What is this?

Community Beer Works is a small brewery in the process of opening in Buffalo, NY. We should be open by early 2012, and it has come to our attention that in order to be a functional brewery one needs money. That's where you come in: you can help support a local cause, be personally responsible for great beer hitting the market and get some cool stuff in the process.

If you mean "what is Kickstarter?" then I'd suggest you read a blog post we wrote on the subject, or look at Kickstarter's own FAQ. Essentially, we're asking you to give us money. In exchange, you get cool stuff. Your credit card isn't charged until our project ends and we reach our goal. If we don't get our target of $15,000 then we don't get any money and you don't get your stuff: so please, help us get there!

Who are you?

CBW is seven guys: Ethan, Dave, Rudy, Greg, Dan, Matt and Chris. Some of us have been friends for decades and some only a few years, but we've coalesced into a Borg-like hive mind focused on making great beer and having fun while doing it.

Nano-whatsit?

When we said our brewery was small, we mean really small. Our batches will be 1.5 barrels (bbl), which is 45 US gallons. Let's look at the Boston Beer Company, brewers of Sam Adams: if you compare the amount of beer they sold in 2010 to the amount we're projecting to sell in our first year, we would be an ant (5 millimeters) and they would be two giant squids stacked end to end (26.14 meters).

We're what's called a nanobrewery: a brewery that's much smaller than a microbrewery (we know the orders of magnitude are all wrong but it's what we're called so there). By starting small and expanding organically we hope to be able to provide fresh, exciting beer to Buffalo. Our flagship beer will be a pale ale: you'll consistently be able to find it at our brewery and at a number of good beer bars in the city. Beyond that, our small size will let us be flexible with seasonal and single batch beers: maybe we want to make a porter. Okay! Or maybe we'd like to try a mild. Sure! We'll be nimble enough to follow our whimsy.

I'm still confused

I'm sorry about that. Maybe reading more about us would help: our website has been updated weekly for a year and a half, with every Thursday bringing a new blog entry about our progress, beer news in general and, occasionally, videos of drunk squirrels. We also, like everyone else on earth, have a Facebook page and have been known to tweet as @communitybeer.

If you'd still like more clarification, or just want to say hi, you can drop us a line at info@communitybeerworks.com.