Get Ready to come out, drink some beer, eat some bbq, and listen to our favorite local band this Saturday at the Tap Room.

Who? Beer by Blue Pants, Food catered by Bush League Competitive BBQ team, Band by Seducing Alice

When? Saturday 3 – 11 or later.

Where? 500 Lanier Road, Building 1 Suite A, Madison, behind the Madison Walmart on Lanier Rd. The one with the Blue Awning.

How Much? No Cover charge, 5 dollar pints of all our great styles: Knickerbocker Red, Corduroy Rye IPA, Breeches ESB; plus our new specialties from Brewfest: Oaked Pinstripe Stout, Slip Rose Strawberry Saison, and Tuxedo Black IPA. 5 dollars for a plate of BBQ.

If all else fails, at least its some free live music. Should be a blast. Cue Poster

The tap room is officially open for those seeking a pint and potentially a tour (at least a walk through). We’ve got Knickerbocker Red, Corduroy Rye IPA, Breeches ESB, and sometimes even Pinstripe Stout on tap. After Rocket City we will add at least two more taps to the mix. Swing by, we are open:

Thursday 3 – 8
Friday 3 – 10
Saturday 3 – 10

We are also open for doing events at other times if you want to schedule something.  Tonight and tomorrow night we will be holding drawings for tickets to Rocket City Brewfest.  Come on out.

Surprisingly, a bar is basically a wall.  I didn’t know this going in.  It’s just a really nice shorter wall.  I’ll talk through the process with the pictures in the gallery below.

We started with framing, then applied oak plywood to the backside of the frames.  Once the bar was put in place, we applied MDF (medium density fiber board) to the face.  The top consists of two sheets of ¾ plywood and 1 sheet of ¾ oak plywood.  We tried our best to square up all the top pieces with a table saw, but ended up using a special router bit for squaring a face.  It worked fantastically well.  The top was then framed with oak 1x3s, sanded, and stained to reveal the near finished product below. 

Lastly we added some stainless steel film to the face and framed in the front with a kick board at the bottom.  Many many coats of polyurethane and the bar is ready for consumption.

I keep getting questions about the tap room, so I thought I’d share some insight into my schemes. Right now we have a tap room, technically. I’m fully licensed and even insured to serve you beer from my brewery. I even sort of have a bar, but when I say a bar I mean I would turn around a fridge that has draft towers sticking out of it and pull up some chairs too it. It would look like a fridge and you would hit your knees on the “bar” when you try to sit at it.

Also, apparently I’m unique in that I don’t like people walking around the brewing area while I’m brewing. It’s hot, there is lots of water, lots of chemicals, a gigantic natural gas burner, a sensitive sanitary process, etc. It’s just not a great place for people to be around while there is stuff going on. I like it all to be pinned up. Plus, I’m incredibly distractible. So if you talk to me, I might miss a hop addition. Not good. To counteract this, our tap room is closed off from the brewery. Right now, unfortunately, that means you would basically be drinking beer in a room with a fridge in it. I don’t really think that that is a fun place to drink beer and I don’t want you leaving my brewery thinking “Man, he brews good beer, but I really don’t want to go back there cause it kinda sucks”.

To counteract that we are installing 20 feet of windows on the wall between the tap room and the brewery so that you can start at us working and stainless steel till your heart is content. We are also going to open up the brewhouse one day a week so you can walk in the area, play some games that will be in there, and talk to us about brewing.

Those two things, the bar, and the window, are what I want to accomplish before I let you all in on a regular basis. That being said, we are renting out the room for a couple parties this month.  It is available if you are looking to have a function

As for the other two things, the bar and the window, they are my second highest priority apart from paying rent and utilities. I’m shooting to have a public open house by the end of April and an official schedule of when we are open by the beginning of May. Hopefully we will have the time to complete it.

I promised I’d give the full trip summary here.  I’ll take my part at least.  I started off driving down 431 to swing into Guntersville.  There’s a place there called Mosley Monogram which apparently is a monogram shop that also has a little draft room in the back carrying local craft.  They are picking up most of the Huntsville guys.  I need to spend more time in Guntersville.  On the way back, I had to stop at the boat dock to take a picture of this.

After that we headed all the way down to the Mellow Mushroom in Oxford.  While I didn’t get us on tap there, we decided a better approach would be to introduce our selves to the area by hosting the April 25th beer tasting for their beer club members.  So mark your calendars if you are an Oxford local.

We next swung up to The Peerless and had to leave a sample for the manager there before swinging in to have a chat with Dave Mogil at Damn Yankees.  I had never met Dave or been in to his restaurant, but I need to go back and eat.  The food he described sounded awesome and he’s a really cool guy.  Nice place too with a sweet bar where we are now on tap.  My favorite part about getting that tap though is that we replaced Bud Light.  We talked to Dave for about an hour and then headed to Pelham’s and Effina’s in Jacksonville before stopping to have a beer with a couple friends at Cooter Brown’s.  After that I headed to our meet the brewer event at J Clyde where we poured samples with some Birmingham folk and talked beer.  They currently have our Pinstripe Stout and Knickerbocker on tap.  I will also throw a shout out to the delicious BLT with a fried green tomato and sweet potato fries.  We took a break from the Clyde to hit Good People Brewery, which is awesome.

The next day (after a little bit of sleep and a little bit of sleep walking (I sleep walk when I drink)), had some great lunch at El Fuego, which has an awesome pulled pork Chimichanga before getting new taps at Rogue Tavern and Slice.  We also talked to the guys at the On Tap at Lakeview.  We are going in soon to the Galleria location so they wanted to see how it went there first.  Later we stopped into Maphiozas and talked about doing some cask events on their new local beer Thursdays and said hey to our friend Chandler at Neighborhood Hops and Vines.

I swung back by the distributor house there, Birmingham Beverages before driving back up through Anniston to be there when Dave tapped the new keg.  It was a long couple of days with a lot of driving and probably too much beer sampling, but it was a blast.  My brother Clint hit Birmingham and Auburn too, I’ll put up his experience next.

But seriously check out how pretty my drive through Guntersville was.  I posted on Twitter, you have to love a state as beautiful as Alabama.

So, my brother Clint and I took too hand bottled cases of the new red down for a two day trip into Birmingham, Anniston, and Auburn. I’ll put a complete list of the new spots up tomorrow when I have time to put up a good solid post about everything we have in the works to include beer dinners, tap takeovers, cask nights, and one-offs, but let’s just say it was a big success. I think between the two of us we got about 10-15 bars in the three areas excited about the new Knickerbocker Red. Had a great time with the guys at Good People hanging out with everyone at the tap room and finally getting to check out their awesome setup. Poured samples and talked with a ton of great Birmingham folks about what we’re about and I’m pretty sure I need to go brew more beer tomorrow and start pricing out more tanks! When I get a chance to breath we are going to be doing more here on this blog, posts about the equipment and stuff that I know you guys look for.

Last Thursday we finally got some beer out of the new brewery. Every step to get something out of the door it seems some piece of equipment decided to make me work to make it work. The glycol system decided to break or at least make trip two pumps, forcing me to result to a cheap pool pump, which I’m actually okay with. Both brewing pumps crapped out and are now replaced. The final culmination was the breaking of the brite tank carbonation stone on the day I intended to start carbing the beer.

Through all those issues though, the beer kept trucking along and so did the yeast. At least the tanks were well built and they withstood the test of warmer weather and taking down the glycol system for a day while they were supposed to be cold crashing. The result is that beautiful beer you saw on Facebook in all of these kegs.

The beer is a little hoppier than the first go around and it went over like gangbusters at the first tasting event for Huntsville Young Professionals on St. Patty’s day. We have a release party at the Nook this weekend (Saturday, Be THERE). Before that, twice as many kegs of the new red are going out (hopefully more actually, we had a little lower yield than I expected).

Apart from a pump having a clearance issue, things have actually slowed down a little on the breaking (knocks on wood) or at least if they do break I know how to fix them quickly or have a backup for them already. Good starting a brewery tip, always have backup crap. The beer is coming out phenomenally well if you ask me and I’m getting the same reception when its in the real world. Now we are focusing our efforts on getting some specialties out for brewfest and getting the tap room open (I’m hoping by May)

Look out for events coming out of the new brewery on Facebook and Twitter.

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.