How hard is it to start a brewery?

[akr71]

Circling back, I suppose scale is also important. In contrast to large scale craft brewing (i.e. not commercial brewing scale) What about someone who wanted to simply brew and sell 5 gal at a time (nanobrewing?) and sell, say, at a farmers market? Does this brewery model make sense financially? Does this brewery face all the same fees and regulations as a large scale craft brewer?

I don't know much about the beer industry, but I would guess at that scale your problem isn't fees, materials etc it would be labour costs. Since it takes the roughly same labour to make 5 gallons as a bigger batch your labour costs will dwarf any other costs when you get down to the 5-10 gallon scale. Let's pretend it takes 5 hours to brew, an hour to package and then 5 more to sell the beer, it takes more than that but lets just pretend, also assume material and capital costs are $0 for simplicity. Your 5 gallon batch will yield 38 500ml bottles. So to make the median wage in NS ($21 currently) you would need to sell your 38 beer for $231 or $6 a bottle.

Don't forget that $6 is going to go up once you factor in alcohol taxation, unless you want to sell at a loss... which you already are, since materials cost were the mythical $0