Brewery Pondering Continued

So I stumbled onto a very helpful site for brewers, prowbrewer.com.  Lots of informative stuff, but in particular I stumbled onto a forum thread about nanobreweries, and read an incredibly helpful post by a nanobrewery owner who seeks to inform prospective nanobrewers.  The gist: not a profitable venture.  This is fantastic news (he says with a note of sarcasm).

I could finagle all kinds of arguments and computations to disprove this claim, but it would be futile.  When someone who has done exactly what you plan to do tells you something, you listen.  I wasn't sure whether a nanobrewery would be profitable, and I expected it wouldn't allow me to quit my job, and now I know it won't.  But it may very well be a good step to opening an actual microbrewery.

What is a nanobrewery?  While not a well defined or industry term, it's typically a brewery or brewpub (beer manufacturer) producing in 1-7 barrel batches (a barrel is 31 US gallons).  Small microbreweries are often 15bbl operations.  And of course there are many different sized operations in craft brewing in general.  For perspective, New Belgium Brewing, the third largest craft brewer in the US, has 840,000 barrel capacity at their Ft. Collins, CO facility.  They probably make 2,000 - 4,000 barrels of beer a day there.  I would be making maybe 3-10 barrels a week.

I think what I've figured out with a couple of hours worth of reading and consideration is that a nanobrewery is a great way to figure out the process of brewing professionally, and a great step on the path to opening a large, full time, profitable brewery or brewpub.  If this is really something I want to do, I'll have to approach it in this fashion.  A nano operation would allow me to test the market, establish a customer base, prove income for a while, and plan a larger operation.