Beer By the People

Get in on the world’s first co-operative brewpub

Black Star Co-op invites patrons to own the bar where they drink.

Steven Yarak thinks there’s no good reason that you shouldn’t own the bar where you drink. And by “you” he really means you, not him.

The brainchild behind Austin’s Black Star Co-op had plans to open a bar after he graduated from school in 2005. The idea quickly evolved into a community-owned brewpub. Yarak called the first meeting for interested individuals in January 2006. Sixteen people came. Now the co-op—which will be the first of its kind in the world after a physical location is nailed down—is 900 members strong. That’s a great built-in consumer base for the pub when it opens.

When and wherever that may be. Plans to open at 1712 Lavaca fell through at the end of 2008, and a Location Search Committee has been formed to help scout out a new venue.

In the meantime, the co-op holds “Beer Socials” where members can interact sans a physical location to call home. The Beer Socials also seek to recruit new members via information tents, mug sales, and so forth. They’re held almost monthly at Kenny Dorham's Backyard.

And the beer? That’s different, too. Head brewer Jeff Young graduated from the American Brewer’s Guild Intensive Brewing Science & Engineering program under Master Brewer Steve Parks. By day, Young is a chemist. He majored in math, from which many of his brews—Aleph Null, Epsilon, and his “irrational” and “rational” beer series—inherited their monikers.

Black Star’s membership literature promises that its beer will be original and representative of the area. Young’s concoctions deliver on the promise. “Aleph Null” (a term Young defines as “a level of infinity”) is a wine-beer hybrid—like a barley wine but with more wheat, to which Young will add Hill Country grapes before aging it in Syrah oak barrels. Another example: “Waterloo” seasonal wheat ale is infused with Texas peaches and wild fermented for a touch of sourness.

As for the co-op model: “It’s not consumer operated,” Yarak says. “We don’t require people to volunteer—it’s worker self-managed. It’s a blend between a worker and consumer co-op. A consumer co-op would be like a credit union, but here’s a professional staff that handles the operations, and the rest operate the board, et cetera.”

Each member pays a share of $85 and a one-time joining fee of $15, and gets one vote in business referenda in return. No member-owner owns more than 20 percent of the business.

Of course, this presented some stickiness. Nobody could go to a bank and get a loan sizeable enough to get the business going.

“We have our member-investor shares and, through that program, we’ve raised a fair amount of money, but it’s quite difficult to administer—$10,000, $15,000 dollars at a time,” Yarak says. “Whereas if [one or two investors went] to a bank, [they] could get $200,000 in one fell swoop. But the upside to that is we have almost a thousand members, and that provides us with a built-in customer base when the brewpub opens.”

If you want to try the beer before that, then you have to stalk Young for his homebrew.
“The general public can’t get it yet,” he says. “But every once in a while, if I show up somewhere, I’ll have a bottle of something to open up and taste …”

SIDEBAR:
To join the co-op, find out about the next Beer Social or weigh in on the location search, visit: http://www.blackstar.coop/.

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