Ok so I know I promised a lot of things while I waited for the Brew Magic to arrive. All of which I have failed on. I am gonna try to capture here all my first thoughts and impressions of the Brew Magic since it has arrived. We have used the system only like 5 times thus far, including 3-4 water runs to test it out and then one small 5 gal batch brew.

First of the thing is very well constructed. It’s definitely sturdy and all the lines are well welded. I don’t have a single complaint about anything in the fabrication of the entire rig. I had a few concerns about the design but they have thus far proved fruitless. I have a few ideas on how to upgrade and improve the system, but truthfully I don’t really know if it’s worth the work. The system does what it is designed to do and it does it very well (in our case too well, but I will get to that later).

I do have to say that we initially had an issue with our rig. When we got it all assembled (ridiculously easy – basically clamping a few lines and things like that) we were doing a water test. Basically we just put cold tap water into the HLT and moved it around the system learning what each valve did and things like that. We wanted to make sure we knew our way around the system before we tried an actual brew. Eventually we graduated to boiling water and testing the burners. When we did this we noticed that our mash temp probe and the mash gauge were off considerably. I think it was something like 40 degrees so we knew something wasn’t right. We checked all of our clamps, seals, etc and had no luck. To their credit we called Sabco on a Saturday and they quickly had an engineer calls us back and he walked us through a little trouble shooting. Turns out during shipping the probes wire in the control box shook loose and was making contact with the other line, shorting it out and skewing the readings big time. Two minutes later and it was reading perfectly. Kudos to Sabco for great assistance. Between this incident and negotiations with Bob at Sabco over our initial purchase it has been nothing but a great experience.

So for our initial brew we wanted to just do a simple IPA (thinking late hop additions might cover any mistakes we make on the new system heh). We decided that a 5 gallon brew would be best, figuring it was less that would wind up on the floor if we had a major incident. We were lucky enough to have a professional brewer with us to help us out and he was impressed by the setup. He started out saying he was going to let us do the brewing and he was just going to watch, that quickly changed as the curiosity factor quickly got to him and in the end he basically brewed the first batch.

Everything worked great. The only real issue we have was the post brewhouse stuff. We declined to buy the Chillwizard from Sabco because we just felt their price tag was way too high for what is essentially a $200 Therminator and a $120 march pump. We bought both of them ourselves – welded up our own little cart from scrap steel and tossed in a “Thrumometer” and we were in business for about $350, as opposed to paying $800+ for the Chillwizard. I can’t imagine it not being a good setup, I just had so many other things to spend that $500 bucks on that I did it myself.

Once we got those kinks out things went incredibly smoothly. So smooth in fact that when we were done and took the initial gravity we found that we missed it by some 40 points. We wayyyyyy overshot our mark. This didn’t really bother us for a bunch of reasons. First it was a brand new recipe none of us had ever tried before, it was a new brewhouse none of us had used before, and we were fairly distracted playing with the system rather then actually brewing the beer. We pretty much knew this was going to happen so we had a laugh and said it would be our Imperial Pale Ale.

Cleaning it was really easy. We basically just boiled up another 5 gallons in the HLT and flushed the system really well circulating the hot water around. After that we added some cleaning solution, for the life of me I cannot remember what the brewer brought with him, but it’s what he uses on his commercial 15bbl system. We added some to more hot water and then recirculated that as well. We did this all the way out of the brewhouse and then through the pump, chiller, and the entire hose. We were then careful to store everything so that it would dry fully and we were done.

Total time on the brew was ridiculous – something like 6 or 7 hours or so. That’s kinda crazy for a 5 gallon batch but that was more to do with user error then anything with the system. Every step was discussed and talked about. Nothing was automatic and nothing was familiar so it took a lot longer. With that said, even if one batch took say 5 hours, I would guess that to do 2 back to back batches would only add probably another hour or so to the entire process. Basically just the time it would take to quickly clean the Mash Tun after the first batch has mashed into the boil kettle. As quickly as you can clean that you can get the 2nd batch mashing, you would just have to arrange it so the longer mash time batch would be the second one I would think. This is our plan, to do at least 2 batches per brew day.

We are still working out the kinks obviously. We are a new set of brewers, brewing on a new brewhouse, and in a new space as we have moved into what will be the brewery now (more on that later as well) so we fully expect to make mistakes. Right now we are focusing on having fun and learning the system. As much as I love to tinker with things and add onto them, I doubt I will with it, as the plan for this system is to operate as a pilot brewhouse for us. It doesn’t need to be flashy or perfect. If you planned to use this as your primary brewhouse, there are a few things I would do. First thing would be to add a hard piped water line that would be able to fill the HLT from a valve. This would allow me to mount a filter onto the stand and it would be much easier to just hook up the hose at the beginning of the day and forget about it. From that hookup I could then have a manifold for additional hoses etc as well as the supply line for my HLT etc. This is just one thing that stood out to me. It just seems silly that with all it’s awesomeness and automation you are still stuck filling your kettles by a garden hose tossed over the side. Just doesn’t seem right.

I think this post has gone long enough. I will turn it over to questions, so if you have anything you want to know specifically please feel free to post them in the comments and I will do my best to quickly reply.

I know, I know, I know, I suck. Sorry for the lack of posts, I really am. But please don’t take that to mean we haven’t been working diligently on our little project. Recently my life has taken a sort of perfect storm and I have been busy as all hell. I have taken on a new job so that’s eaten up most of my days. On top of that I failed to realize that once my son hit one-year-old he will no longer be timid about the world, but said world will be his bitch and he will want to take it on all day, every day. He has been taking up a huge chunk of my time, needless to say I am loving it!

On the brewery front we have had a lot of progress. I stalled initially on posting because it was a lot of little things happening. The sort of things on their own that make a really boring post. But recently I realized that there is probably quite a few people like me, that are fascinated by the minutia in things. I love the details of how things work, especially projects like this. I hadn’t noticed that I got annoyed when I visited other brewery startup blogs and they hadn’t posted. So here I am to apologize for that.

I am gonna try to get you up to speed on where we sit today. I will try to fill my posts with as many details as I can, but I am sure I will miss some (if not many) so if you have any particular questions feel free to ask via the comments (that’s better in case anyone else has the same question).

I imagine I wont get it all caught up in one sitting as I want to make a post for each hurdle and go into depth, so please make sure you visit back often over the next week or two as I get the posts out. Thanks again for reading!

Just a quick little post to announce my excitement. We have confirmed that the Brew-Magic will be delivered to our house on Saturday morning. We are all in a frenzy now trying to make sure we have all the things we need. We are basically gonna geek out and do a full day of setup/fabrication on our setup, building stands for the fermenters (which arrive tomorrow) and stuff like that.

But I imagine for a good hour once we get it unwrapped we will just stand there and drink beer and talk about how purdy it is.

We plan to take a ton of pictures as well as some video. Not sure if we will actually get to use it or not as it seems there are some things we should do to it before use, like passivate the stainless pieces. But we will do videos on our test runs with water and stuff to those that might be interested in the system, or just hearing some brew dorks gush like teenage girls.

Ok so I haven’t been posting too much here lately and not really twitter that much lately. It’s for a variety of reasons but not because the project isn’t moving forward. Probably the largest reason is my son has started getting his molars and has been a real handful so I get very little time to fool around and play on twitter, couple that with my consultation biz really exploding in the new year and my time has been seriously crunched.

With that said we have been actually making good progress with the town and with the business plan. We have been networking like a mofo and have made good contacts in important places. We are starting to get some good momentum going. I really really recommend looking up a “Small Business Development Center” or whatever they may be called in your area. Ours is attached to the University nearby and aside from offering great advice and mentoring, they are SUPER connected. They know everyone on a personal level. Try if you can to be seen by the head/director of the center, this way you can use their name when calling county and town officials. I can’t explain how helpful this has been. I imagine it will also be very helpful when we approach banks as well, as they have standing relationships with everyone.

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So despite the lack of posts here, there has actually been a lot of activity on the brewery front. I hesitate to call it progress because, well, I am not sure we have moved any distance forward, but a lot of work has been done and things are starting to gain a certain clarity.

We now have a target location. We are not close to securing it but have developed a nice relationship with the owner and are currently doing research on the sites feasibility. Our major concern is indoor drainage and sewage systems. We are putting calls out to the city sewage/waste department hoping to get them to take a look at it and let us know what would be required of us to get up to code. We are also starting to verbally massage the owner of the property to get him ready for just how much will have to be ripped up to work with a brewery. He seems on board thus far, at least with tearing up the floors to put in trench drains, but we also haven’t gotten into costs and who’s responsible for what. I really do not like the idea of sinking a ton of capital into a building we at the very least don’t have the option to buy down the road.

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Today I am trying to get some momentum going on this mountain of brewers licensing paperwork. We can’t really do anything with it because you need a location to file any of this stuff, but we would like to have as much filled out and ready to go so that we can just input the location info and send it off. Ideally we would like to be legal by the festival season next spring but I am starting to have my doubts about that.

WE are looking at all kinds of locations but even when we find that one place, it’s gonna take some time getting consultants, architects and contractors out just to tell us if a brewer in that location is feasible on our budget. This will take a lot of time and like everyone else, I have very little faith of the government working as quickly as we would like. Most of the reading I have done has people saying how helpful the TTB has been for them and how it was rather painless. That’s great, but the reviews of the ABC in New York are equally as bad. Most people seem to have to file several times due to lost paperwork and a multitude of revisions, and even then you have to get on the boards review schedule which I think only happens once a month. Typically this takes people about 250 days, so just short of a year.

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As we did more and more research on a small nanobrewery setup it becamse pretty apparent to us that for the size we were looking to brew as a pilot system we would really have to be like the A-Team about 3/4’s of the way through an episode and just go all crazy and build something out of what was laying around. There just wasn’t anything designed to do the things we wanted to do. We got a bit worried about mashing in 55gal barrels and things like that. There is nothing wrong with homebrewing on a system like that, but our goal is to dial in recipes and get them ready to bring them to market. Consistency is the biggest factor in our considerations.

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I have been really trying to wrap my head around what is the best and easiest approach for us to take. Problem is both choices have different needs as far as a brewery setup. As you know by now we are trying to start production on as tight a budget as we can possibly do. We absolutely will not skimp on quality, but if it’s a matter of something being pretty or not (think stainless steal vs food grade plastic) or even more work for us (BrewMagic System vs Manual Single Tier Brewing) we have no problem with that.

The question goes all the way down to what type of customers would we like to cater to. Restaurants would lean us more towards kegging. It’s much easier to get a restaurant to take on your keg if they are able to make 3x’s whatever you charge them on their own pints. The margin on bottles is much less, especially with the overhead of a restaurant.

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Ok so I have been told running a brewery can be hard work. I know for a fact that doing a startup can be intense, and that you eat, sleep, and breath the company. Recently with all the planning going on for our startup brewery I have been so immersed in so many facets of the plan that I am starting to lose sleep over it.

It’s not so much “stress” because to our credit we are doing as much as we can to eliminate as much risk as possible. It’s more a mix of excitement, anticipation, and fear. I really wish I could just get started already. Lately I have been trying to solve the obvious (production line, equipment, storage, etc) and the not so obvious (cold storage, carbonation, etc.) and it’s starting to wind me a bit tight.

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I recently made a post on twitter (follow me) asking all our fellow beer geeks “If you were going pro and could only brew three styles what would you brew?” I got a lot of replies and it really helps to see what people think would be the pulse of the craft brew market. I couldn’t really get into why I asked that on twitter with their darn character limit so I decided to put it down here and those interested could read it.

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