Demolition Day 1

What a day!  As I mentioned the other day, we have signed a lease on a building where we will eventually open the doors of 515 Brewing Company to the public.  The building has been many things in its life...a restaurant or two, a bar or two and possibly a couple of things we haven't heard of yet.  Needless to say, we have to do some work to it in order to match our vision for the brewery and tasting room.

With the receipt of our insurance paperwork this last week and a floor plan more or less finalized, we are finally able to get our hands dirty and start work on cleanup/construction prep.  We have not acquired our official building permit yet so we aren't doing anything major, but one thing was known from the moment we all first laid eyes on the space...the carpet had to go!

It had to go for many reasons, really.  First of all, it had so much stuff spilled on it in the last however long it had been down that it didn't exactly smell of roses!  Then take into account the fact that we will very likely have liquid spill onto the floor on occasion and carpeting seems like a pretty silly floor covering!  We thought that once we loosened a couple of edges that the stuff would just pull up without too much trouble.  Um...no...how wrong we were.  I arrived first, thinking it wouldn't be that much trouble.  An hour later, this is all that I accomplished:

I had to stop pulling every couple of minutes to let my hands rest!

So, Ryan arrived after I had been working for about an hour and with a couple more tools and after about another hour we got this far:

That stuff just absolutely did not want to come up!  Next we tried to pull smaller sections up (about 12" wide).  That worked a whole lot better and the work on the carpet went much quicker...but was still pretty difficult.

One other thing we absolutely had to do was to remove a wall full of mirrors off of one of the walls.  One of the previous tenants in this place had even covered up two windows with mirrors.  Why, you ask?  We have no idea whatsoever!  It makes very little sense, but overall it doesn't matter because we have to pull them off anyway!  Below is what the wall looked like with all of the mirrors on it (forgive the horrible photo...just for an idea of the mirror wall!):

Our initial attempt at the first mirror (about 4' x 4') did not go well and we quickly broke a piece off.  It had been secured to the wall by half a dozen or more of these solidified putty-like disks.  Since neither one of us wanted to get cut and have to get medical attention on our first day of work we decided to unleash a little bit of frustration.  If the mirror didn't want to come down in one piece, we would make it come down in as many pieces as possible!  A few seconds later and a flying ice scraper and crowbar later and the mirror was down, Ryan and I were laughing somewhat maniacally and we could finally see what was behind the mirror wall!

After a suggestion by Ryan's wife during dinner, we did finally find a way to pull the mirrors down without breaking them (at least most of them) and finished off pulling down the rest of the mirrors.  If I remember right, we salvaged 3 or 4 of the 4' x 4' mirrors.  Not sure what we'll do with them, but once we get the wood  out of the windows it will be great to get some natural light into the brewery.

Photos of progress from day one:

Home Sweet Home

So, it has been awhile since my last post and work has continued to progress.  The website is continuing its evolution, recipes continue to be refined and we have looked at several more potential properties.  The property search, as I have mentioned before, is a very critical step in our plan as we can't file for our brewer's license without a location.

Our Realtor has been great to work with thus far.  He has put up with all of the requirements we threw at him and has been willing to work with us after normal business hours since all four of us continue to work at our original jobs.  We have been through some tough decisions and some tough moments in our search for a location, however, that search has finally come to an end!  We all got our keys to the new brewery (we can call it that now!!) on Friday.  I won't post just yet where exactly it is, but rest assured, that announcement will come soon enough.

This means that we can cross another huge "to-do" off of our checklist and now we can really start to build up steam towards actually opening our doors (now that we have them!).  You should be seeing some more activity in the next month or so.  We should be launching our website, opening up our Twitter and Facebook accounts, and, finally, releasing the location where we will be brewing and serving our beer.

I think I can speak for all of us that we were all a little giddy on Friday when we finally were able to put our hands on those keys.  It is a great feeling to make that huge step.  Now we need to finalize the ultimate layout of the brewery so we can submit our paperwork to the TTB (The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) so that we can get them working on issuing our brewery license.  That notice, along with similar notices from the State of Iowa and the City will allow us to finally use our commercial 3 barrel system to brew beer for sale.  Up until then, we can only continue to brew on homebrew setups in order to finalize our recipes.  Which, Brandon and I happen to be doing right now!  My Kolsh is now in the fermenter and Brandon's Shandy is coming out of the mash tun as we speak.

So, while it has been hard work up to this point in our plan, I anticipate things are going to get even more difficult over the next couple of months.  What is up next is to submit our licensing applications, clean up and build out the brewery/taproom, launch our official marketing plan and conquer the hundreds of smaller tasks remaining on our list.  It's going to be a crazy, crazy spring and summer, but it sure is nice to finally have a home for our venture!

Cheers and happy Easter everyone!

Experimental Adventures

So, Brandon and I had a long, but productive brew day yesterday and got to experiment a little bit.  Before I get to that, however, a quick update on the status of our business.  Still no location, ugh.  This part has been, by far, the most difficult part of the process to date.  We have a very narrow set of requirements and there are only a certain number of spaces out there (available or not!); making it a needle-in-a-haystack sort of search.  There are obviously a lot of federal, state, county and city regulations to juggle which makes the search just that much more difficult.  We continue to scour all of the commercial listings on our own as well as with the help of our agent.

Now, on to the brew day.  We were brewing a beer that was the idea of my girlfriend, essentially we were trying to recreate the flavor of a salted caramel in a beer.  For those who haven't done much (or any) brewing, there are some grains available that create some of that caramel flavor.  We have all used these in varying amounts in other brews, but this is the first where I really wanted to highlight the caramel flavor instead of using the caramel to support other flavors.

Time for a little Brewing 101!  A quick run-down of the initial steps we go through to make beer.  Beer is basically fermented sugar water with alcohol and carbon dioxide being the by-products of the yeast eating the sugar in said sugar water (yep, we're drinking yeast poop!).  The first step is to get the sugar out of the grain so the yeast will have something to eat.  We do this by soaking the grain in water at a specific temperature, allowing enzymes to convert starches to sugars.  Normally we just throw water in at a specific temperature, let it sit for an hour or hour and a half, then get the water out.  For this, though, I wanted to try something new.

I had been wondering about a mash method called decoction mashing for awhile and, while this is really more of an antiquated mash technique for use with grains that have not been modified with modern malting techniques (as well as other reasons), I thought that the process might help me extract more caramel flavor from the grain.  Essentially, for this method, the beginning is the same except we let it rest at a lower temperature than the "single infusion" method I described above.  After a period of time, a specific amount of grain is pulled out of the main mash and brought to a boil for a little while.  This is then added back to the main mash in order to bring the temp up to the temp we normally aim for with the single infusion.  From there, the rest of the brew day is the same.  This should, in theory, add more of a caramel flavor to the beer, and our first taste of the unfermented, cool wort seemed to bear that out.  I'm really excited about this beer.  If nothing else, it was (and is) a great experiment!  If you are interested in learning more about decoction mashing and seeing a video about it, try this link to Northern Brewer, Brewing TV.  Brandon also took a couple of photos during:

Stirring the Decoction

Decoction Close Up

While brewing we also bottled 3 batches of beer that had been carbonating: Mexican Spring (an Agave Lime Wheat), Sour Power (our version of a Berlinner Weisse) and Rooster Red (Irish Red brewed for the Des Moines Roosters Aussie Rules Football team).  I'm sampling Mexican Spring right now and I really like it.  Brandon's friend and wife tried it the other day as well and could really envision themselves drinking it while floating down the river in a canoe or kayak.  We also tasted 3 others that should be ready relatively soon: A Belgian Quad currently aged about 6 months, Big Nuts (Imperial version of Numb Nut Ale) and Sweet Grits Ale.  All 3 have a lot of potential, but are still a little young and the flavors need to blend a little more.

Mexican Spring

Anyway, I think I have rambled on long enough.  If you made it this far, thanks again!  I need to find a way to make some of these shorter...apparently I'm a little long-winded!  Either way, have a great night and we'll have more news later!

Cheers!