Happy Friday, and welcome back to FNBB! Come in and have a cold one with us!
Craft brewing is a business, and a profitable one, but here's a story I can't see happening in other industries:
According to a new a blog post this week from Russian River Brewing, “We are still moving forward with the plans for Firestone (Walker) to brew Pliny the Elder for us during our construction in January/February.”
Think about this for a minute. Would the place you work help out a successful competitor, or would they be jumping on the chance to increase market share for your products? If AMD had fab problems, would Intel help them out? Fucking get serious. I'm sure Firestone will make money off the contract brewing, but I still think most companies wouldn't pass up a chance to stick it to the competitor.
The bad news is that Russian River's new brewhouse will not be any larger than the old one, so production will stay the same. They're just replacing a worn-out 50-barrel brewery with a shiny new 50-barrel brewery.
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I'm out at the homebrew club tonight, I'll check in later. What are you drinking? Who's brewing?