We’re stoked to feature our client, Brewaucracy, in this month’s newsletter! They’re a craft brewery and taproom down in Hamilton. They have a 4.9 star rating out of 310 Google reviews, so it’s safe to say they’re kind of awesome. Owner Greig has provided some insight into the business, and we’ve linked their socials for you to check out below.
My name is Greig, and Brewaucracy was born from my love of beer. Having fallen in love with it, learned all about it, travelled for it, and even helped found a consumer organisation (SOBA - now sadly defunct) to promote it, brewing it seemed almost inevitable. Luckily for me, I didn't have to take the daunting step from home brewer to commercial brewer alone. Phil and I had been friends for a while, and shared a love of the final product. Phil's sage business advice and head for numbers was extremely useful in getting our little brewing enterprise off the ground, and his continued wisdom, calm head, and friendship has been instrumental in us still being here after all the challenges of the last few years.
The craft beer market in New Zealand has undergone a radical transformation since we opened our brewery and taproom. Demand has decreased, partly driven by COVID and associated changing habits, partly by a changing demographic that seems to drink less, and partly by craft beer maturing to the point where we brewers can't just rely on being new and cool to sell beer anymore. Brewaucracy was sized for a market that no longer exists - we are set up to produce around one to two thousand litres per week, and that was designed to mostly go to market as keg sales to bars, with our taproom being a small part of that. With the exception of a few well-capitalised larger players, the market has "localised", with people preferring to drink at the brewery, and margins for packaged product sold offsite being razor thin. As a result, we produce "only" around twenty-five to thirty thousand litres per year - roughly one batch every two weeks. If I were to starting a brewery today, I'd size accordingly, producing smaller volumes of a larger range of swifter rotating beers, having two or three locations, and selling at more of a premium.
As a brewery and taproom, we turn seven years old this year, and while the industry has taken a beating and we're not as profitable as we had hoped, we are at least still here and much loved by our local community, and Phil and I are very proud of that. Cheers!
