Why Finding a Brewpub Location is Tough

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Transcript

Updated transcript coming…

Hello again it’s Augustine Stino Iacopelli and you are listening to what’s brewed with Augustine oh your source for information on craft beer craft coffee and craft food as well as a little bit of an insight into the trials and tribulations of opening up a successful craft brewery in in our case brewpub I’ve we are into our almost a full year now at the time that I’m recording this of looking for a brewpub location in Wichita Kansas and we still haven’t gotten what most recently we lost out on a location on the north east side of town side of town we originally set we work to look in but we have since found ourselves expanding our area of search for the right location for our first location of Augustine oh brewing and we thought this was to be a really great location if you are connected to us on Facebook which you can find us by going to Facebook.com/Augustine oh brewing and if you go there and you connect to us so you’ll see pictures of the concept art for this location which was just fabulous looking it was good me a great location unfortunately the somebody else going for the location and they wound up outbidding us and so we’ve founders of spec at the starting line but not to me it’s starting next week, done quite a a lot of other work and you just can’t keep pushing forward but it is another reminder just how hard it is to find the right location for a brewpub in particular now you might be asking yourself why why would it be so hard to find a location it is Lotta locations in the Wichita’s Lotta locations in your city probably as well but as it turns out when it comes to beer production most most municipalities is true in Wichita it’s true most likely near a city or town in town as well there are a lot of places that the Greek cannot be placed and that it right away reduces the number of locations you can even look at it doesn’t mean that there are ways to get around some of the our regulations by working on your eyes zoning in and going before the zoning commission with good reasons why you should go into certain location Central standard brewing here in Wichita had to do that as well and so it’s not impossible usually but it does make things difficult and it also throws up additional in it slows your project down further when there’s already a lot of things that that can slow a project like this down so your locations are very plentiful in our case we have been a very insistent especially looking at some of our competitors here in the a local market we are very very insistent that we will have good parking for our customers I think it’s one of the number one complaints I hear about Wichita brewing company and other breweries in the Wichita area that their hip happening places but it’s really hard to find parking and I know as for myself I’ve bypassed locations that look like it’s so packed in terms of parking that I just say the heck with going there and so what we want to make sure we have is we want to have adequate parking it’s one thing to have a parking lot it’s so big that even if you are packed it looks like there’s nobody there would want that either but there’s a right balance of parking spaces two seats in your robbery that is fairly important in our case were looking at the spaces that we can get about 100 230 or so people in there comfortably and you really want to have almost a ratio of one spot and one seat in order to be absolutely certain that you’re going to have plentiful parking for your for your guests at your brewpub or door just a restaurant in general because well the reality is a lot of people come on their own to come to restaurant come to a bar it’s probably even higher than I am a typical family restaurant and the last thing you want is to have somebody have to park across the street or have to you just bypassed by it’s a real quick turn off and so that’s a big thing for us to I can’t believe it blader that point a little bit beyond that there’s a lot of my remodeling on just about any space that we would go into and so we have to find spaces that require as little work as possible because it’s already worked that’s involved with installing the house itself and getting all of that functional and laid out correctly and so because of all the expense on the brewhouse side we need to really have a second-generation restaurant to offset the expenses that are incurred just to get the upper house installed and otherwise there’s a lot of upfront cost on our part which we just were not ready to or desirous of putting into it because then it winds up increasing dramatically our burden of expense on our loans and the means that we have a higher breakeven point and hey at the end of the day we love making beer for you we love making food for you we love making coffee for you but were in it to make money for us to sell and if you’re planning to open up a similar location and you were not thinking about I want to make money for me I want to get to my goals well then you’re getting into it for the wrong reason because at the end of the day it’s going to be tough it’s going to be hard it’s the long hours even if you have in a general manager to basically run your show I can bring on had brewers in and have the side of things taken care of you still have to mock that managed the piles of paperwork that come with running a business especially one that is federally regulated like breweries are so it helps to have your mind set around that well also and then you know we also want to have the maximum advantage possible over our competition in the area we love our competition the good guys I I know them all they’re just there in it to the to do their thing were in it to do our thing but at the same time we are competing with one another and our team is relentless to find the system that will be as competitive as possible pricewise we want to be able to not necessarily provide you with the cheaper beer but a better beer a for we can do that very very happy so recommendations for those of you who are out there and you’re thinking about in your searching for trying to figure this whole thing out in terms of your brewhouse location and maybe getting frustrated hey we been getting frustrated to at the in our team at Augustine oh brewing it’s been challenging at times for us to keep our heads up and move forward give yourself the time in terms of finding a location for a brewery it can easily take six months nine months a year or maybe even more than that to find a location it’s also easy to find a location quickly if you’re not doing your due diligence on location there’s been a number of places that opened that they chose their location and they didn’t think about some of the ordinances involved that would make their operations very difficult so take the time one power player if you can find somebody who’s a mover and shaker in your community and you can get them on your team that it can make all the difference in the world honing your plans and workflows with that extra time that you have and never ever ever give up I’m Augustine Iacopelli and this is what’s brewing with a Augustine oh thanks for listening