The craft beer sector doesn’t seem to be slowing down, either. Today, there are about 2,000 craft breweries operating in the United States, the highest number since before Prohibition, with another 1,000 in the planning stages, according to Herz. “So in a way,” she says, “the success of creative business models is because a rising tide floats all boats, and the rising tide of the successful breweries in the last few years that has brought us to more than 2,000 breweries now has helped change the business paradigm.”
While the majority of these new breweries will take a traditional business route—starting a limited liability company, securing a bank loan, mortgaging a home, etc.—many are tapping into their communities to get their dream off the ground.
Cheers, Times 100
Tim Dery was just another homebrewer in Seattle in the summer of 2010 when he read on a local beer blog about a meeting for individuals interested in creating a cooperative brewery in the city. Besides daydreaming about owning his own brewery—a blue-sky idea shared by every homebrewer at some point—Dery had never seriously considered the idea. But he was intrigued by the idea of a cooperative, which according to the International Co-operative Alliance, is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.
Dery ended up joining the cooperative that would eventually become known as Flying Bike and became a member of its steering committee. He is now a member of the board. The nontraditional business model drew him in. “I like the community building that is centered around beer,” Dery says. “It’s a different mind-set than my day job in tech; it’s a different set of challenges, and I like that.”
Flying Bike started soliciting members in April 2011. The co-op is still looking for a space to convert to its brewery. It also plans to have a taproom. “It’ll sort of be like Cheers, times 100,” Dery says. “Where not only does everyone know your name, but all our members are owners.”
However, Flying Bike is not blazing new ground. Black Star Co-op Pub & Brewery in Austin, TX, opened in September 2010 as the first cooperative brewpub in the United States—and, as far as anyone can tell, the first in the world, says Jeff Young, Black Star’s head brewer.
Young, a professionally trained brewer, had just moved to Austin from Alabama in 2006 when he attended one of the co-op’s organizational meetings. Initially, he didn’t even know what a co-op was, but he believed in its basic tenets. “It basically put a name to what I wanted to do, which was have some sort of brewery or brewpub that worked very closely with the community and the owners and take some of the production or the design of the beers, take some of that responsibility and spread it around and get more input, and feedback, and help,” Young says.
Black Star’s genesis was similar to Flying Bike’s. A group of like-minded individuals interested in starting a local brewpub, but without the wherewithal to go the traditional route, got together and made it happen. “None of us had the money, and none of us could go to the bank and say: ‘Hey, I got this wonderful idea. Give us half a million dollars,’ ” Young says. “So we really had to start from zero dollars and, in some aspects, zero experience.”
It was a slow process, and one without a playbook. It took three years to get the co-op organized and functioning, and an additional two years to build the brewpub, Young says. He acknowledges there were doubts as to whether the cooperative model would even work, but a core group remained committed to the idea.
