with a few. Through these friends and acquaintances, I received my initial lessons about the business of selling craft beer and the difficulties.

Two years prior to working with Dunedin and Shelton Brothers I became a columnist for a Tampa Bay area free weekly put out by the St. Petersburg Times. The TBT* (Tampa Bay Times) allowed me a forum to discuss craft beer makers and esoteric beer styles to a mainstream audience. Feedback via the column went a long way toward convincing me that there was a market out there for craft beer and that people were interested in trying new things.

All of this built towards my growing interest in running a brewery of my own.  Many of the styles that have driven the American craft brewing scene have no Florida parallels. There are no bottled India Pale Ales from Florida. You cannot buy a Floridian made Double IPA, Imperial Stout, Barley Wine or many other complex styles, in bottles. Meanwhile these styles are brought into the state and they are selling well. Then there is the glaring lack of a regional brewery in the Tampa Bay area. Go to any city or region the size of Tampa and you can easily purchase beer from a local craft brewer.  Good luck doing that in Tampa Bay. From where I stood it appeared the demand had finally arrived, but no one was there to fill the void.

Concurrent to all of these happenings I began reading the forums at www.probrewer.com. If you ever imagined yourself as a brewery owner then the probrewer forums are must-read material. I quickly learned from these forums that I could not raise the money to open a brewery. I figured I might be able to scrape together the money to contract brew though. If you are not familiar with contract brewing this article by beer writer Lew Bryson explains what it is and how it is perceived better than I ever could: http://www.beveragebusiness.com/bbcontent/art-arch/mmbryson0201.html

In Florida there is really only one option for contract brewing and that facility places many restrictions on how and what you can brew. I wanted more control over the process. But, I quickly realized it just was not feasible to contract brew in Florida and I did not want to brew outside the state, as the goal was to create something made in state. So I shelved the idea and went to work at a specialty beer store just to keep up with all the beer related happenings in the Bay Area.

Around this time my father, a confirmed teetotaler, began to ask me questions about my interest in opening a brewery. We discussed my ideas a few times and he looked over my woefully incomplete business plan and to my total shock decided to offer me a loan for the initial start up costs. I had previously had some investment interest from a few friends, but they were in the process of opening a business of their own and could not spare any capital and so I figured it would be a few years before I could get off the ground. I had read numerous posts on probrewer about raising the capital to open a brewery and I knew that, as with any business, having money makes it a lot easier to get money.  Getting the initial capital to purchase equipment, space and supplies is undoubtedly the biggest hurdle you will face opening a brewery. It may not be the route of the indomitable self-starter, but getting a loan from Daddy or any other family member can go a long way toward getting you started.

So that gets us up to speed. I plan to document every step of the process as the brewery goes from imagination to operation. My primary reason for doing this is the lack of information that I was able to find when I began this process. It is my sincere hope that anyone with the dream to open a brewery can learn from the mistakes I am sure to make and benefit from the successes I hope to have.

 

Cheers,

Joey Redner

Posted by Cigar City Brewing at 10/21/2007 2:55 AM
Categories: 1: How It started
 

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