Delicious and Nutritious

After learning that Florida’s “Cottage Industry” regulations didn’t extend to soft drinks, we were hard pressed to see how we could take Ugly Beer to the next level on a bootstrapped budget. I spoke with a brewing and bottling equipment consultant based in Orlando, and he worked up a $1.5 Million equipment quote that would automate everything from cleaning to filling to capping beer bottles for us. The machines would need to be paused, adjusted, and reset every time we loaded in a new type of beer bottle because of the varied size and shapes we collect, but the system could ultimately crank out 15-20 bottles per minute when operating. It’s a super exciting proposition to automate everything related to the production, cleaning, and bottling of an Ugly Beer plant, but we’re not yet ready or capitalized for it.

I talked to a couple other friends who had some familiarity with bottling, but couldn’t come to a clear answer on what the “in between” plan was if we’re not ready to deploy $2 Million+ on equipment, real estate, and the works.

Then I spoke with the owner of one of my favorite beverage joints in town (shout out to Missy and The Zone Nutrition), and she mentioned a guy who was renting out space in his commercial kitchen when not in use.

Later that day I was talking with Jonathan Peres of Beast Coast Nutrition who confirmed he could rent us kitchen time on a commissary basis to produce and bottle our product. He could even walk us through the licensing process as a Mobile Food Vendor and arrange for an inspection. Score!

Back to Norwoods Farmers Market

We’ll be setting up shop where it all started at the farmers market again this weekend. This time we’ll have 3x the inventory from our first visit when we sold out. We’re getting pretty good at using the commissary kitchen for two hours once a week (Tuesday evenings while a babysitter stays with our littles), but the operation is still by hand. The goal is to get to ~100 bottles ready to sell from each session, which would be two 5-gallon batches of root beer.

We sold out 48 bottles last time with a simple tent and table setup, and it seemed like offering samples was the primary driver of sales. Offering a small paper cup of root beer gives us time to tell the brand story about saving bottles.

However, we didn’t net many social media followers on the last trip. This time, we want to see if we can drive both sales and social buzz. We’re thinking a simple 10 percent off the purchase price if the customer snaps a picture and then tags our brand on social media.

First Ugly Press

Speaking of buzz, we met a local writer that has written articles on the recycling issues in our county over the last couple of years in our local newspaper, Charles Guarria (twitter, web). He wanted to hear more about the what and why of The Ugly Beer Co, and put together a GREAT first piece of press about our movement in the Hometown News Volusia!

Norwoods on both ends

As mentioned in the article, we’ve been picking up bottles from Norwoods in addition to selling at the farmer’s market there. Back in the Fall when we ran our first pilot sale, Emily had stepped inside the restaurant to go tinkle.

She stopped by the host stand on the way out, and struck up a conversation with the restaurant’s general manager. He heard about what we were selling outside, and thought it was a great idea to let us collect glass bottles from the restaurant’s three bars (one downstairs, one upstairs, and one outside in their amazing tree house area).

After approval from the owner and some retraining of a staff that hadn’t had to separate glass from trash in a couple of years, and we’ve been quietly making the town’s only glass “recycling” run at Norwoods every week since the Fall. We haven’t had the sales outlet for a couple of months, so we’ve been storing bottles in a local Cubesmart storage unit.

Now we’re exciting to be back in business and putting those bottles to good use. If you’re local, come say Hi and grab a sample at Norwoods Farmers Market this weekend!