State of the Poppy: germinating

Where we are the moment

Starting a brewery is a lot of fun.

Allow me to rephrase that.
Starting a brewery is a lot of work, most of which has little or nothing to do with brewing, and all of it requiring a metric shit-ton of attention. So the best advice(°) we have for starting brewers is this: you better learn to find the fun in all the hassle involved in starting, and eventually running, a brewery.

°) the difference between ambition and arrogance is the timing of well-intended advice. So until we've been operational for a couple of years, please take all advice we care to share more as internal musings directed to our past selves than actual "we know what we're talking about" advice to your future selves aspiring to become brewers some day.

Getting all the assorted paperwork in order is -and I'm being exceptionally euphemistic here for once- a daunting task. Compare it to Sysiphus rolling his rock up and down that hill of his, whilst grinding for mythic WoW-gear. And filling out his tax papers in the meantime. In Mandarin. Without hands.

The rewards are bountiful.
(check out ExistentialComics if you want to find out what happens next)

So, let's keep things at "we have most of the paperwork sorted out".

Sorted out implies three categories:

  • unknown(°)

  • pending

  • sorted out (no really, this should be okay. We think)


°) most of which is truly, madly, deeply unknown.

Aside from all the paperwork, there's practical things to sort out. A location being perhaps the most obvious.

Courtesy of the Cronos Group, we finally found a place in a warehouse in Kontich. In the next couple of weeks, a fully operational brewery will be installed there, and before you know it, beer will be flowing at last!


Be prepared. Tall Poppy is coming....