It's Already Old News, But...

Tony Magee's announcement that Lagunitas is planning to open up a production brewery right here in Chicago is big news for both Chicago's burgeoning craft beer scene and particularly for the long list of brewery startups seem to be in various early stages of getting beer onto retailers' shelves.

I recently put faces and names to two of the startups on that list at the last Square Kegs meetings I attended - Gary of Panic Brewing and Jerry of Uné Anee Brewery. I'd met both guys at prior meetings and found their breweries on the internet independently of talking to them. They're both pretty experienced brewers, both have invested in professional brewing education, and both seem like pretty genuinely good guys. I'm rooting for both of them to succeed.

And I think that Lagunitas coming here is going to make it just a bit easier on them. Sure, they'll be competing for taps and shelf space with a really well-established player in the market who can produce more beer in a single brew cycle than some of the nano / startup breweries will in a month or a year. But that doesn't really matter all that much compared to what Lagunitas could and hopefully will do for the supply chain and other related businesses that a production brewery relies on.

For example, one of the biggest cost factors in running a brewery is freight. Tony gave that as his singular cost justification to build this massive brewery. Grain has to get from a farmer to a supplier and ultimately to a brewery. That takes a lot of diesel. The same goes for bottles and then for finished beer it's basically the opposite process. The raw materials are cheap, but the freight adds a lot of cost in to the equation. (To put it on a homebrew scale, it costs ~$15 to ship a $50 sack of grain from Northern Brewer to my office in Northbrook.)

Having some big production breweries based right here is going to make it far more attractive for those grain suppliers to throw a single pallet of malt on the back of a full truck or to open facilities closer. It's going to make it easier for Windy City Distribution or Glunz Beer to buy more trucks, pay more sales reps and pick up the new startups with that extra capacity. Every successful (and particularly large and successful) brewery that opens has a positive impact of the ecosystem that supports the industry.

So I'm really excited about this announcement. Not only because I'll be able to go buy growlers of some of my favorite beer, but also because this is a huge leap in Chicago becoming a world class beer city with amazing local breweries dominating our tap handles. Hopefully in five or six years, Jeremy and I will be able to buy a used 15 barrel system off of somebody local who's outgrown it, take advantage of the great infrastructure that's grown to support our local beer industry and have a little bit easier of a time launching a dream because of the people who paved the way for us.