After returning from a brief weekend getaway for the 4th of July, the time had come to pack my car to the brim with all of my personal possessions and make the move back down south.  During the 500 mile drive, I contemplated my next series of moves on this journey into professional brewing.  Should I just take the first job I can get no matter where it is located or what brewery it is?  What is the best way to prepare myself to open a small brewpub someday?  The more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me that I need to jump into the actual business model I want to be in to gain the necessary skills to be successful.  That meant I needed to be a little picky and also attack this need for knowledge from many angles.  So what have I done to accomplish this so far?

For starters, I’ve been brewing like a mad man.  Four brews in four weeks.  One cannot have a successful small brewery of any kind without good beer.  While I was at Davis I had tasted a few beers that inspired me to create recipes for styles that I hadn’t delved into before.  Dogfish Heads Burton Baton, an oak aged IPA sparked my interest in trying my hand at one.  During our class trip to Sierra Nevada, I had their Milk Stout for the first time and inspired me to see if I could make a great, flavorful session beer like that.  My internship at Stone exposed me to all sorts of great beers, the most original being their Smoked Porter.  So, I decided to take that concept, make it a bit more robust and add some vanilla beans into the secondary.  Avery’s Salvation was a great influence in my decision to make a Belgian triple with a twist, using a combination of Belgian and American yeasts, along with US and NZ hops.  This is the type of work that gets me excited, which has really motivated me to get the ball rolling.

So what else?  Well, I’ve enrolled in both Financial and Managerial accounting at the local college to give me a good knowledge base on the financial end of this future endeavor.  Great beer + great decor + great food + bad bookeeping (despite all the positives will still) = out of business.  Reading those books by Sam Calagione and the guys from Brooklyn brewing have taught me to avoid those pitfalls.  One side effect to choosing to enroll in more classes is that it has essentially rooted me here in this city, which means I just reduced the number of breweries that I can go after from 1600+ to about 30.  I’m not complaining mind you, I could be stuck in a much worse place than here.

Now it comes down to what am I going to do to gain more experience.  God knows San Diego is chock full of breweries right?  Indeed it is.  Right now I am targeting the smaller breweries/brewpubs in the area for brewer positions.  What I am also doing is looking at is bartender positions at brewpubs and beercentric bars.  I’m going to have to be a jack of all trades when this thing gets going, so I’ll to need to get a good grasp of the "front of the house" as well as the production side of the business.

It’s going to be tough since there doesn't seem to be much turnover in this market segment, especially when you factor in the wonderful state of the economy.  Then there's the fact there are simply less positions as a whole in comparison to larger breweries.  Also, when you actually sit down in one, everyone employed there seems to be pretty happy with what they are doing.  I’m hoping that the combination of my previous experience, recent education, homebrewing knowledge and the fact that I’ve been writing this blog will open some doors for me that would otherwise have been closed.  Once that piece of the puzzle has been snapped into place, I should be well on my way to making this vision a reality.

Next Time: You probably have just as good an idea as I do at this point!

Questions or Comments?  Feel free to email me at beereaucrat@gmail.com