Bigger Money

We spent an even larger sum of money yesterday. Noooo... well, yes. Lawyers aren't the only people who require engagement letters with retainer deposits. We officially teamed up with Destree Design Architects yesterday. Despite working on highly-stylized places like Samba and Fromagination, the folks at Destree are very grounded and approachable. Helping us evaluate locations and design our facility won't be as lucrative as some of their other projects, but they're cool with that.

I spent the last day of 2008 doing something I love: bottling a batch of Belgian Pumpkin Ale. Bottling is ok on a homebrew scale. There, I'm not a hypocrite.

Big Money

We wrote our first four-figure check today... scary! We've now officially retained a securities lawyer to review our investment offering. Up next: take a few days off to enjoy our families' culinary skills because we can no longer afford food. After that, we'll retain an architect and commence an intensive location search. We practiced this afternoon by checking out an unexpectedly awesome property. As if our spirits weren't high enough, the House Ale tastes fantastic - my experiments with organic ingredients and unfamiliar yeast strains are beginning to pay off in spades. Have a great holiday!

Holiday Beer

It's not a holiday-style beer, but it is the beer I'm bringing back to Michigan for the holidays:


I'm hoping to serve this beer year-round at the pub. The first pilot batch tasted mighty fine before I bottled it today!

Radio Radio

Dean Coffey, the brewmaster at Ale Asylum, thinks that anyone who wants to open a brewery in Wisconsin needs their head examined. I think that anyone who wants to run a bottling line needs their head examined. Joking aside, Dean really captured the essence of Wisconsin's Brewpub Bill in this Beer Talk Today interview:

MBR Podcast 12/9/08

Can we still call the bill SB224? I believe the original proposal was sent back to committee due to overwhelming industry opposition. Calling it "the 2007-2009 budget" isn't very descriptive, though.

More Models

The picture below is of a cold room. My initial sizing estimate, which assumed that 15% of the cold room floor would be empty, didn't have nearly enough space to arrange the tanks and kegs in a usable fashion. The modeling process convinced me to bump the empty floor space to 50%.


The next picture shows a mill room. It's not much to look at, but it was nice to verify that my initial sizing estimate would fit a mill, two pallets of malt and a pallet-wide door path.


I went two for three on my initial sizing estimates. Not bad for my first time!

This Year's Model

A 3D model of the brewery, that is!


I was just hoping to make a crude 2D CAD drawing, but I couldn't find any free software for my old Macintosh. Eventually, I stumbled across Google Sketchup. It's totally counter-intuitive if you've used other 3D modeling programs, but I'm getting the hang of it. All I need it for is to quickly estimate whether or not a given space is big enough to house a brewery. I had no trouble fitting the equipment onto an ambiguous rectangle with the same square footage as my sizing estimates, so I've done a good job so far.

Short Week

I hope all y'all had a great Thanksgiving! It was a short week for me, both because of the holiday and because I'm running low on things to do. A lot of the near-term tasks are out of my hands: our lawyer is making a few changes to our operating agreement, Jane is updating her bio for the business plan and our real estate agent is searching for buildings. Once the operating agreement is ready, another attorney will review our investment offering for compliance with securities and tax laws. In the meantime, I scheduled meetings with an accountant and an architect - as well as a couple of property showings - for next week.

Jane and I know what architects do in the general sense, but we're pretty clueless about the specifics. We know that Madison won't give us a building permit without facility drawings that are signed by a registered architect or engineer, so we'll probably need to work with one at some point. Some of the things we don't know are when we should start talking with architects, whether or not they can help us evaluate sites, and how we can approach them without sounding like idiots. This website was a huge help:

American Institute of Architects: How Design Works

In other news, my wife is pregnant! Her due date is early June. I could write pages about how excited I am, but that's not why you're here. As far as it relates to the business, it basically means that I'll have to be making money by July. Daycare alone will cost more than my wife's salary will be able to cover. The brewery won't need to be open by July, which isn't remotely possible anyway, but I'll either need to have raised enough money by then to start paying myself or I'll need to get a part-time job. The responsible future parent in me is screaming "get a job now!" while a more optimistic part of my psyche is saying "you're too far along - you'll have to quit any job you take in two months." If I knew what I know now, I'd have looked for a job as soon as I got back from Vermont. I'd be much farther away from opening the pub, but I'd be in better financial shape and I wouldn't feel nearly as weighed down by urgency. How naive was I to think that I'd be renovating a facility several months ago? Am I still being naive in hoping that I can raise $600K and find a location before next summer? Jane could have spent the last year working abroad instead of lingering at a job that she hates. I could have gotten another year of commercial brewing under my belt, or I could have learned to bartend, cook or wait tables. I hope I won't be saying the same things at this time next year.