Doubling Up

As soon as our little brewery was open and the beer flowing, we knew we would need to grow in order to keep up with demand.  We need more beer!  After our second week of being open, we put in an order for two more fermentors to double our capacity.  Good thing we ordered them so long ago, as they just arrived, 3 months later.  With these new fermenters, we'll be able to brew twice a week instead of once a week, effectively producing twice as much beer.

 

We received the fermenters just in time. This weekend we completely sold out of beer and had to close early, and are closed the following weekend as we try to catch up.

 

It's a pretty common phenomenon in the craft brewing industry - that you have to be prepared for expansion before you even open your doors.  In the early days of planning a brewery, you put a lot of time and effort into figuring out the size of your brewhouse, how often you will brew a week, how much beer you need to sell a week, and how many hours a week you will need to be open to sell that beer.

 

Of course the bottleneck (pardon the pun) is how much money you have available (whether you're relying on savings or bank loans) as well as how much risk you're willing to take on.  Either you start out 'just testing the waters' or you 'go big or go home'.  When starting Winterlong, we found ourselves closer to the 'starting small' end of the scale.  

 

 

But no matter where you decided to start, you're kidding yourself if you didn't plan for expansion. Ensuring there's room for more fermentors, cold room storage for kegs, and warehouse space, should be on your mind just in case. There are many stories out there from across the nano-brewery world of starting with a 3 barrel system and then jumping to a 20 barrel system within the first year or two.  Now that's some serious growth!

 

So yes, we are constantly thinking of our next steps, as we run low on beer and as people come back to fill growler after growler of their favourite brews. That's the fun of opening and operating a business, thinking of the next steps. There's always a need to grow to keep up with this neverending thirst for craft beer, and that thirst is growing in the Yukon, just as much as everywhere else.    

 

In the meantime for Winterlong, we're anxious to get these new tanks full of delicious beer, which will give us a little more flexibility with how many beers we can brew at a time and so that we can age bigger beers that we want to brew (did someone say Barley Wine?).