Hey, did you miss me?
I want to give you the facebook address again. It's not a shameless plug, it's just the easiest way to keep up on what's going on with the brewery on a regular basis.
https://www.facebook.com/muddycreekbrewery
The page also shows all the latest photos etc. I try to upload as many as I can here but things are much easier on the FB page.
However, here is all the inside skinny that YOU GUYS want to know that facebook people don't much care about.
We have finished all our licensing requirements from the Feds (easy) and the State (harder) except the final inspection walkthroughs. Those will no doubt be a bit of a pain but we have check-lists of everything that we need to adhere to so as long as we do meet all the requirements we are told that there will be no issues. (Ya... I know.)
We have built the bar and only need to front it and put the top on and lacquer and finish it. We need to wash and polyurethane the floor and paint the walls and the taproom will be ready for our customers. All our taps (along with 17 turbo-taps,) shanks, connectors, and bar line has been ordered. We are purchasing our gas-mixing system to deliver 2 of our beers initially on nitrogen along with the ability to regenerate nitrogen ourselves rather than purchase it which will over the course of about 16 months pay for the cost of the nitrogen regeneration system.
We have all our kegs on hand, this weekend we finish sheetrocking the fermenting, lagering and milling rooms. (That will finish all our drywalling.) On Monday we are having the lead electrican and the accounting manager back from our electrical company so we can figure out the rest of the work on the building to finish the electrical for both the taproom and the brewery control system.
The brewhaus tanks should be shipping within a couple of weeks and we should have them in house by the 3rd week of July. By mid August our goal is to have them all hooked up and start brewing test batches. By the end of August we hope to have everything dialed in so we can start brewing in earnest.
Basically, we have everything in place right now except the brewhaus tanks and some transfer hose which we will order as soon as the tanks are shipped. Starting out we are going to run everything pretty simply. We'll start with just 4 beers on tap, although we have 17 registered with the state and will eventually work our way up. We'll open with a stout, an amber, a blonde and of course and IPA. Immediately available we will also serve root beer and lemondade for shandy options.
Soon after we will add a wheat ale and a porter. After that we'll include a true hefeweizen and some fruit beers. Down the line we'll also include ginger beer.
We've already had some interest in local distribution. We've organized some limited tastings and local restaurants and some pubs are interested in carrying our products. We'll get to that as soon as we are clear on what our taproom volume is. We have a 10 bbl system and we plan on running 20 bbls a week initially until we learn what our demand is. What our taproom doesn't require we will distribute and with luck we'll find we may need to up our weekly production sooner than later.
We run a farmhouse system, so there's no substitute for time. We need to age our beer for it to be at it's best and that means a planned rotation and foresight for what's down the road. That's one of the reasons we went with a larger system than originally planned. We wanted to have the option to put down as many as 35 or 40 kegs each weekend and let them sit for a month aging while we continued to produce beer each week to supply whatever needs we may have.
In more interesting news, we built a Mobile Libation Station basically to take to one of the owner's nephews wedding. We made two beers last month, Muddy Creek Chocolate Stout and Dirty Blonde Ale, put them in a couple of corny kegs and built a mobile serving station out of a simple plastic trash-can on wheels. It holds the kegs, a 5 lb C02 tank, all the hoses, connectors etc and plenty of ice to keep the kegs cold and has a tower-double tap on the lid.
We also have all our T-shirts in. I don't know if I added those pictures yet, but I can show you some of those too. For the sake of brevity, I'll just show the men's black and the women's pink although we have other colors as well. Soon we'll be doing public tastings were people can buy pint glasses, mugs, growlers and T-Shirts if they like and we can start recouping some investment and perhaps making some attacks on the principle of our business loan. The good news is that enough people have asked us about our pint glasses, mugs and T-Shirts that we may be able to sell enough to order more and make the tastings regular events to maintain our high community interest until we can officially open. (Ah, but you ask, how can you do tastings if you aren't officially open or fully licensed?) We can GIVE beer away in our 4 oz taster glasses (or bigger, if we like.) at a location OTHER than our taproom. Fortunately, the Post Martini bar is right next door to our taproom so we can do tastings and also give short tours of our taproom if we like where people may choose to purchase "Muddy Gear".
And finally, we also have a YouTube channel if you'd like to see some of our other semi-cheesy stuff. I occasionally put up some vlogs I call "Meet your Maker" which refer to the guy who makes the beer. There are other segments to. Some are old beer commercials I found and put up, others are just vlogs from days gone by that talk about beer etc. If you want to check it out, feel free if not - don't. My feelings won't be hurt.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9dea2w_RaBaFWefvNGukPw
Anyway, we're getting closer day by day. It's a ton of work. I won't lie. Once you see the bar you'll see just how much love goes into that kind of endeavor. (It's 26 feet long by the way.) We need to install a dishwasher underneath but that's pretty minimal. All in all, things are going very smoothly. As smoothly as any new brewery goes, I suppose.
Have a great day everybody. RCDAHAHB!