Nanobrewery?

Anthony Robbins, Stephen R. Covey, and other self-help authors always advise people to do what they love for a living. Not necessarily to get rich, but to at least enjoy and be passionate about your work. Then there are people who have done things like that, and say they have turned a hobby they enjoyed into a full time job, with all the soul sucking drudgery that implies.

I've written about this before. It seems like an elusive dream: a job you enjoy that still puts food on the plate. Maybe not so elusive. Enter the Nanobrewery.

There's no concrete definition of a nanobrewery, except that the annual production is small. BeerUniverse.com suggests a range from 30 barrels to 1/3 barrel, or 10-900 gallons per year. Trillium Brewing, which hosts a list of nanobreweries, defines a nanobrewery as under 3 barrels, or 90 gallons. So I will arbitrarily set the upper limit at 30 barrels a year, until someone comes up with a better number.

A nano brewery would likely start with a 7bbl system, or like Sam Calagione, a 20 gallon system. Add one or two 60 gallon fermenters. Calagione brewed the same recipe three times a day, and put the output in one fermenter. Fifteen triple brew days would make 900 gallons. That's brewing every 3.5 weeks. The rest of the time would be filled with cleaning, marketing, deliveries, and governmental paperwork. Now I see why Drew Carey brewed Buzz Beer in his garage while keeping his day job.

But is it practical? That's another question which I will talk about later.