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