Start Your Own Craft Brewery in Australia, with Confidence.

Do you have a dream to run your own business?


Or even better, to run your own craft brewing business?


Are you planning to step into a world of hops, yeast, water and malt?


Working in brewing, designing recipes, fermenting, creating, selling and building community?


The Brewers Institute provides the only dedicated craft brewery business courses designed specifically for breweries in Australia.


Our courses have been designed to help you plan, start and grow your business with a clear business and viability lens.


We guide you through the steps needed to successfully open your brewing business, and take your product to market.


The courses are delivered online, and are supported through a network of students alongside the Founders of The Brewers Institute.

In good and bad economic times, starting a small business is risky - especially a capital-intensive one like craft brewing.

If you are well prepared and educated on what you need to do to limit that risk, starting a brewery in Australia can be personally rewarding while possibly providing a good financial return.


If you’re going to do it, do it right - save time, money and reduce risk with our "Planning Your Successful Craft Brewing Business" course.

Know your numbers, especially before you start a craft brewery in Australia.

The Advanced Business Financial Model spreadsheet included in the course helps you see what the numbers could look like in your business.


It will give you a full understanding of the financial risks, and potential rewards, before you commit any cash or time to your craft brewing business.


Put in the products you will sell, the retail price, number of kegs, cans and pints in each sales channel, the costs and overheads and it will show you the potential sales, profit and the cash balance over five years.


The course will guide you towards having a fully functional business plan that you can present to any bank or investor.


Along the way, we will help you understand the craft brewing market, and test whether there is demand for what you are thinking of brewing and selling.

There’s financial support to start and grow a craft brewery in Australia.

Did you know there is great Federal government support for the craft brewing industry?


The current excise rebate means small breweries in Australia have a financial opportunity to start a brewery, without paying excise on their first $350,000 of excisable beer every year.


In other words, breweries don’t pay excise until they have sold enough beer to go over that rebate each year.


If you had a beer at 5% ABV, that means you would need to sell 480,668 pints, or 281,191 litres, a year at your brewpub, before you exceed the rebate.


Let’s say you sell your pint at $12 including GST, that means you would need to sell over $5.2m worth of pints in a financial year before you start paying excise (the rebate restarts 1 July each year).


You see, in that pint is $0.73 of excise, which isn’t a cost to your business until your 480,669th pint (then you only pay excise on beer sold from that pint).


As the excise rate is different if you sell it from a keg (at your venue) or in a can, you could reach the excise rebate sooner (if you also sold your beer in cans.)


If you are selling your beer in cans, the same 585ml pint has almost twice the excise in it, $1.35 (or for a 385ml can, $0.89).

This isn’t our first rodeo.

We launched The Distillers Institute in early 2020, and have guided more than 660 people on the decision whether starting a craft distilling business was for them or not.


Around 100 said ‘yes’, and have gone on to grow their dream craft distilling business.