The burner is working and we are officially in business. I started milling grain for the first test batch last night. Everything seems to be working great and the times for heating up and cooling down should be great. I’m really excited to actually be doing brewing like things again, its been since November. I water batched some last night and I think the test batch will be a lot of fun. Look for pictures early next week.

So Close

But yet so far, right? Two Sundays ago we got the glycol chiller solenoids switching. Then began the interesting week. There were four pieces of equipment that we needed to finish to meet my brewing deadline of Saturday the 4th. We did well considering, we got three. The last one has kept me up at night and making phone calls all day.

The Rinnai water heaters were easy, a matter of venting some gas and fixing a conversion kit. The glycol chiller was pretty easy too. Once I electrocuted myself making sure the paddle switch worked we had someone smarter than me come take a look and using a multimeter to measure voltage (rather than my fingers) we figured out the low pressure switches for the compressors were set too high and thus cutting off.

The last piece has been the burner. Installed and running on Thursday, we could get a good flame for about 30 seconds at a time and thought it was just a matter of tweaking the settings. While weaking them though, we put in a little too much gas and backfired. Thus going into the weekend, it wouldn’t start. It wasn’t until Sunday before the superbowl that we considered that we broke off an ignition probe and then confirmed it. After reinstalling the probe last night I couldn’t get the gas to increase. Today was spent hunting for a solenoid valve to replace one that apparently stripped in a week of operation. Argh.

Oh well, we are close. And we keep at least figuring out whats going on so that’s good. Don’t buy burners with tanks made in another country is one moral of the story, cause they may use parts like valves that you can’t source locally. Bad news. Grain is here; Yeast is here; water and power are ready to go. One valve could be all that is left.

This last week or two has been equipment setup and it’s nearing completion. I’ve gotten all of our solenoid switching, glycol piping, electronic wiring, and even hot water heating for the most part figured out. We’re still tweaking on our natural gas burner, but I think it’s time to trial batch soon.

I really can’t wait to get the first batch of beer going and see what happens with this fancy equipment. It’s almost more of an epic culmination than the opening of the first brewery. The first brewery the realization was, holy crap, we can actually just go out and start a business. It made me feel very American, but didnt have the scale of this one. This is the shock of, holy crap, if you can dig up some money to work with, you can put together some crazy stuff.

I’m really excited about how the beer is going to change. I know a lot of you guys who are our fans have said never change Knickerbocker, but I can assure you it will meet your liking. We will have so much more control on the clarity of the beer, the consistency of the flavors and carbonation, as well as every other piece of the process. It’s great that each batch will be what used to take me a weekend to brew, but its even better that the beer is going to have so much more consistency.

We are hoping to “release” our new beer in March. That gives me a month to figure out all the equipment and ferment the first couple batches. Along with that we have new t-shirts, coasters, stickers, posters, and probably a new website. There’s some really cool new stuff coming that I will share as it happens. This is almost a complete overhaul to the brewery now that we are out of the small scale phase and we are going to be working really hard to give you guys the complete brewery package.

Look for more exciting news soon.

Allright, took some pictures yesterday and here we go. The brewery as we are getting closer. There are captions on the pictures as to what’s going on in each.

So, no pictures today unfortunately. But I will give an update. This past weekend we had water and power, sufficient resources to go ahead and passivate those giant stainless tanks. When you buy new stainless the first thing you should do (well after cleaning it) is run some very strong acid through everything. This will allow the stainless to “re-stainless” (I dont know what else to call it. Resulting in the nice fun rust proof stainless we know and love.

I took care of that this weekend. It gave us the oppurtunity to actually have something running in the brewery (namely, the Clean in Place unit) which was a lot of fun. We should be able to run the inline hot water heaters and potentially even the burner after this week. We still have a ways to go what with ABC approval still out, but Im hoping to start running water through everything to get comfortable with the equipment by the end of the month.

Its crazy to have all this big, nice equipment. After this week the only equipment work that will remain will be the auger for the grain, insulating all the gylcol lines, and wiring all the logic system. It’s kind of a whole new world of brewing with this stuff. Its really amazing how much better everything just works.

So in addition to trying to build a brewery and host all of the family around the holidays, we have another excuse for why I havent been very good at updating progress. Blue and I welcomed a little one into the world at the beginning of December and have been having fun and dealing with the challenges that that can bring. She’s great, sleeps pretty well for a 1 month old and we are finally getting a handle on things. Here are a couple pictures below of the smallest supporter of Alabama’s smallest brewery. Sorry for the quality, its kind of hard to get a baby to take a pic after you change her clothes.

I know, I know, having a baby and running a brewery. We are a little crazy.

Well, the small broom closet, Alabama (and maybe America’s) smallest brewery is officially decommissioned. I had to remove the Rinnai inline hot water heater for moving it over to the new brewery this afternoon. Since we got the Rinnai we converted everything to run off of it. I think maybe you could do a lot less brewing there and it would take a lot longer, but I don’t really want to do that.

That means we are without brewing until the new brewery is up and running which we still have some time to get to. The sheet rock of everything is mudded and they should be sanding and painting the walls in the next week. We are still waiting on all of the utilities. But some day in the next couple months we should be turning on this bad boy. Very exciting. Working on the PLC controllers for monitoring ferment temps and such now. Hopefully the parts to complete the glycol lines will come in tomorrow so I can finish up running the glycol lines in the next weekend or so.

Fun stuff. I already cant wait to start shopping for tables and chairs for the tap room.

I posted about Jester King suing the TABC a little while back. Well, turns out they won. Several parts of the code were deemed unconstitutional. Check probrewer for more info.

http://www.probrewer.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=23348

After the slab was poured last week we took this weekend to stand up the tanks in place so that they can be hooked up. It was a pretty exciting experience but also quite terrifying. I don’t know how much you all know about stainless steel tanks, but at one point we did the math and a thing we were carrying cost as much as a college education at UAH. Kind of a scary think to be suspending from a 30 foot telescoping fork lift. Speaking of that. People will let you drive a 30 foot telescoping fork lift for not that much money. I was incredulous. You don’t see me in the pictures cause Im in the lift moving the tanks. They decided to leave it in my hands so if one of these things fell or hit something I could only blame myself.

Here are a couple pictures, but the good ones are coming, this is just what I got with my phone. Next week we will have an electrician provide power to us so that we can start hooking up all the internal power routing goodness, the glycol piping, etc. We did get all the brewhouse piping put together and once it has electrical and gas it could probably operate. Of course there will still be more to do before its ready to brew.

Since we moved in the equipment, the contractor has been doing a lot of work. We had to temporarily offload everything into another building on site and will be able to move it over as soon as the slab has cured and is ready for it. One of the things we were excited about for this particular building is that it is an asphalt floor so we are pouring a brand new brewing basin (sloped to a drain) on top of it. That’s not always a luxury you get if you are moving into an existing space.

Part of the slab is complete and the walls of the eventual tap room are going up today. Additionally they are working on the demising wall between the two spaces. I could send you guys pictures of all this stuff, but to be honest, its not really that interesting. Also we’ve had a couple distractions at home so I haven’t even really been over there too much.

We are planning on standing up tanks this Friday and then can start the process of hooking everything up. I will work really hard to get you guys a second round of pictures of standing up the tanks as soon as I can. Check facebook and twitter for incremental updates before that. Once we are hooking up equipment it should be really interesting.

Everything is progressing pretty well and while construction may have been a little slow to start we should be able to start running pipe and hooking up things next week. I’m also only half way finished with learning Chinese….

Just kidding, we got some English manuals.