Business School for Beer Geeks

With the intense interest in start-up breweries and few resources to learn about the business of brewing, several schools have developed offerings to fill the educational gap.

JOHN HARRIS IS AS EXPERIENCED

as anyone at running a brewery, and yet it took him almost thirty years to open his own. Harris—who joined Deschutes Brewing as its first brewmaster in 1988 and was brewmaster at Full Sail Brewing for twenty years—founded Ecliptic Brewing in Portland, Oregon, in 2013. He spoke about some of the challenges and considerations of ownership during a panel on “How to Start a Brewery” at the 2016 Craft Brewers Conference.

“If I can do it, anyone can do it, but I also had twenty-seven years of experience before I even thought about opening a brewery,” Harris says. “I’ve never been a bootstrap and figure-it-out kind of guy.

“I tell people, ‘you’re not just opening a brewery, you’re starting a business.’ People forget that,” he says. “You might be able to get the doors open, but keeping them open is an entirely different deal.”

Industry experience used to be about the only way to prepare for the realities of starting—and growing—a successful brewery. But as a tremendous spirit of entrepreneurship continues to course through craft brewing, as anyone who looks at the stats for new breweries and breweries in planning will attest, people from all kinds of different backgrounds and experience levels are getting into the business, and they don’t always have the time or inclination to invest years in learning the ropes.

But while there are plenty of options for people to learn the technical side of brewing, there are still relatively few resources for would-be owners to find specific information about planning, opening, and operating a brewery.

That’s one of the reasons Madeleine Pullman created the Business of Craft Brewing Program at Portland State University, and why she asked Harris to collaborate with her on her new book, Craft Beverage Business Management.

Equal parts textbook, planning guide, and operations manual, the book takes an in-depth look at developing a craft-beverage business from the ground up; from concept and funding to materials management, production, packaging and distribution, branding and marketing, and beyond.

“All the things you don’t think about when you’re just thinking about making beer,” Harris says. “It’s meant to at least help people work through the questions to think about when deciding whether or not what they want to do is really going to work for them—because once you jump off that cliff, you’re all in.”

The cost of investing in a little bit of education and advice is negligible compared to the risk and capital required to start even a very small brewery, and several programs—including Portland State University, the University of Vermont, San Diego State, and Metropolitan State University in Denver—are cropping up to offer education about the business side of brewing.

There are also a number of private consultants who work with breweries and breweries in planning, and Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® also offers an intensive New Brewery Accelerator workshop. In addition to Pullman’s Craft Beverage Business Management, another good resource is The Brewers Association’s Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery by Dick Cantwell.

“There are some excellent brewing programs already—from UC Davis and

Siebel to the American Brewers Guild here in Vermont—and we weren’t interested in trying to replicate that,” says Gregory Dunkling, program director of the University of Vermont’s Business of Craft Beer program. “But we saw a gap in the need for people to develop the business acumen not only for starting a business in general, but for starting one in this industry specifically.”

Students must complete at least two 10-week courses of study to complete the professional certificate through UVM. Courses are offered online through the school’s continuing and distance education program at the cost of $2,195 each. There’s also a required 3-week capstone project, and a career coach and alumni network both offer continuing support.

The curriculum, developed in conjunction with the Vermont Brewers Association and other professionals, is designed to prepare students for jobs in sales, marketing, distribution, operations, supply-chain management, and related areas in the brewing industry. The majority of enrolled students—about two-thirds, Dunkling says—aspire to start their own brewery.

“For the people who want to start a brewery, there are a couple of things we’re trying to accomplish,” Dunkling says. “One is to give them a breadth of understanding of what it takes to build a comprehensive business and strategic plan for a brewery.

“We give them a lot of information—everything from branding and marketing and the financial details of what it’s going to take, to the cost of goods and how to build a realistic financial model. We also get into a lot of the challenges of opening in a crowded market.”

Another aim, Dunkling says, is “to slow people down a bit so that, when they actually launch the dream of their life, they have an understanding of how complex it all is” and the tools they need to succeed.

“If we can help in any small way to improve the quality of new brewery startups or prevent the failure of future brewery startups, then we will have, I think, made a small contribution to the industry.”

That message of cautious, informed optimism is a common thread among business-oriented beer-education programs, many of which are developed and taught by industry vets who have first-hand experience with the many challenges and potential pitfalls that new owners might face.

Pullman, director and creator of the Business of Craft Brewing Program at Portland State University, founded Wasatch Brewing in Park City, Utah, with a partner in the 1980s. She then worked as a consultant for startups.

Like UVM’S program, Portland State also offers a professional certificate through its distance-learning department. Each class lasts 5 weeks, and students complete at least 20 weeks of classes to earn the certificate, with a total cost of about $2,800.

The core of the program centers on helping students develop and vet their business plans and “trying to open their eyes to all the hidden facets that a lot of people don’t consider,” Pullman says.

“One of the things I see happening repeatedly is people neglecting brand building and marketing. They know how to make beer, but they thought it was going to be easy to get the product into bars and onto shelves, and then they have this long period of struggling to actually get into places, and that can cause a lot of cash-flow problems.

“Undercapitalization is also a huge problem,” she says.

Pullman spends a lot of time working with students to analyze the financial soundness of their business plans and how each piece fits together and can impact the whole. She uses financial information collected during the Brewers Association’s annual benchmarking survey for different-sized producers, as well as feedback based on industry norms.

“The Probrewer forum also has a lot of great information about costs, where to get used equipment, numbers, and salaries,” she says.

Metropolitan State University of Denver’s program, which began offering classes in late 2015, is different in that it offers two degree-track courses of study—in brewery operations and brewpub operations— through its hospitality school. Like the other programs, it also eschews text-heavy business theory in favor of a practical, hands-on approach. The program also makes use of Tivoli Brewing Co., the only operating production brewery on a college campus, as a living laboratory of sorts for its students.

The program is designed primarily for nontraditional students, many of whom have had previous careers, who are looking to earn a degree at their own pace. Like many who enroll in these professional programs, it’s an attractive way to get educated and enter the industry without first trying to break in through industry connections and working their way up through internships or lower-paid positions.

“I think for a lot of people, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get those positions, as well as for brewers to justify the time and expense in training people for those positions,” says Scott Kerkmans, brewery program director at MSU Denver.

“It’s easy to get connected to the brewing industry for a lot of consumers who are hoping to break in, but it’s hard to dive deep and make truly meaningful connections that can yield jobs and opportunities,” he says. “And getting a degree is one way to separate yourself from the pack.

“And what we’ve heard from [our advisory council] is that you don’t need to have a strong science background—most anyone can be taught to be a brewer—it’s much more important to be able to manage process flows and ingredients and people.”