You don't need a tad more money, you need a lot more money. I don't even know how much money you do have and I know you need more.
Are you going brewpub or distributing brewery? Don't undersize your initial system. It will just end up making your life crap nearly immediately. For a distributing brewery, I wouldn't start with anything less than 10bbls, and even then, 15bbls is probably better.
For a brewpub, I would say bare minimum 5bbls, but 7+ is probably better.
If it were me, I would open a brewpub without food, just operate as a tasting room selling pints and growlers, and if you have excess capacity, do limited bottling/distribution in kegs to local bars just for advertising. There is way more money in that startup design than in the distribution end of things.
There are currently 633 breweries trying to open up in the US. That is a lot. There is enormous competition right now, for equipment, for customers, for shelf space, for everything. You have to differentiate yourself from the competition somehow. You probably won't do it on quality if you are a distributing brewery. There is just so many great breweries out there already. You can try doing it with different sorts of beers, you can do it with marketing (blech, don't do it like that), you can do it based on location in places that don't get much great craft beer, you can do it on price (blech, too hard to compete with Sam Adams/Sierra Nevada on price). The best way to do it, I think, is to cater to an underserved area and put all your efforts into a nice tasting room where you can sell 4-5 dollar pints that cost you less than a dollar to make.
