Small-Scale Brewing

While getting ready to put together this website, I spent some time thinking about how best to describe ourselves — what's a fun way to basically say home brewery. I'd seen a few small commercial breweries of late that billed themselves as nano-breweries, i.e. smaller than micro-breweries. Micro and nano are both SI prefixes for small numbers (10-6 and 10-9 respectively), so being a non-commercial home brewer, I figured I'd go smaller.

The next prefix smaller than nano (10-9) is pico (10-12), but PicoBrew is apparently the name of a commercial beer brewing appliance, so perhaps not the best label for describing a brewery.

Initially I thought I'd call us a femto-brewery, using the SI prefix for 10-15. However, it's always prudent to google any name or term you want to use before doing so. As is so often the case, my idea wasn't original. And while that's fine, I'd prefer to be somewhat consistent with how anyone else may be further abusing the SI system of prefixes to describe the size of their brewery.

North Williston Brewing calls itself a femto-brewery and defines the term as a home brewer who hits the 200 gallon mark annually. They also offer some definitions for micro, nano and pico, although if you search around some more, you'll find there are different opinions on these matters.

Regardless, Grossdale Brewing is still a long way away from hitting the 200 gallon mark annually. So let's look smaller. There are three more official SI prefixes smaller than femto: atto (10-18), zepto (10-21), and yocto (10-24). The internet is full of home brewers labeling themselves as atto-breweries, zepto-breweries and yocto-breweries. But is there any agreement on what these terms means?

Das Ale Haus in Southern New Jersey calls itself an atto-brewery, claiming that since it produces no more than 48 gallons annually and that is four orders of magnitude smaller than the limit for a micro-brewery, it is appropriate to use the SI prefix that is four smaller than micro. I'd argue that atto is actually a trillion times smaller than micro but none of the other numbers above actually have a direct relation to the literal definition of their corresponding SI prefix. So I can get behind this definition. And also 48 gallons is still way more than we produce annually. So let's keep going smaller.

While there are plenty of zepto-breweries and yocto-breweries out there (including at least one commercial brewery calling itself a yocto-brewery), I didn't find any that put a number to their definition. So while all of the SI prefixes below micro have gotten use, only a few of them have had anyone attempt to define them (that I have found).

  • micro - commercial, up to 460,000 gallons a year
  • nano - commercial, no volume definition
  • pico - name of a commercial product
  • femto - home brewer with more than 200 gallons a year
  • atto - home brewer under 48 gallons a year
  • zepto - home brewer, no volume definition
  • yocto - home brewer, no volume definition

Since Grossdale Brewing is currently about as small as can be (did I mention there's a toddler?), I'll just pick the smallest of those and call us a humble yocto-brewery. And hopefully we can start moving up that ladder.