Not quite, but I do have the confidence and drive to make something work, though! Worth more than money in my opinion.
Do you have any experience in this field? Do you have any experience in starting a business? How much free cash flow do you have? How much collateral do you have? A bank will only give you 80% value on any collateral you have to borrow against. If you don't have the collateral banks won't even talk to you because breweries are lumped in with bars as a high risk investment. So small banks won't even be able to get the government to sign off on a loan, and big banks won't talk to you unless you are borrowing $1 million +.
If you don't have the money than you will have to think about taking on investors. How much of the business do they get and for what cost? Just remember the more partners you take on the more diluted your shares become the longer it will take to make any money. Starting a brewery is crazy expensive even if you bootstrap it. ESPECIALLY if you are hiring out as much as you are already thinking about.
The market for used equipment is drying up like crazy because everyone who has done a Mr. Beer kit once wants to open a brewery now. It's even HARDER to find nano scale stuff used. You can buy chinese **** for cheap but it might be 202 instead of 304 stainless, which I've seen happen. Quality new equipment is a 8-12 month lead time. One of my homies who bought a kit from a MAJOR player was pushed back 8 months PAST what was promised. There are a lot of new players in the small scale, but most of that equipment is all manually operated and basically oversized homebrew equipment. So expect each turn of your brewery to take longer, which on a small scale can be killer.
THEN, you need to know the ins and outs of your local, state, and federal alcohol laws. OR you going to be paying a lawyer $100 an hour to tell you what you need. In my hometown for example, there are only a certain number of liquor/beer licenses allowed to be give out. So if all of them are gone you are ****ed. So you have to wait for someone to go out of business and hope they let their license run out. BECAUSE they could hold on to it and make you pay them to transfer the license to you. You also need to know all the building and zoning codes. Probably going to spend ass tons of time with the planning committee of your town.
Make sure you understand that you have to have a building rented/bought and equipment at least ordered before you can even get on a list to get inspected. SO hopefully you can negotiate some free rent from your landlord.
These are barely even the basics of getting a place set up. Now you have to know if your place will even make money. How big is the town you live in? What is the market like? What is your competition? How are you going to stand out from everyone else? The days of making money off basic beers are over unless you are the only one in the market. But even small towns have 1-3 breweries now.
Judging by your, "I don't have a million dollars" I assume you are wanting to do a 1-5bbl set up. You need to figure out what kind of profit margins you can make off that. If you have heavy investment, have employees, and are trying to make any money at all you will need to do most all of your sales out of a tap room. Can your town even support the volume of beer you need to push through a tap room to break even?
Most distros won't talk to you with a less than 7bbl kit. Some big boys want 15bbl kits. Then, distro don't pay you **** per keg. Do you have any experience selling beer? Ever been in the industry at all? You are going to need to know the ins and out of selling. What distro will you go with? How many accounts do they have? What is their sell through time? How is the product kept? A pale ale that sits in a non temperature controlled warehouse for 10 weeks is going to be **** no matter what the original beer taste like. So a bar will put that on, it won't sell through and they'll never buy your stuff again. Unless they have the local schick, there are too many good choices now. Bars have almost a paralysis of choice now. Why as a bar would I pick your product when even Three Floyds will probably be cheaper and it sells itself?
Sorry to be a debbie downer but you need to know all this before you can even figure out if your brewery will break even. And you will lose money. A lot of it starting up. Especially considering it sounds like you want to be pretty conventional.
Now, there are ways to make bootstrapped and small scale work. But you better be the dopest in your area at what ever niche you have. I mean constantly kicking out treehouse level hoppy beers or killer sour beers or something you can make money on. Because on a small scale you will never make money on pales, wits, hefe, porter, ect.
With no industry experience it's going to be a long road fam. I've started and helped start a few craft bars and those were hard. Breweries are 10x harder.
Love,
666