Opening a Brewery

This is the first article in a series of articles about opening a small brewery in Hyattsville, MD a stone’s throw from DC If you’d like me to answer a specific question about opening a small brewery, tweet @JonCetrano or shoot me an email at jon.cetrano@streetcar82.com, and I’ll do my best to write about it.

I’m opening Streetcar 82 Brewing Co with two other partners, Mark and Sam. After we decided to open a brewery, our next decision was: where? We initially thought DC would be a good location for us and toured the city. Everywhere we looked, the rent was too damn high! One industrial building we looked at in Ivy City was $14,000 a month. For us to be able to do that, we’d need at least a few million dollars to open up, jump right into a 30 barrel production system, and have distribution ready to go to make it financially feasible.

“But what about investors?” you ask. “With investors you can get more capital and access!” Eh,  that is true, but the problem with outside dollars is that