I’ve been homebrewing for about 7 years at this point, and about a year and a half ago I started asking myself what a lot of homebrewers ask: can I take this bigger? It was more an extension of the question: I’m brewing a lot of beer right now, and I want to brew more, but what the heck am I going to do with it? I was brewing a couple times a month, minimum, and I just don’t drink all that much.

So, I sat down and started writing up a business plan for a brewery. I basically said to myself that if I was going to be at all serious about it, I needed to do the work to see what that all meant from a money and time standpoint. It took me a few months, but in the end, I ended up with 30 pages of a plan that talked about opening a medium-sized production microbrewery (production=packaging and selling in stores, small taproom, no restaurant). I was happy with the plan, but was uncomfortable about the amount of startup money that it would take to get something that big going, and I also struggled with the fact that if I was going to do it, I would have to quit my job and jump in headfirst on the brewery.

I talked to a couple folks about it, and in particular, an advisor from the small business development association. He was incredibly helpful at getting the business plan in shape, but he said something that stuck with me during one of our meetings. He said “the more you can bootstrap your operation, the less risk you take on, and the more chance you have to be flexible as you scale it up”.

At the time, it seemed like a tough thing to do. Everything I read was saying that a brewery can’t be profitable, and will never be sustainable below a certain size system. For those of you who are familiar with breweries out there, this ‘magic number’ is usually quoted at a 10 or 15 Barrel (31 gallons=1 Beer Barrel, BBL) system, minimum, for any sort of production. (For reference, Mother Road has a 15 BBL system, and the new brewery at Lumberyard is a 20BBL system)

A system that size was just more money than I was willing to take on as a risk. It would mean a higher investment, which would mean more pressure to sell enough beer each month to make the loan payments. That was a little intimidating, and I also really enjoy my day job, so I struggled immensely with the fact that I would have to leave that behind to start this.

And so, it languished. I spent the summer poking and prodding at the business plan, but not making much progress beyond that. Sometime in the fall, I realized that I really needed to make a decision whether to just abandon this or do something real about it. I started talking again with Mother Road Brewing Company who had finally gotten operations up and running here in town about brewing on their system in their downtime. There were some capacity issues as well as issues with the packaging I wanted to use (22 oz bombers), and so I started looking elsewhere. I talked to several other breweries around the state about contract brewing, which is where you basically pay somebody to brew the beer for you, and then your name goes on it and you sell it. But, in the end, I really don’t want to just sell beer. The thing I enjoy about it is actually creating it. So, even though the startup costs for contract brewing was essentially zero, just selling beer and not actually making it was not what I wanted.

So, I was back around to where I started: back to the business plan for the 15BBL brewery.

Which I wasn’t comfortable with.

So I gutted it. I pulled all the sales figures, the capacities the monetary investments out of it, and I said “I love my job, but basically just want to brew more beer”. After running the numbers, and double and triple checking it, I was totally bought into the 10-15BBL minimum in order to make money off it.

But what if you didn’t want to make money off it?

What if I changed the goal from making this my main income to having some fun, selling some really really tasty beer, and it paying for itself?

So I did that. I scaled it back to a 3BBL system, I scaled it back to self-distributing, and having a taproom which was only open a couple days a week. The goal was to be flexible so I can brew a lot of different kinds of beer, and primarily get them into restaurants and the couple good beer stores around town.

All of a sudden my space requirements dropped, my initial investment amount plummeted, and the amount of times I needed to brew per month to break even looked more like a hobby on steroids than a full time job.

Now we were getting somewhere. All of a sudden things started coming together and I started feeling more comfortable. My SBDC advisor’s words came back to me about bootstrapping. Short of selling 10-gallons of beer at a time on my current homebrew system, this was the ultimate bootstrap.

By day, I still design and develop medical devices, by night I brew beer.

Which, quite frankly, isn’t all that different from what I do now.

Within a couple months, I had looked at a space, had gotten quotes on systems that seemed reasonably priced and was looking into loans. I even had a graphic designer from chicago who was on board for designing logos and labels for me. He had seen my post on one of the brewing forums about the contract brewing and contacted me about helping out. Over the last couple months we’ve settled on what is the final logo for the new venture of mine.

I’m incredibly happy with where it ended up. I think it pretty well sums up the feel of the whole endeavor. Simple, yet detailed. To the point, yet still a little funky.

The only thing I need is a name for the hobo.

My initial thought was to keep the brewery somewhat under wraps until I was further along, but the rumors had started floating around Flagstaff about it, mostly because moving forward with it necessitated bringing some other people into the loop. So, in order to keep everyone abreast of what’s going on, the cat is officially out of the bag.

I’ve been sitting on domain names, facebook pages, twitter accounts, and other manners of electronic real estate for about 18 months, and it finally got to the point that it’s time to get stuff rolling and start letting people know what’s going on.

The facebook page went up sunday night (and at the time of writing this, I’ve already got almost 100 people subscribing to it based of a single post which basically says “stay tuned”), and the website will be going up in the next couple weeks (at least something beyond a splash page). I locked up wanderlustbrewing.com, wanderlustbeer.com, wanderlustbeers.com, and wanderlustbrewery.com to try and head anyone off at the pass who stumbles upon the same name. The twitter account is twitter.com/wanderlust_beer.

Yes, I’m excited, and yes, you should be too.

But contain your excitement for a bit. I have to put a big fat disclaimer on this post: this is still very much in the setup phase. As Mother Road found out, these things take time, and a lot of aspects just can’t be rushed. The licensing alone takes 90 days from when I take possession of a building (which will hopefully be February 1st). The equipment I am trying to get on order isn’t due in to flagstaff until May or June, and that’s if I can get the loan wrapped up in the next few weeks.

So don’t go wandering around town looking for that logo on a door and expect to order a beer yet. In fact, if we’re all sitting around drinking a beer with that logo on it by the time the fall semester of 2012 at NAU starts up, I’ll be a happy camper.

But in the meantime, I’m still going to be homebrewing like crazy (along with some biking and skiing, and business planning), and I promise I’ll keep everyone in the loop on where everything is along the way. It’s going to be a fun journey, and I have no idea where it will end up. But, in the end, if I have a good time, make some other people happy with some good beer, and don’t lose my shirt on it, it’ll be a success.

And since the Wanderlust site isn’t up and running yet, just keep back here (or on the facebook or twitter pages) for any news for now. (Yes, I’m going to keep blogging, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen to the HBS right now, sounds like a post in the making…..)