council made excellent beers. a real loss for the SD beer scene - in a town overrun with breweries, council was at the top. was.
my takeaways from the article:
- brewery owners put in ridiculous hours. owning a brewery is a sentence (going back to work the day you delivery a baby?!?)
- the #1 reason why breweries fail: expanding too fast/unsustainably = you're so stretched that you can't deal with any disruptions. when a brewery bets the farm on more production capacity, they are essentially betting that nothing will change - including their current growth rate. why bother expanding? why not just stay a small brewery? because brewing is a volume business. it takes as much time to brew one barrel of beer as it does to brew 50. so why not get a fat loan, upgrade the brew house and end the day with more beer to sell, so more profit? with their 3 barrel brew house, the owners couldn't pay themselves. it's damn tempting to put on some rose-colored glasses and tell yourself that a $5 or $10 million loan will be no problem to pay back, plus you can finally cover your rent...
- fuck trump and his tariffs.