So we have a few things to update you about. We submitted to the ABC back in the last week of October, and we ran into a little bit of red tape since then. The ABC requires us to provide them with information regarding our current employment, and they had an issue with Steve's current position at Whole Foods. Steve is the Associate Team Leader for the Specialty Dept. at Whole Foods in Santa Barbara, which is a management position. Steve was asked to provide a detailed job description for his position, and after the ABC received the description, they informed us that there is a conflict of interest - Whole Foods is a retail location that sells beer, and with Steve's management position that allows him to oversee the beer purchasing decisions, brewLAB could have potentially monopolized the beer wall at Whole Foods. So, Steve was given 3 options in order for him to remain on our ABC license: 1. Step down from his management position at Whole Foods 2. Leave Whole Foods entirely 3. Step down as a manager/owner of brewLAB. Steve has chosen the first option. He was required to fax them proof of his new (non-managerial) position, and we are waiting to hear back for their approval of the change.
Other than the issue with Steve's employment, we ran into an issue with our source of funds. In order to apply for an alcohol license, we have to disclose to the ABC where our money is coming from. We have to provide loan/gift documents for all the money that is loaned/given to us. They mentioned that we might also have to provide personal information, and possibly even fingerprints, of our financiers. Also included in our list of funding sources was Kickstarter, and after our application had been submitted, the ABC requested our funding documentation from Kickstarter. We informed them that we had not yet launched the campaign, but would be doing so shortly. Since they need documentation of funds in order to process our application, we are going to have to remove the Kickstarter from our current list of funding. The ABC also mentioned that there could be issues with the Kickstarter from their end. Like I said, we might have to provide the personal information, and possibly even fingerprints, of our financiers...so they mentioned that could be an issue if we are receiving funds from a large multitude of people (such as what would occur in the case of receiving donations via Kickastarter). They also mentioned that there could potentially be a conflict of interest if any of those donations came from sources that would benefit from their donation. They couldn't give us any straight answers as to whether or not that would be an issue for us, only speculation. We have contacted 5 other breweries in California who have successfully gained funding via Kickstarter to ask them if they ran into any similar issues. So far we have only heard back from 2, and neither had encountered such issues. So we are going to do some more research to find out what our options for crowd-sourcing are. It might be the case that we will have to wait until we are licensed to run our Kickstarter campaign.
Although we did encounter some red tape related to Kickstarter, it may have been a blessing in disguise. We have two friends who are currently running Kickstarter campaigns and have run into some technical difficulties. One of them had noticed that the donations to their campaign had slowed down significantly, so they decided they would go online and make a donation themselves just to make it look like there was some action going on - as a way of getting the public a bit more amped. When they tried to log in to their amazon account to make a donation, they were unable to do so. They called Amazon, and couldn't get a straight answer as to why they had trouble logging in. Eventually, they got it out of them that Amazon was having trouble connecting with the browsers Safari and Chrome - for about ten days. Meaning that there was a potential that anyone trying to donate to the campaign would not be able to do so using those browsers for ten days. And those are pretty standard browsers for a lot of people. They are probably going to pull the plug on their campaign and run it again at a later time. We informed our other friends of this issue, and they mentioned that multiple people trying to donate to their campaign were reporting the same problem. If we were currently running a campaign, we could also very well be experiencing the same problem, and that could've greatly hindered our ability to reach our goal.
Other news since the last blogPOST is the launch of our website. We now have an actual website! We put it together ourselves, and none of us are experts in the field, so it is nothing too spectacular or fancy. Hope you enjoy:
http://www.brewlabcraft.com/
Also, we just received news from the city that they are ready to condition our ABC permit pending some questions we have to answer regarding the specifics of our business (ex: hours of operation, occupancy load limit, if there will be an on-site manager at all times) This is good news, because once the city gives us the green light to use our space as a brewery, we can begin getting plans approved for construction.
All this brings me to another thing I'd like to address - when we are going to be opening. We just don't know, and we don't want to keep guessing because we don't want to lead you all on, or lead ourselves on. There have been a lot of things we encountered over the last 6 months or so that we never expected to have to deal with, and new things seem to be popping up almost every week. We didn't know how long this process was going to take, so we were always optimistic with our projected opening date. But this is wearing on us - every time we reach another unexpected hurdle, we are forced to push the date back further. Doing so has caused us to put a lot of extra pressure on ourselves to make things happen faster - which isn't always realistic, and the added stress from our self-inflicted pressure usually causes us to work less efficiently. So when we are asked the question (which we get multiple times a week) "When are you guys gonna be open?", we are doing our best to explain that due to the forces that be in the world of starting a brewery, we don't know for sure, but we are hoping it will be sooner than later. We deeply appreciate all of the support that remains despite the lag in getting the brewery open, and we apologize if anyone feels like we have been leading the community on....OK, I feel a lot better having expressed that and gotten it off my chest. And thankfully we don't feel so alone in this respect, having read about other breweries' trials and tribulations with starting up. Here is a blogPOST from The Bruery (Orange County) from back in 2007 when they were getting started. It explains how they were also constantly having to push back their opening date, and it makes us feel a little better about how long things are taking. They began renting their space in May of 2007, and were planning on beginning to brew in August of that year, and selling the beer that September. They weren't even approved to brew until the following February (2008):
http://bruery.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-guessing-about-launch-dates.html
Another blog that chronicles the experiences of a small brewery starting up:
http://hessbrewing.blogspot.com/
Thanks again for all of the support. We will keep you updated on any important happenings. In the meantime, there is still a good amount of local beer available for your consumption. Island just released a new double IPA for all you hop-heads - King Tide. It's a pretty tasty IPA, and rather drinkable for 9%. Go try it!
Cheers!
-Rob
