Post Thanksgiving Update

Things have been slow moving in the Rushing Duck camp, but there have been some positives. We have the keys to the brewery and have signed a lease. Like I mentioned earlier, though, it’s just a provisional lease until we receive approval from the town. However, we did get a chance to spend some time in the building to assess what needs to be done to make it brewery friendly, and it’s going to take A LOT of work. There is a ton of demo to be done, we need to build a tasting room and an office, electric and water lines need to be run just about everywhere, the floors, wall, and ceiling all need a serious paint job, and we need to run floor drains through the building. I’m sure there is more, but that’s more than enough for me to think about for the time being. It’s a good thing that I’m leaving my current job soon because getting things ready is going to be more than a full time job. 

We’re also getting ready to start moving equipment in too. Three of our fermenters should be on a truck en route to the brewery as I write this. The brew house we’ve purchased will be decommissioned by its current owner, Roy Pitz Brewing Co., in about a week, and then we can arrange getting that up to the brewery as well. 

We also purchased a used bottle filler from my current employer, Weyerbacher. The initial plan is to have our year-round beers sold only on draft. Seasonal beers and any big beers/special releases will be packaged in 750ml bottles with this filler. We would do more in bottles, but the filler we bought is too slow to use on a regular basis (I know from experience). Also, it only fills still (uncarbonated) liquids, so bottle conditioning is necessary to carbonate the beer. I like the idea of bottle conditioning some beers, but force carbonating is a much more consistent method to use on a day to day.  The idea, hopefully, is to buy a small canning line within the first year to package the rest of our year-round beers.

I’ll try to take pictures of the equipment unloading process, just in case anyone thinks that I’m lying about this whole “starting a brewery” thing…

-Dan

Belated Intro

I feel a bit guilty that my last post was a bit anti-climatic, so I decided to write another. I figured that since that, initially, I will be the only full time employee of Rushing Duck, that I should give myself a proper introduction. 

My love of good beer started in college. Like most 18 year-olds I started off drinking the standard fizzy, yellow swill that is vastly abundant at any college in the United States.  My epiphany happened one night after stumbling home from a college party. My roommate and I both decided that while we enjoyed the social aspect of beer, we could not stand the taste of the mass-produced stuff at our disposal. However, at our age we were unable to head on over to the local bar or liquor store to try a bunch of new stuff. So I decided that if I couldn’t buy it, I’d make it. That Christmas the first gift I asked for was a homebrew kit. Like any good parents, my parents (and current owners of Rushing Duck) were ecstatic to get one for me. Understandably, my first few batches were less than delicious. I knew that there was a substantial learning curve involved before I started making good beer. During this time I also happened upon an ID of “questionable legality”. Over the course of the next year I made it a point to try as many styles of beer as possible to find out what I did and did not like. This really helped me develop my palette. So I started homebrewing like crazy at this point. One day it kind of occurred to me that I was investing a lot more of my time into brewing and learning about beer than I was in pursuing my degree in Political Science, so shortly before graduating, while all of my friends were applying to schools for their Master’s Degree, I was applying to the American Brewer’s Guild to learn how to brew professionally. I was accepted to the program, but there was a year long wait list before I could start. In the meantime I figured the best thing to do was spend as much time as I could in breweries by volunteering my time cleaning kegs, working bottling lines, and mopping floors for a couple NJ breweries. After a few months, an entry level job as a cellarman opened up at Weyerbacher Brewing Co. in Easton, PA. Though it was a long commute from my home in North Jersey, I couldn’t pass it up. For the next few months I cleaned fermenters, kegs, floors, and anything else that needed cleaning. At the same time I was also taking the American Brewers Guild as a distance learning program. By sheer luck, Weyerbacher was looking for a new brewer the week I was scheduled to graduate from the ABG. I was lucky enough to get the promotion to brewer and then a year later to Lead Brewer.   However, as good as it has been to be a part of Weyerbacher for the past 3+ years, being in charge of my own brewery has always been the goal. After a ton of planning, my dad and I decided to pull the trigger and secure the financing that we needed to put it all together.

That about catches us up to present day.  We hope to be selling beer in the spring of 2012 (assuming no significant setbacks). Check back often and stay up to date on our progress!

- Dan

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Crawling Along

Not a whole lot of news to report.  The good news is that we’re getting very close to signing a provisional lease to get the keys to our building. The bad news is that a provisional lease only really allows us to move equipment in and store it there. Before we can install equipment, make building improvements to make the building brewery-friendly, or apply for necessary state and federal licenses we need the town to approve us as a business first. As we’re finding out, this is becoming a particularly slow process that involves a lot of foot dragging. We’re now looking at mid December to early January before we will have successfully jumped through all requisite hoops to get our local approval. In the meantime we are moving forward with a lot of other things. A logo is going to be finished real soon, and new equipment will be purchased with a lot more regularity. Small progress is still progress… 

-Dan

Spending Cheese

Some of the big news that I was alluding to in the last post was that we were very close to purchasing a bunch of equipment.  We have purchased two 15bbl fermenters and have put an order in for another 7bbl fermenter as well as a 15bbl brite beer tank to be fabricated for us. Initially, the plan was to buy most of our equipment used in order to save money, but we got a very reasonable quote from a company called Pacific Brewery Systems out of LA. They have a very respectable reputation, so we decided to just go for it. However, the unofficial reason we bought new is that I’m a sucker for the glisten on a shiny new piece of stainless steel.

So while that’s not all of the equipment we need to get started, it’s definitely a big chunk of it. I’ll be sure to update as we buy more fun stuff. Also, probably some other big news on the way…Stay tuned. In the meantime here is a picture of my two new babies.