How to Brew Beer at Home - The Micro Brewery

Want to home brew? How do you get started home brewing?
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Jeff Parker from The Dudes' Brewery (thedudesbrew.com) and Andy Black from MacLeod Ale Brewing Co. (macleodale.com) talk to us about getting started home brewing beer.

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It’s good thing that we’re in the size that we are and the cost of goods will be higher than all our scale but we’re like just big enough. The owners originally wanted to go with a nano setup and it’s just like, it’d be dumb. We’d be sitting in a small inventory and the product out the door would be so low, it’s crazy.

[Module 5.3 - The Micro Brew]
So that’s the breakdown of the craft brew world. Now you’re going to learn about Microbrewery. A great stepping stone for homebrewer looking to transition and make some money off the brew. Then you’ll hear from our experts on what they wishes they could have done differently.

We’re microbrewery for sure. I don’t know the exact number on barrel each but I think it’s 60,000 before you become regional craft so we’re nowhere near that yet so we’re definitely a microbrewery. We want to max out our facility here. When we were space planning and shopping for properties, we found that this was the right size building for the barrels that we wanted to produce for what we thought we could put out as a quality product. You can do that part where, Oh yeash. XYZ sold out and they went big time. There’s quantity in scale obviously on the profit side or what not. I like small. Small just feels more like handcrafted to me.

It’s good thing that we’re in the size that we are and the cost of goods will be higher than all our scale but we’re like just big enough. The owners originally wanted to go with a nano setup and it’s just like, it’d be dumb. We’d be sitting in a small inventory and the product out the door would be so low, it’s crazy. So I’m glad that we were able to convince them to go up with seven barrels so at least we had hope of hitting a decent brand.

It feels small do, right? Seven barrels?

Now, it feels so small. In relative terms like in my own experience, we ran about 30 or 40 test sparges before we opened. Even in batch 15, I already brewed more than I probably ever had in terms of gallons. But brew 3 of the full scale setup, my number’s completely out of the water. It’s pretty crazy how much beer that we had. We had so much inventory for so long. But now we signed on distribution and it was like we’re gonna struggle.

What did you step up from? I went from 14 gallon kettle, the seven barrel brew house. Just curious what your job was.

My old homebrew setup was 5 gallon and then the owners have 10 gallon brew magic and now to seven barrel. I interned and learn a 20 barrel UK setup. That was pretty big that I could not trust an American to run their brewers.