What Would Jesus Brew?

Article in the Wall Street Journal online:

http://tinyurl.com/dycg3bf

Brewery Pondering Continued

So I stumbled onto a very helpful site for brewers, prowbrewer.com.  Lots of informative stuff, but in particular I stumbled onto a forum thread about nanobreweries, and read an incredibly helpful post by a nanobrewery owner who seeks to inform prospective nanobrewers.  The gist: not a profitable venture.  This is fantastic news (he says with a note of sarcasm).

I could finagle all kinds of arguments and computations to disprove this claim, but it would be futile.  When someone who has done exactly what you plan to do tells you something, you listen.  I wasn't sure whether a nanobrewery would be profitable, and I expected it wouldn't allow me to quit my job, and now I know it won't.  But it may very well be a good step to opening an actual microbrewery.

What is a nanobrewery?  While not a well defined or industry term, it's typically a brewery or brewpub (beer manufacturer) producing in 1-7 barrel batches (a barrel is 31 US gallons).  Small microbreweries are often 15bbl operations.  And of course there are many different sized operations in craft brewing in general.  For perspective, New Belgium Brewing, the third largest craft brewer in the US, has 840,000 barrel capacity at their Ft. Collins, CO facility.  They probably make 2,000 - 4,000 barrels of beer a day there.  I would be making maybe 3-10 barrels a week.

I think what I've figured out with a couple of hours worth of reading and consideration is that a nanobrewery is a great way to figure out the process of brewing professionally, and a great step on the path to opening a large, full time, profitable brewery or brewpub.  If this is really something I want to do, I'll have to approach it in this fashion.  A nano operation would allow me to test the market, establish a customer base, prove income for a while, and plan a larger operation.

Brewery Pondering

The last couple of months I have been brewing all grain beers in small batches, mostly 2.5 gallons.  I find this process easier.  Although the brew day is not really shortened compared to a day brewing 5 gallons, several aspects of the brew day are easier.  For one thing, there is less of everything: less water, less grain, less hops.  That means that for less than $15 I can make a decent 5% beer on a weekend.  It also means everything is easier to move, heat, and cool.

I like this easier process because it allows me to brew more often.  I've brewed almost every weekend for the last six weeks or so.  Typically I'll set up my equipment in the kitchen on Friday night, and start the strike water heating at about 8:00 am, and by noon I'm cleaning everything up.  I've made two batches of an ESB, two Imperial Stouts, an IPA, and an English bitter.  In the next month I'll be able to taste most of these and see how I'm doing.

Along with my increased interest in homebrewing, I've started thinking about the possibility of opening a nano-brewery.  Although that is a trendy idea in the craft brewing world, it's also very appealing for someone like me with 1) no experience and 2) no money.  For a small investment, I could open a very small (think one barrel) brewery that sells to walk-in customers and fills growlers maybe two or three days a week.  I'd start with two or three beers, all in the English tradition, and sell growlers for the walk in / walk out folks.  Also I'm considering the possibility of brewing on order; that is, letting interested folks with a recipe or beer idea have them brewed on our system.  In this way the brewery would be intensely local and feel like a true shared experience.  We could do this maybe once a month.  This is all still in concept mode.

My biggest concern is my lack of experience brewing.  While I've been homebrewing for about 7 years, I've only just gotten more serious about it in the last two or three and I still have a lot to learn.  With all that said, though, I think it takes more than expertise to open a brewery.  Mostly it takes balls; the willingness to give it a shot and deal with it if it fails.  I've been so long in trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up that I think I'm ready to take a shot on something of interest.

For the system, I was thinking a one barrel (31 gallon) custom system built using Blichmann pots (55 gallon) and pumps to do the transfers.  I'd have someone local weld the structure together based on a useful design.  Initially I think I'd gas-fire the kettles.  Long term I'd rather have an electric brewery run at least partially on solar power, but those dreams will have to wait for the future.  As for fermenters, it would be nice to have at least three, so that it would be simple to rotate two year-round brews constantly, and have one fermenter available for seasonal / customer brews.  I think I'd maintain a ten gallon system as well for experiments and some custom / seasonal brews (think big beers).

The whole general idea is a pub concept.  While I love to cook and love to eat, and would love to have the pub be a restaurant also, I think the weekend pub idea is a great place to start and test the market.  Find out whether people like the beer, and get the word out about filling growlers.  In my experience living in different places, having a place you can go and get a growler filled is awesome, and the experience breeds repeat visits.  And if you can sit and have a pint with a few folks while the growler is filling, so much the better.

This is all in concept still, and, I think, at least two years out.  But I'm seriously thinking about how to get it done.  In the meantime: brew, brew, brew!

The Laundry Room Brick Floor

Here is a picture of the work in progress.

The laundry room is an earthbag room about 90 SF (12' X 10' oustide edge to edge), and was originally built with an earthen floor.  Well, while we were out of town shortly after the room was finished, a PVC pipe joint broke and lots of water poured onto the floor, and it swelled and buckled and heaved and cracked and generally was rendered unusable.  About a month ago I started digging it out bit by bit and replacing it with a brick floor, seen here.

The bricks are heavy pavers, the kind used on city streets.  I began by smoothing a sand bed where the bricks would go, then lined them out in a pattern with about 1/2" joints, and tried my darndest to level them in a row across the room.  The result has been a very rustic, if not exaclty level, floor.  I've laid another course since this picture was taken, so the floor is easily half finished.  I'll have to snap some photos of the walls, especially the north wall, which was partially destroyed by the leak, and which I am in the process of re-plastering.

The Wellhouse

I started building a new wellhouse around the existing one back in August.  I dug an 18" deep trench and filled it with rubble and rock, then laid down a stem wall of broken concrete chunks, often referred to as urbanite.  Then I ran a couple of courses of rock filled bags, and the rest of the bags have a good sand/clay soil mixture.  I'm about halfway there.

Two weeks ago I laid on the first layer of cob plaster over half of the bags on the south side, mostly to protect them from UV.  In working with earthbag building before on our laundry room, I had the unfortunate experience of haveing several of the bottom layer bags disentegrate, spilling their guts everywhere.  Not good.  It takes suprisingly little time for these bags to disentegrate in summer sun.

Once I get the walls to roof height, I plan to tear down the existing wooden wellhouse and then roof the new earthbag wellhouse.  The new wellhouse will be about 15' in diameter and only just tall enough to allow a stock door to be framed in.  Eventually I will brew and ferment in this building.

Hyperadobe

   If you're into natural building, you have likely heard of adobe, and you have likely heard of earthbags, but you may not have heard the term "hyperadobe."  I stumbled across it a month or so ago while reading about earthbag building, and it's a very cool method of building with earth that combines adobe and earthbag methods.  Here is link to an informative lesson on the method.

http://www.earthbagbuilding.com/articles/hyperadobe.htm

   I've also found a supplier of the continuous roll rachel netting required to construct as shown in the above link.  This company is in Canada, and I'm set to order 200 feet of their rachel tubing to do some experiments with.  The problem is that shipping is high from Canada, but if you buy a whole roll it comes out pretty cheaply per foot.  Here's the response I got from www.bagsupplies.com:

From: Maurice Wilson | BAG Supplies Canada Ltd [mailto:info@bagsupplies.ca]
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2012 8:02 PM
To: Cummings, Colin P.
Subject: Re: raschel tube netting rolls

Hello Colin,

Thank you for your email.  We sell in rolls of 3,200 ft x 16" loose width.  Will stretch to a max width of 20"Colour Orange.  Price in USD$ 241.00 per roll x our store. We await your reply, thank you for now.

Kind regards,

Maurice Wilson.

   More to follow on my hyperadobe experiences.  For now I'm working with polypropylene woven bags, cramming them with my silty-clay soil and any sand I can find.  Brutal labor.

Intro

This is the place where I will post at random intervals details about what I'm building, baking, brewing, growing, fermenting, cooking, or just plain thinking about doing.  More to follow, but if you like homemade bread, beer, and buildings, you'll probably enjoy this.