Wow! We suck at blogging...

We suck at blogging. Like really suck. But... we have also been trying really hard to put all of our focus into actually opening. With that being said, I do like sharing our progress, so we will compromise and make it short and sweet.

As you probably noticed, we have had a name change. People didn't really remember the word city in our name, but they remembered the rest; so, we dropped it, and couldn't be happier! Our new name and our new logo are perfect (to us)!

We have made tons of progress on our tenant improvement. To name a few: we got our permits, our concrete is re-poured, we framed our office, storage room, and new bathroom, and raised the ceiling in the existing bathroom (its 9 foot high now, but was 8 foot before and had a huge fluorescent light housing that dropped down and made it feel even smaller). We added wood siding to the outside of the cold room to dress it up, plumbing, electrical, and drywall are almost all finished, and most of our brewing stuff is either on its way or being installed.

Its hard to estimated an opening date, but we are trying REALLY hard to be open March 17, 2014, for Saint Paddy's day!!! What an awesome day to open!

Anyways, there you have it, short and sweet.

Cheers!

 

Full Swing at ECB

Things are in full swing at the brewery. We have received all of our permits, except or building permit, which we expect to have in about 2 weeks. We just resubmitted our plans with corrections yesterday, so by January 2nd we should be able to get cranking on the construction. We have done pretty much everything that we can now, so once we get the permits we will be in good shape.

The bar is nearly done, and it looks amazing!

 

We have also started installing the draft system.

 

There are 6 more of the secondary regulators, but we are waiting on parts before we can finish the install.

 

 

We have also received our 3-tap jockey box from Micro-Matic that will be used for events (Super excited to start doing events) and our draft line cleaning system. Next order of business is to set rebar in the trenches so we can be ready for pouring concrete!

 

P.S. Our blogging has been lackluster, and we apologize. All of our free time has gone into the brewery (both in the build-out and behind the scenes stuff) for the past couple months. We love updating the blog though because it helps us actually see our progress, and it always feels good after a blog post to see what we have accomplished.

 

Cheers

 

 

The latest

Hey all, its been almost a most since I have posted last, crazy how fast time goes by! Well, demo is pretty much done--walls are gone and floors are cut--and its time for the new stuff to go in. Our plumbing is installed, and we have started building the bar. We have been eyeing reclaimed lumber for the finish, and are also looking at ways to turn old wooden wire spools into tables for the tasting room. Hopefully in a few days we will have come up with some really cool ideas.

Our plan is to repurpose as much as we can; the story behind repurposed material is so much more interesting than for new material (new material stories are pretty boring in general (i.e. "yea, we went down to Home Depot and picked up this lumber on an orange cart and then stood in line and paid for it...").  Whereas the material we are looking at came from the inside of a barn in Wisconsin that was built in the late 1800s--much more interesting...

So, check back in the next few days for more updates, I promise to post them more regular.

Cheers!

Update to the most recent happenings

A lot has been happening here at Electric City Brewery. We have been working on finalizing our logo (still), obtaining our building permits, satisfying all of the licensing requirements,  and taking delivery of our various brewing equipment, and fabrication of our custom made parts. If you are interested in the details, read on....

To start, we have been working with Potamus Press in Temecula on our logo design, its still a work in progress, however we are getting closer to something we really like. The big news here, is, we were offered some graphic design help from a rather large company that has worked with Stone Brewery and Hangar 24, to name a few. We are saving the details on this for later. But for now, we have sent them the below logo for critiquing and alteration (as they see fit). We are VERY excited to see what they suggest!

 

Our permits are moving along, although at a snails pace. We applied for a construction permit last week, but were told that we can't get one until our CUP (Conditional Use Permit) is approved. The confusing part here is that we only need the CUP to operate the tasting room, not the brewery itself (And its the brewery side of things we need to start constructing). We were at the City Hall last Thursday negotiating a resolution to this "hang-up". We expect by Monday or Tuesday to have this issue resolved so we can build some walls and connect some pipe.

 

The ABC license went off without a hitch. They were most pleasurable to work with and everything was near seamless. Biggest problem (and the only one) was the plans we submitted to them weren't in the correct format; we changed formats, resubmitted, and all was well. They instructed us to call them two weeks before we open for an inspection of the premises. After that, we are 100% approved.

 

TTB is still "in-the-works". What this means is we have submitted it and haven't heard a thing since. Lets hope that no news is good news!  

 

The brewing equipment and brewhouse fabrication is coming along nicely. Our mill was delivered last week and its a big blue beast--we are super anxious to use it!!!!

 

 

Our auger arrived, too. The black circle on the left is the cork-screw-auger-thing-a-ma-jig that installs into the PVC piping (slightly visible on the left of the below picture). The auger installs onto the bottom of the mill and carries the milled grain upwards to our grist hopper. The grist hopper sits above our mash tun and holds the milled grain until we are ready to brew. 

 

 

 

The false bottom was a very interested piece of the puzzle. The false bottom is basically a big coffee filter that keeps the grain suspended a few inches above the bottom of the tank. This allows us to rinse the sugars with "sparge water" while leaving the grain behind.

 

We called around for a few weeks gathering information and getting pricing. We wanted to use perforated screen, but everyone told us it wouldn't work. They said it would crush under the load, but recommended a product called Wedgewire; its reportedly very strong, it does the job quite well, and it runs $3000 per sheet--the final product after fabrication would cost upwards of $6,000--for us, that's an expensive coffee filter.

 

We knew the guys at Aftershock Brewery in Temecula were using perforated screen so we went down there and got some great tips from the owner/operator/nicest guy around, Marvin. He recommended some parts and off we went to build it.

 

Our neighbor Dave from Terra Dynamics drew up the design--based of our rough explanation of what it should look like--on his CAD system, and after a few days of labor came to us with the final product (pictured below); it seems to be bullet proof! Each "pie" shaped section easily holds 400lbs (we tested it) and there are eight of these sections. We estimated 2000lbs of force on a huge batch of Strong Ale, so, at 3200lbs of theoretical capacity, we should be more than okay.  

 



 

 

Last, but not least is our HERMS coil. HERMS is an acronym for Heat Exchange Recirculated Mash System. It goes into the hot liquor tank and during the brew day we pump the liquid from the mash through it in order to maintain temperature. For some reason haven't snapped a picture of it, yet,  but we assure you, it is very cool.

 

[PICTURE COMING SOON]

 

 

That's the latest from Electric City Brewery, and we need to get back to work, so until the next interesting topic, Cheers!

 

It's cleaning--not demo--we promise...

Since we can't start demolition until we get our permits, we decided to do the tasks that are considered repairs more than demo. We removed the tiles and insulation from the T-Bar ceiling, and put down a Soy Based Cleaner to remove the glue that once held the flooring down in the front office and bathroom. We also removed the doors from the two walls that will eventually be demolished. These doors will be sanded down, stained a new color, and will be reinstalled on the new rooms we are building.

 

The waterproof fiberglass wainscoting that was in the restroom (you can see the glue from the old board in the picture) was removed and discarded. We are going to repaint, then install some new wainscoting, new toilet, new sink, and the rest.    

 

 

 

 

 



 

We also received another brew tank, and our grain mill and auger (the grain mill is blue, and is on the far left, next to the stainless steel grist hopper, which is next to the two brew kettles, which is next to the two fermenters and the bright tank). 

 

 

All-in-all, even though we cant start construction, its been a pretty busy week, and it feels like we have made some progress. Todays agenda has us scraping the floors and building the auger for the grain mill (its in a box, and is in about 1000 pieces), so, off we go to pretend like we know what we are doing!

 

Cheers!

That's the plan

We are working with architect Anne Parizeau to put all of our ideas onto paper (We were really trying to save money by drawing our own plans, but the city Building and Safety guy was "not in-agreement" with this plan. Bummer, because every dollar we save in permits and paperwork can go towards the equipment we sorely need, and we sorely need a keg washer!).

Anyways, below is the diagram that we submitted to the TTB. TTBs main concern seems to be brewery and tasting room separation and designation--they say that they want to make sure their revenue (taxes on the beer) stays protected. What this means is that there needs to be some means of deterrent to restrict non-brewery workers from accessing the non-taxed beer area. Nobody we have talked to knows precisely why this is a concern, but we have heard many of different guesses. Perhaps patrons were drinking from the bright tanks "tax-free"? If anyone knows the real answer, please, fill us in!

 

The hatched part of the plans is the actual brewery; it includes the beer production area, as well as the electric room, office, restrooms, utility-room, and the service-area behind the bar. The non-hatched area is the tasting room and observation area, which pretty much just means no seating (We weren't too keen with putting tables in front of the restrooms)... 

 

If we ever need to add more fermenters (Lets hope!), we could expand the production area into the observation area/entry simply by moving the 42" High Metal Rail over about five feet. Hooray for built-in expansion capabilities!! But for now, with 2519 feet of production area, we have all the room we need.

 

Cheers! 

 

 



Dabbling with a new logo

We ask almost everyone we come into contact with about our logo (The Cityscape logo with the Tesla Coil Sun in the background), and always get mixed responses. Some people like it, others are just "eh". And we have always felt about the same. The logo was okay, but never really grabbed us.

We always knew we wanted our logo to reflect the fact we are an electric brewery, but it was very hard to nail down a concept. We had asked ourselves many times: what does electric, or electricity, look like?  It was always electric bolts, tesla coils, or the shock waves that happen when a cartoon character gets electrocuted. All resulted in boring logo designs.

However, inspiration came to us when we weren't even looking for it! While installing a cities worth of 50 amp receptacles at the brewery (First Photo) we thought to ourselves, "hmmmm, could we turn one of these into a logo?".

So after a few hours on Microsoft Paint we came up with the below logo design (Second Photo). Our goal was to incorporate the electric receptacle into our logo design, while keeping it simple and clean. Obviously our logo designer will need to redo it professionally, but so far we think its pretty cool... 


50 Amp Receptacle







Rough Mock-Up of our Logo Concept Design

 

What does everyone think:

1. Did we nail it?
2. Should change something?
3. Did you like the other concepts better?