And I'll say, if you've only been brewing a year and relying on biased input of friends and family, you aren't ready.
This.
The rest is irrelevant for now. Hire somebody who knows the ropes in the brewhouse or get more years/study under your belt and wait for the market reset, which is coming. At that point, you'll be able to pick up equipment a lot cheaper and you will hopefully have the experience, recipes, time, and money to jump in. Until then, keep it as a hobby. I could write a book about opening our brewpub but there are already enough books out there. (I did post quite a bit during the construction phase on our FB page, which is "Idyllwild Brewpub," so you can read that if you want to get an idea about our journey.) The books you should be reading are the textbooks about brewing because it's all about the beer and your journey will be unique to you and your project. Yes, there are some generalities that apply across the board, but there are more things that will be distinctly yours, especially when it comes to dealing with the local, state, and federal government stuff.
Before I turned pro, I had been brewing about 25 years, wrote for Brewing Techniques magazine back in the 90s, and had won some awards (even a best in show for a Tripel). I also have a degree in microbiology and have an extensive brewing library that I've read cover to cover. Even after all of this, I was SCARED when the time came to start brewing and charging people for my beer. I can't even begin to explain the level of stress; in fact, I missed our grand opening because I was in the ER with stress-induced atrial fibrillation. Yeah, I'm wound pretty tight naturally and have gone through a lot of stressful situations in my 63 years, but this was well beyond anything I had experienced before, even other business start ups.
Successful? Well, we brew just under 500BBL/year and all of it is sold on premises since our liquor license prohibits us from filling growlers or distributing unless we use a distributor, which I won't do since there's no money in it at our production level. At this point, we have 21 house-brewed beers on tap and always have one or two waiting for a tap. I have never lost a batch and we have sold everything we've brewed. Are all of the beers world class? No, but they're clean and tasty, and folks seem to like them since they pay for them and come back again and again. I continually tweak the recipes until I get a final version for our system. Of the 30+ styles of beer I have brewed here, I probably have solid final recipes for over 1/2 of them. I guess that's some measure of success.
I've been involved in this pub now for over six years and while there are things I'm dead tired of, the actual brewing of beer isn't one of them. I still get excited the night before a brew day and I hope that never ends. When it does, well, I'm old enough to retire and that's what I'll probably do.
Cheers,
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Don
Head Brewer / Partner
Idyllwild Brewpub