March 4 Update

What is a brewery? (a place where beer is made commercially according to the wiki) This question was asked last week and I was surprised! So I gave the lowdown to the questionee and proceeded to explain how our operation would work. A brewery is a new concept around here and with it hopefully comes inspiration for others to do the same, whether it be another brewery, restaurant, or specialty shop. These places are unique, cool and give Manassas character! My hope for the future of our town is to see more mom & pop businesses. We live in a franchise city compared to places like downtown Alexandria along King Street or downtown Asheville, NC where a different brewery is on every corner. Well, not literally, but Asheville was named beer city USA and they have a lot of breweries!

This month I reveal our layout a bit more. BadWolf is simply a very small taproom. 6 beers will be on tap (usually) with our customer area just large enough to accommodate some people sitting and of course standing room. Our bar is being built from scratch which will look great. Another cool thing - we will have a sit down pacman table loaded with hundreds of games including pacman and other fun ones from back in the day. Free popcorn will be available popped right on site in the cool little popcorn cart. Of course we will provide our freshly made beer in growlers to go. You will be happy to know there is a large fermentation room to store tons of kegs of happily fermenting beer. Behind this will be an sweet office complete with 4 walls and carpeting! It does not include a window view unless we paint one. Damn.

Behind the office and down the main hall is a large room for storing lots 'o grains and you can't live without a bathroom so we put one of those in. It comes with free toilet paper and hand towels. One day, I will get BadWolf the cool sustainable Excel dryer.

T-shirts, BadWolf pint glasses, BadWolf stickers and the cool stuff will be available for purchasing once we open.

WHEN ARE YOU OPENING, GIVE ME A DATE!?

Um, this spring and sorry, but no date confirmed until we start testing our brewing system which is about to be installed shortly! Hang in there. Don't worry, we can hardly wait too.

WHAT BEER WILL YOU HAVE ON TAP?

The brewmaster has 6 recipes selected (which I will keep a secret for now) and the beer will change as we brew new batches. No single recipe will remain on tap consistently. If you have a recipe you would like us to do, please go to our website and click the taproom tab. The brewmaster may even invite you to brew with him.

Big Milestone

On February 6, 2012 TTB approved our Brewer's Notice! We couldn't believe our eyes when the approval appeared in our inbox, finally! We submitted the application in early October and we knew 120 days was the average processing time. Now it's all about the VAABC application which will be submitted shortly. Average processing time is 30 days.

All of the plumbing work has been completed and passed inspection. Just a few days ago, we passed the electrical inspection and will be starting drywall very shortly followed by grinding and sealing the floors. The brewing equipment and control panel will be installed along with our dishwasher, 3 compartment sink, hand sink, kegerators, and the bar. The bar is a simple design built from scratch and one of the cool features will include embedding bottle caps along the top and stained wainscoting.

The customer area will look like...wait, we don't want to tell you everything!

 


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The Buildout Phase

On Jan 14, the power was turned on, lighting up our sign and the most exciting news: we received our building permits! This gave us the green light to begin buildout phase. The plumbing crew, in a matter of a few days, marked the floors, cut the concrete up, reworked the plumbing in preparation for the dishwasher and sinks, then had it reviewed by the inspector which passed inspection this morning. Today they will fill in the holes with new concrete. The path of dirt between the concrete sort of reminded me of what the "Graboids" from the movie "Tremors" left behind. After plumbing work is done, the studs for walls and electrical work will be configured.

Okay, ready to serve beer? Not quite, we have completed a few requests on our application and sent those back to the TTB so they could finish reviewing it. We estimate the application should be approved by the end of the month. After this phase, we work with VA ABC for state approval which takes approximately 30 days. After buildout is complete, test batches of beer on new equipment will begin. In the meantime, you can always order your BadWolf growler or pint glass in our online store, you know, to test out the growler and glass to see if it holds beer?

We will keep everyone posted!!

Patience and ?

The other day something exciting happened. An email from TTB was received stating that our application was given a tracking number and that a Specialist was assigned to us. Oh boy! One tiny step forward. Patience is all that is needed. The application process does take some time but the good news is it will eventually go through. When that happens, we will celebrate.

While we eagerly wait, one of our latest belgian beers will be opened tonight and tasted. Well, (ah-hem) let me clarify, it has been opened and IS being consumed by all those lucky souls present. If Jeremy enjoyed writing, I would have him talk a little more about it which is another reason why we look forward to opening BadWolf. He loves talking about his beer!!!

There are so many people we've run into who aren't familiar with craft beer, even more, the idea of a nanobrewery opening in their town! Some people think it's a bar and then we have to clarify that it's not just a bar, there's much more to it. All of the production is done in-house and served right there. Talk about local business and building community! Prior to prohibition, breweries abounded in many cities and the only reason there wasn't a national beer brand was because refrigeration had not been invented and thus the distribution networks lacked. Who wouldn't want freshly brewed beer on site?  Sometimes we use the winery example to explain the concept. From some of the material we have read, good beer and fine wine are quite similar and you can learn a lot from reading about both beverages. In fact, beer is awesome because the most expensive bottles of beer are not as pricey as the cheapest bottles of wine. Although, that may be changing as more expensive ingredients are going into the recipes and bottle conditioning becomes more popular...

Guess this is just a rambling blog tonight. Cheers anyways!

Update on Our Proposed Legislation

In our proposed legislation, the 3-tier system is still in place. As of 2008, wineries distribute their own wine as contracted employees of the Virginia Winery Distribution Company. So they essentially self distribute, but they only have to pay a $5 fee for each transaction using a special database. No 27% to 35% markup on each keg. Utilizing the same setup with the Virginia Winery Distribution Company, we could rename it to the Virginia Wine and Craft Brewery Distribution Company. 

This means that small breweries like ourselves, would sell kegs for what they are worth minus a few bucks! So BadWolf could still have our wholesaler drive our kegs to their far away destinations but we could also have a choice to deliver our own kegs to the restaurant down the street, and charge almost full price for the keg.

As we discussed in our letter, this would help small breweries get off the ground and since wholesalers have a great network of places to distribute beer, small breweries who eventually scale up could take advantage of their services. But in the meantime, this legislation helps out the small guys like us.

All we need to do is have a few breweries back us up and get the draft legislation in place. We need this soon! The VA Brewer's Guild is aware of the idea and apparently some breweries are already working on legislation. We have contacted those breweries and we are now working together to see if we can get the legislation passed by next year!!!

Checkpoint

So far it's been smooth sailing the past few weeks. We've accomplished a lot already! Shoot, maybe I should create a pocket guide to opening your nanobrewery at some point? Don't steal my idea now. If I could sum up the process so far in a few words it has been a juggling process with the guidance of our business plan. What would we do without it? Did I mention teamwork? Between Jeremy and I, we both pickup where one leaves off or work on two or three things at once. I cannot forget everyone supporting us. Thank you! We are getting the job done! 

I think back to when we started telling everyone we were planning on opening a brewery in the spring. Just saying this made us realize we had promised everyone and did not want to let them down! Therefore we had no other choice! Note to self - this is a great motivating strategy. 

So what are the major stepping stones accomplished to date? 

1. Incorporate BadWolf as an LLC on June 28, 2012 - Spent $100 committing to the first step. It was a cool feeling!
2. Obtain our EIN number
3. Leased our location
4. Apply for our licenses 
• File Brewer's Notice to TTB - application is almost ready to submit! Here is what they require: http://www.ttb.gov/applications/pdf/brewery.pdf This takes approximately 53 days to process
• Next is state - approximately 30 days to process
• Local stuff 
5. Spend money - The fun part has been ordering all the gear and spending the money! Scary at first to watch a large lump sum in our cart be checked out online and realize we are really doing this. My guide has been our the budget and so far and I'm excited that we've stayed under budget! Leaves more wiggle room if we have hiccups in the buildout which I am sure we will.
6. Marketing - we've also set up all the other fun stuff. Twitter, Facebook accounts, our webpage: www.badwolfbrewingcompany.com. Submitted our listings to Google Places & Yahoo. Ordered our beta tester t-shirts and setup a phone line - thank you Google Voice. Love it. 
7. Banking & Accounting - Setup our business checking accounts and ordered Intuit Quickbooks 
8. Planning for Buildout - While doing steps 2-6 we have also connected with our Architect - Loveless & Porter who has completed the preliminary drawings and provided our proposal. Next step is getting Manassas City's approval. 
9. Misc - Membership with the Brewer's Association.

While doing all of the above, we still had to brew beer to make sure it tasted good of course! Brought 4 corny kegs to the neighborhood Oktoberfest for everyone to try including our chocolate oatmeal stout, pale ale, blend ale and an ESB. It was all a hit!

Proposed Legislation for Small Breweries

We recently submitted a letter to both of our local representatives and want to encourage other Virginia breweries to jump on board with our idea. This would help small breweries get off the ground and distribute their beer just as the Virginia wineries do.

Dear Senator Barker / Delegate Anderson:

My name is Sarah Meyers, a native resident of Manassas with a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from George Mason University's School of Management. I have worked in small business for over 14 years and currently work in a small IT firm locally. My husband and I have plans to open the first craft nanobrewery in Manassas. We have been discussing and researching our options since 2009 and have our business plan ready to go. We were ecstatic to learn about the new legislation SB 604 recently passed for breweries in Virginia.

The reason for my correspondence is that we have hit a stumbling block with the three tiered distribution system Title § 4.1-500. Breweries cannot distribute their beer unless a contract is signed withan independent wholesaler. If we began as a large scale brewing operation, this would not be an issue. Nanobreweries can only just break even with the current distribution model. The majority of our revenue is absorbed by the wholesaler, compounded by the fact that there are only a few wholesalers to choose from inour locality, this is a formidable barrier to small VA family business. My observation is that the Virginia wine industry is able to more or less self-distribute, even the smallest wineries can deliver to local stores and restaurants through a state organization, the Virginia Winery Distribution Company, at much less cost than using an independent wholesaler. What makes the wine industry different from the craft beer industry?

I propose a similar state sanctioned beer distribution company, the Virginia Brewery Distribution Company. This would be a large step toward microbreweries getting started in Virginia and once these small, family breweries scaled up, they could utilize the distribution system. Wholesalers would ultimately receive more customers as nanobreweries scaled up their operations! Virginia would be in competition with North Carolina and the Pacific Northwest for the greatest variety of breweries and would be able to supply the distributors with hundreds of different types of quality VA beer.This means more jobs, more revenue and more tourism for the State. As theBrewer's Association mentions, "Growth of the craft brewing industry in 2011 was 13% by volume and 15% by dollars compared to growth in 2010 of 12% by volume and 15% by dollars." It's an incredibly viable industry right behind Virginia's wine industry. We need to give the burgeoning craft beer industry the same opportunity.

The phrase "Virginia is for craft beer lovers"was recently coined to commemorate SB 604.

For entrepreneurs like ourselves, this would be a major milestone and benefit to our great state. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Sarah Meyers

Co-Founder BadWolf Brewing Company

Jeremy Meyers

Co-Founder BadWolf Brewing Company

This article explains what has happened in the wine industry in Virginia allowing wineries to work with the self-distribution laws. http://www.virginiawine.org/system/payloads/25/original/2010-02-Industry.pdf?1266261463