In the US there's a "brew pub" chain, called Granite City that operates through an interesting tax loophole.
As it was explained to me: in the US a tax is applied to alcohol distributors for moving alcohol across statelines; the Granite City chain centrally operates their brewery for cost reasons and desired to transport their beer to each Granite City brew pub location via tanker trucks; to avoid the taxes involved in transporting alcohol what they do is transport the wort in the tankers, and then pump them into onsite fermenters that are in each brew pub. They're now no longer transporting alcohol across State lines and can avoid this tax; they also end up with lower costs as they don't have to have a full brewery setup in each pub, they don't have to pay full brewers (just "assistant brewers" that know how to add yeast to wort and clean fermenters), and the consuming public sees giant stainless steel fermenters and just assume that their beer was produced on premises...
After reading the "Starting a Brewery" thread, I dedided it was worth resurrecting the idea of physically locating a "brewery" within a bonded warehouse with this idea applied.
IF your "brewing" operation is split between a facility that produces (undilluted) "wort extract", (a food product containing no alcohol), and then transports this wort to a bonded warehouse where you have rented space for appropriately sized fermenters, the actual creation of the alcohol would occur within the bonded warehouse.
Is this not a possible solution to the bond problem for a small brewery?
This would provide two opportunities:
1. It would be simplier, faster, and would require less capital investment for small breweries to get started in Ireland.
2. It would create increased revenue opportunities for any Bonded Warehouses that might cater to small breweries in this manner. (This has got to be worth a slight cost premium vs. just storing pallets of bottled wine and beer.)
Adam
