The Brew Blog

It’s been a crazy few weeks for all of us at Merry’d Men Brewing, both from a brewery and a personal perspective. Things are finally settling down a bit after the holidays and the new year is off to a rushing start! So what’s been going on? Well, let’s see….

First, we have a contact at the local chapter of Score.org. This is a small business advisory service that helps small businesses build contacts, investments, business plans, etc. That’s exciting in and of itself, and there’s even more.

A couple alumni from the University of Missouri have reached out with an interest in providing advice and possibly even investments. We’ve been talking with them, and working to put together several iterations of startup business plans. Plus, two other people here in Burlington have reached out indicating they are interested in talking with us as well — mainly advice on getting started. At this point, that’s a huge help, trust us!

And then, the highlight of the last few weeks for the three of us (not to say the other stuff I just mentioned wasn’t great…) — we got a personalized, backstage tour of Magic Hat Brewery here in South Burlington, VT. WOW! First, a huge thanks to Matt Cohen. He really indulged us with our questions, comments and excitement. It was a great tour and only served to get us that much more excited. Of course, we learned a lot — but we plan on putting all that to work as we continue to move forward. If you haven’t tried the Magic Hat brews, you owe it to yourself to give them a shot. Their standard, cornerstone brew is #9 — definitely unique, but definitely worth it! Two things Matt shared with us that we really took away — first, the brewing industry is very close knit, friendly and open. That’s a great feeling, I have to say. The other? The gang at Rock Art started out by brewing and selling out of their home. If we could get started like that, it would be great!!! Matt said he would introduce us to the Rock Art gang so we can chat.

As we continue to pursue all the different aspects of this effort, I’d like to know just how much paperwork there was prior to the Federal Government’s “Paperwork Reduction Act.” I’ve never seen the likes of paperwork, and that’s just the federal side. There is that much more to do on the VT side.

Well, as you can see, it’s been busy and hopefully it will get even busier. We’re looking at putting together a set of glasses, coasters and t-shirts for sale to try and raise money for the initial licensing. Stay tuned on that front! We’ll let you know how it goes.

And, as always, tell your friends about our site, the blog, our Facebook pages…we need all the fans and friends and links and eyeballs we can find!

Take care and we’ll talk again soon!

–Scot

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This entry was posted by sbarker on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.