[BGrits]

Thinking of opening a brewery that brews YOUR home-brew recipes and sells YOUR Beer to the public. Same idea as a business incubator but for beer. Thoughts as to whether this is a good idea.

YOU would have to pay for the brew services (typically a set fee for brewing, products, bottling, distribution, etc) but have a chance to make your money back, or some of it from sales, if your product is good. Your sales % could increase if product is good and production increases.

Thinking this is a startup for Home Brewers to get into the retail side without the huge investment to start your own brewery. If the product is good then they may want to take the next step to opening their own brewery.

This model works for just about every other business, why not for Beer.

[denny]

Pretty sure it's been tried and failed.  Have you thought through the financial side?  You need to be able to answer questions like..how much will it cost to set up and produce the beers?  How much do they sell for to keep you in biz and give homebrewers a cut?  where and how will you market?  Why should people take a chance on buying this rather than the established brands?  And lots of others.  Not really trying to discourage you, just pointing out that at the moment it sounds like a dream rather than a business.

[a10t2]

I'm not sure I see any upside for the brewery here. At best, they're selling beer that they don't keep the profits from, and at worst they have an outright stinker tying up tap handles and shelf space and diluting their brand.

You're also going to run afoul of at least a few states' laws regarding disbursing profits from alcohol sales, so look into where you can incorporate/operate first.

[Gary Glass]

Here's a business that's doing something similar to what you are talking about, but more for breweries that are looking to expand production without having to invest in more brewing equipment: http://brewhub.com. 

There are some other examples of breweries that make their own brands, but are primarily contract brewing for other businesses.

[ethinson]

There's a place here in Portland that does something similar to this, with limited success.  However they keep the two sides separate.  Portland-U-Brew allows people to pay to brew a large batch (15 gallons) of beer on commercial grade equipment.  In the end you take home 3 kegs of your beer to use at a party/wedding/home kegerator etc.  You don't get paid for the beer and you can't sell it.  They have a commercial side called Unicorn Brewing that makes beer for an on-site taproom and festivals and sometimes contract brews for other people who might be just getting started, or they specialize in large breweries who want to try a recipe and make 15 gallons of it rather than a 100bbl batch of something.  Similar idea, but very different as far as the licensing and selling etc. 

I agree it might be a difficult sell to customers when every batch is a Pro-am (basically).

[tommymorris]

This sounds a bit like the Picobrew BrewMarketPlace Homebrew section. There the homebrewer shares her or his recipe with Picobrew and they sell recipe kits to other brewers. The recipe creator gets a royalty. That’s a lot smaller scale than a full fledged brewery brewing batches of Homebrew recipes, but, the risk for the recipe creator is a lot less.