The mission of Topsail Brewing Company is to create and distribute high quality craft beer that satisfies the evolving tastes of craft beer drinkers, while providing a platform to engage the local home brewing community. To do this, Topsail Brewing Company is planning to build a packaging brewery in Northern Virginia (focus on Fairfax County, VA). In the past, location was not a great consideration in the establishment of a packaging brewery. Instead, the primary considerations were low costs of rental space and easy access to transportation routes. Several trends have come together to increase the importance of location for packaging breweries. The first is the growth in the ?farm to table? concept where people are increasing their grocery expenditures on local produce. This desire for local has spilled-over into the craft beer market as well.
While Topsail Brewing Company will create high quality craft beers for the local market (and eventually beyond), it will also focus on formally engaging the local home brewing community. The home brewing community is a very passionate group who, if properly engaged, can not only serve to help promote Topsail Brewing Company beers, but act as an force multiplier to our R&D efforts. To engage this community, Topsail Brewing Company will install a 2 barrel R&D system alongside the larger production system. In addition to brewing pilot batches, this system will be the platform for home brewer competitions. Many home brewers create interesting beers that they like to share with friends and family. Unfortunately, the size of their systems, and lack of ability to distribute, severely limits their ability to share these beers, receive greater feedback and further improve their craft. To assist these home brewers, Topsail will run competitions (starting with quarterly and eventually moving to monthly) where we invite home brewers to submit descriptions of their beer on our social media sites (Facebook). The beer with the greatest number of votes will be selected for brewing. The Head Brewer at Topsail will consult with the home brewer on the conversion of their recipes (from malt extract to grain or scaling for greater production volume) and it will be brewed. After the beer has fermented, it will be offered in the Topsail tasting room for purchase; all of the proceeds will go to Topsail. The benefits of this program will be many: ? Topsail will be able to significantly increase the number of engaged followers in social media (an important part of our early marketing strategy): o In order to have your beer voted up, home brewers will encourage their ?friends? to follow Topsail o These will be engaged followers because they will be voting for their friends and following the results ? Topsail will significantly increase its R&D efforts ? getting direct market feedback about not only what innovations home brewers are coming up with, but the market reaction to them ? Home brewers will have the ability to profile their talents, brew on a system beyond their own personal resources, and get direct feedback from consumers and brewers ? Because we will sell the beer in the tasting room, this R&D effort will be self-funding Since home brewers will own their recipes, they may choose to take the results of the brewing session and launch their brewing careers, or simply view this as a great way to get feedback for a hobby they are passionate about.