The Time I Almost Sold Beer at a Driving Range (And Why I’m Still Figuring Out What Comes Next)

I want to tell you about the best opportunity I’ve stumbled into so far, and exactly how quickly the universe reminded me that I have no idea what I’m doing.
It started, as many unexpected things in life do, on a dating app.
I was talking to someone I’d matched with, and the conversation took one of those turns where you stop performing and just start actually talking. She asked what I was into. I told her about the brewing — the equipment in the corner, the summer plans, the slow-building idea that maybe one day this becomes something real. And because I’d been loosely researching it, I mentioned offhand that I wanted to look into getting a one-day license to sell beer somewhere. Not a grand plan. More of a “wouldn’t that be something” kind of thought said out loud to someone I was trying to impress.
She didn’t skip past it. She said: I own a driving range. You could sell it there.
I want you to understand how that sentence landed. This wasn’t a polite “oh cool, let me know if you figure that out.” She was genuinely offering. Her driving range. A real venue. A place where people show up, hang around, and drink beer while they hit golf balls into the middle distance. If you were designing a location for a homebrewer to sell their first commercial pint, you would struggle to do better than a driving range on a warm summer evening.
I wanted to say yes before she finished the sentence.
The Part Where I Did My Homework
To my credit, I didn’t just say yes and figure out the details later. I actually looked into it. I’ve been burned before by jumping ahead of the logistics — see: the great sanitizer incident of 2017 — so this time I wanted to know what I was actually agreeing to before I got excited.
And look, I was prepared to navigate some complexity. Alcohol licensing is famously not simple. There are federal hoops, state hoops, local hoops, and then probably a few more hoops that only reveal themselves once you’ve already jumped through the first set. I knew it wouldn’t be as easy as showing up with a keg and a smile. I was ready to do the work.
What I was not fully prepared for was a wall. A clean, flat, unambiguous wall.
The state her business operates in does not allow the sale of homebrewed beer at a venue unless it was produced in a licensed brewing facility. Full stop. It doesn’t matter what licenses I hold as an individual. It doesn’t matter how good the beer is. It doesn’t matter that I have a background in fermentation science and have been refining this process for years. If it didn’t come out of a licensed facility, it cannot be sold. Period.
I read it twice. Then I read it again. Then I closed the tab and stared at the wall for a minute.
What This Actually Means
Here’s what’s frustrating about it, and I want to be honest about this because I think it’s worth saying plainly: the regulation makes sense. I understand why it exists. Licensed facilities are inspected. They meet food safety standards. There’s accountability built into the system, and that accountability protects consumers. I’m not sitting here arguing that the law is wrong.
But understanding why a wall exists doesn’t make it less of a wall.
What stings specifically is how close this felt. Not close like “I almost won the lottery.” Close like — I have the skills, I can brew the beer, I have a willing venue with a built-in audience, and the one thing standing between me and a genuine first step toward something I’ve been quietly dreaming about is a licensing structure I can’t shortcut my way around.

The Beer Problem
Let me paint the picture. I am planning on hopefully brewing a lot this summer. This is for real, that's an aspiration. Because I also will be working a lot too. Got to pay the bills. A nano brewery doesn't get itself off the ground.
But here’s the thing about brewing at any kind of serious volume as a homebrewer: you generate more beer than any one person should reasonably drink, and the obvious solution — selling it — turns out to be legally complicated in ways that vary wildly depending on where you are and what kind of facility you’re operating out of.
Giving it away is generally fine, legally speaking, which is great for my friendships and less great for the dream of turning this into something. Entering homebrew competitions is an option, and one I’ve been thinking about more seriously. But competitions don’t solve the “what do I do with the other four and a half gallons from this batch” problem.
The driving range door closed before it opened. And I haven’t found the next door yet.
Where My Head Is At
I want to be clear that I’m not catastrophizing here. This is a setback in the loosest sense of the word — I had a cool opportunity, it didn’t work out the way I hoped, and I’m back to figuring it out. That’s just how this goes. The brewing hobby has taught me more about patience than almost anything else in my life, and I’m trying to apply some of that here.
But I do think it’s accelerating something I was already starting to feel: that the homebrew phase of this journey is reaching its natural ceiling. Not because I’ve mastered it — I haven’t, and I’m not sure you ever do — but because the questions I’m asking have started to outgrow the context I’m asking them in.
I’m thinking more seriously about what a licensed facility would actually require. What the pathway looks like from where I am now to something small and real — a nano brewery, a taproom, something with a name on the door. The driving range conversation, even though it didn’t pan out, made the whole thing feel more tangible than it ever has. Someone looked at what I was building and said that belongs somewhere. That’s not nothing.
I circled “brewmaster” in a textbook in my first year of college. I’ve been running fermentations professionally for years in a completely different industry. I have the science, I have the craft, and I have a summer’s worth of beer about to start accumulating in my basement.
I just need to figure out what to do with it.
I Genuinely Don’t Know What Comes Next — So I’m Asking
Here’s where I land, and I’m being completely honest: I’m a little stuck.
Not in a discouraged way. More in a “I’ve hit the edge of what I can figure out on my own and I need other people’s brains” kind of way. Which is actually a fine place to be, as long as you’re willing to ask.
So I’m asking.
If you’ve navigated the licensing side of moving from homebrewing to selling — even at the small, one-day, pop-up, farmers market level — I want to hear about it. If you know something about the one-day license process that I might be missing, or you’ve found creative ways to share or distribute homebrew within the law, please tell me. If you’ve been through the nano brewery research process and have thoughts on where to start, I’m all ears.
And if you happen to own a driving range in a state with more permissive homebrew laws — you know where to find me.
Drop a comment below, send me a message, find me wherever. I read everything. Right now I could genuinely use the collective wisdom.
The beer is coming either way. I’d just love to know where it’s going.