Shameless Rants and Confessions of an Aspiring Pro

ronjonacron said:

I noticed the 3 hour drive to athens and "first friday" are you in augusta?

Click to expand...

Somewhat close. We're in Statesboro, GA. Our distributor goes to Augusta, we will be on tap there very soon.

Grand Opening is expected in 30 days.

Damn HBT ads making me want more shineys.
I'm thinking I'm gonna get one of these for yeast transfers and emergency power outages and such.
http://www.wastecorp.com/mudsucker/professional-hand-pump.html

Pretty sweet kid. Having just finished up at UC Davis I totally get your passion. Good luck and thanks for the fun read.

Been unrolling the pale ale to the public. SO many BMC drinkers out here, hocking a massively hoppy pale ale is more difficult than expected.
Alas it is hot down here, the drinkers just need a well crafted thirst-quencher.

Fighting the good fight.

Good for you, man. I wish all the best to you!

Lots of fittings in! Brewers hose, aeration assembly, a ton of butterfly valves, and (finally) our missing thermowells.


I got to take the pale ale to a beer-bar. Reception there was excellent, far better than Monday. We are doing an unrolling tour in Savannah all week, but I can't seem to stay away from the brewhouse too long or I have nightmares of it going missing.

Have been waiting on boiler and glycol plumbing all month. It started this week. We hope to be online by next week.

Any updates? Hope things are continuing to go well!

The start-up investment is amazing in the business. Put it all together and it all comes down to the brewer! An awesome read! Other than all the more complex components of the commercial brewhouse, any difficulties in scaling recipes? That mash shovel sounds awesome. Discharge spent with turn of the switch. :rockin: Good luck and keep the posts going

So I'm curious how the brewery is progressing? I just toured another brewery in GA that is not quite 3yrs old and they are targeting 7200 BBL this year.

I'm also curious. One of my sisters friends is in marketing with them, not that I have talked to him, but they seem to be doing pretty well. I'm hoping to see them expanding to Athens soon. Glad to see Ga brewing exploding along with the rest of the country. I'm certainly jealous


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Strawn sounds familiar

Yet again I have abandoned this thread. Things have been very busy 70+ hour work weeks for the past 3 months. I produced nearly 20,000 pints last week alone. Augusta has proven a very fertile market for us.

I tried to post a video, but can't seem to remember how to upload it.

Things are going well. I have produced nearly 250,000 pints this year.

@ Dog House Brew- While the agitator and mash plow are useful, the mashtun still requires more manual labor to clean than a batch of homebrew lol. We shuttle out nearly 2000 pounds of wet grain every brew. The screens to my false bottom are welded together making cleaning underneath very difficult.

I just brought our canning line online today. We will have beer in cans tomorrow. You want to talk about a bottle filler upgrade. I went from 1 a minute with the counter pressure filler to 24 cans a minute. It has a ton of moving parts and the measurements for some of the sections of the cans seal are +-.002"
But it is amazing to watch the machine in action. I have been training assistant brewers lately, the packaging line is my newest project.
I just got 160,000 cans in soooo...


There is much I can talk about. I have many logistical and financial complaints. To get anything done right in a brewery my size, expect to spend 10-100k depending on the project. My opinions on initial investments have changed quite a bit as well. If you want to start a brewery of a scale similar to mine expect to spend a minimum of $1,000,000. (Not including a packaging line!)

We will be statewide (including Athens and Atlanta) by the end of the summer. Keep an eye out for the cans.

Consistency has been extremely difficult. Not because of my lack of documentation or procedures (though, I do feel my recipes always need improvement), but simply because there is so many moving parts and it doesn't always go according to plan. Things break. I ask that any beer snob or nitpicky homebrewer take a moment to consider the cost of accomplishing even the smallest task. Consider the sheer amount of machinery that must work to produce a perfect brew. If a single spray ball isnt spraying fully or if one of hundreds of O-rings arent soaked correctly an entire batch can be affected. I am constantly striving for improvement, but we are a start up brewery on a budget. I do the best I can with what I have.

My first brewday was the most difficult shift I ever worked. Stuck mash and first time using a steam boiler resulted in a 21 hour brewday. But talk about a trial by fire. From that point forward it was no longer a hobby, I am now a professional brewer.

I would love to answer any questions anyone has on here, or you can email me for a faster response @ [email protected]

Oh, and:
http://www.craftbeer.com/brewers_banter/whos-the-youngest-head-brewer-in-the-country

Congratulations on the quick growth. Maybe going statewide so quickly is not such a good idea...but you guys know your business model.

I visited Red Hare recently and they also have a canning line. It was awesome to watch and they are on track for >7000 BBL this year.

I took the Brewery Immersion Course at Echo Brewing out in Colorado recently and brewed an entire batch of their top selling beer on their Premier 7BBL system. It did not have a rake, but cleaning out the MT was not too bad. It was a combo MT/HLT like yours and the height of the manway did not require bending over which would have been a back breaker. I did not have a problem stirring in the mash either, but I only did one full batch by myself. Fortunately, they had a hydrator so I did not have too many clumps to break.

I also agree with you about the scope of the expenses. For anyone wanting to make a decent amount of money brewing, you have to spend a lot of money. I'm used to a certain income and I just would not attempt anything less than 15-20 bbl in brew house size. You guys definitely did the right thing there.

Very cool on the course. I feel like I catch a lot of flack for my lack of professional training. There seems to be a bit of a Siebel fraternity among the GA brewers.

I suppose I should mention our Atlanta presence will be limited We cannot supply such a large city fully. We will be in the beer bars.

Yea, it is pretty easy to pull the grain out with our little scoop, but I have been having difficulty with the grain dust sludge that sneaks underneath my false bottom lately.