If I can give you any advice on the product aspect of it, you may want to take a trip to Vancouver and do a tour
The city is hopping with microbreweries but most of them are terrible.
The successful ones have followed a very basic process.
1) Plan for what your flagship beers are going to be and develop a theoretical production calendar. This will be important to forecast your costs but more importantly the size, scale and complexity of your actual process. Planning on a lager as a flagship? Understand then that you will make little money on it and if it is popular you will consistently be under production pressure.
2) once you have identified what your flagship beers will be, spend the rest of your time perfecting them. As a start up microbrewery your Customer aren't going to have a bunch of opportunities to try your product like they would major label, so if the beer isn't good, you are more likely than a major to see your Customers vanish. Based on what I have seen and tasted in Vancouver, this step is basically lost on the brewery owners who are mostly just scrambling to get beer out the door to keep the lights on. There is so much ####ty beer on the market in Vancouver it is hurting the industry. This is a tragic mistake but can be avoided by step 3.
3) keep your overhead as low as possible! This is what kills the brewery. Many of the breweries starting up in Vancouver at over a million dollars in debt before they even open their doors. This is a quick way to turn your beer hobby labour of love into a soul crushing lead weight. Go to Storm brewing in Vancouver on commercial drive and see the location and equipment James the brewer is using to make some of the best and unique beers in the city. Then keep in mind when he started the brewery that the location was significantly more undesirable than it is now. Significantly.
Good luck, brewing beer is awesome.
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