Our Texas Plans
We have been blown away by the community response since announcing Starbase Brewing a few months ago. We have received quite a few emails asking about our location so we wanted to take some time to address our future plans for Starbase in Texas over the next couple of years.
Since December, we have invested a significant amount of time into researching real estate around the state of Texas. Our initial plan was always to build and open our first location in Cameron County near Starbase. Obviously our name already has close ties to the city of Starbase, Boca Chica, the Rio Grande Valley, and South Texas. We also love the RGV craft beer scene, and want to be a part of it as quickly as possible.
However, building a production brewery is a pretty large project that takes a while to even begin. At a minimum, the steps in front of us include: finding a location, purchasing the land, planning the brewery, permitting with multiple government organizations, hiring contractors, actually building everything, more permitting for alcohol-related reasons...and then at some point many months (or years) down the line, actually producing beer. Because of the incredible demand we've seen so far, our top priority has started to shift towards figuring out how to get beer into people's hands — and mouths — as quickly as possible.
We recently came across an opportunity to take over an existing brewery with a full production facility in Austin, Texas. Though this wasn't quite what we had originally planned for, this move actually makes a lot of sense given where we are at the moment. Taking over this Austin facility will allow us to start producing beer in just a few weeks as opposed to potentially over a year. It will allow us to develop our branding, validate our recipes, and scale to meet demand in a way that makes sense. It gives us a foothold in a location central to all of Texas which will make it easier for us to expand distribution to the whole state. On top of all of that, Austin is a really cool place with an amazing craft beer community, many thriving breweries, a top-notch tech scene, Gigafactory Texas, a (rumored) SpaceX Starlink factory, and much more. Taking all of these factors into account, we have decided to move forward with purchasing the Austin location!
We hope to close this transaction within a month. After that, we can focus our efforts on optimizing this location to crank out as much high-quality beer as possible. As we ramp up production, we are planning to ship much of it down to the Starbase area in South Texas so we can start gathering feedback from craft beer enthusiasts and space fans in the RGV. We are also continuing to explore other locations in South Texas near Starbase and we hope to have more to announce regarding that soon. Ultimately, our goal is to grow as quickly as possible, and the more beer we can produce and sell from our Austin facility, the faster we will be able to complete our South Texas expansion. We are super excited to begin this chapter in Austin and can't wait to unveil some details on our first beers soon. Stay tuned for more updates!