Muddy Creek Brewing Co. Brewery Build- Start to Finish Thread

I will have to come check it out next time I'm in Montana, My girlfriend and I are planning a brewery tour this summer around the Inland Northwest, and West/Central Montana is small brewery Mecca. Looking forward to having a brew with you.

Thar be cement!

In addition to having the drains cemented in Monday, the taproom had the first layer of insulation begun to be sprayed yesterday as well. That continued today and I am told the process will be completed on Friday. Assuming the insulation is finished drying over the weekend, we will spend the week scraping and preparing for painting and next weekend the taproom painting will begin. I assume that will take us a week or so and presumably we should have the taproom painted by mid April.

We'll keep you abridged with photos. We're hoping to launch a Kickstarter or Indiegogo but we're having so much fun it's hard to find time to put together the campaign video what with all the work kicking our asses.

Had our TTB Taproom inspection today. Apparently our partner answered all the questions correctly because he was told we were being put on the fast track to the next stage of Fed licensing and that we would be licensed by the end of the month (for the Feds. Hopefully by the state too.)

Awesome, congrats on getting the license!

So excited to follow your journey!! Building looks good so far, and those tables and stools are awesome. I didn't see anything about the sprinkler system, so I'm assuming you worked that out? Seems like everything is going pretty smoothly. Congrats on the progress. I sincerely wish you the best of luck! I'll be following closely

Cheers!

I made a "beer tour" through Oregon last summer.....not the stated purpose of my trip... I come from Montana (#3 beweries per-capita), and Oregon is #2 (Vermont #1). I couldn't avoid "drinking my way through Oregon".

I ran into breweries of all scales, from industrial scale (Deschutes), down to a bar in Astoria that had 3 of their own beers on tap........ The owner was in the process of preparing to do a mash....... He was brewing in 6 gallon brew buckets!! And had 3 on tap. That's quite impressive. It shows that you CAN start small. I don't know anything about Oregon law, except that it is authoritarian......... the only place in the free world where people are doing time for being "politically incorrect"...... but apparently they must be liberal where brewing is concerned.

How big do you want to start? An existing business might be the place to start........

H.W.

MuddyCreek said:

I am officially throwing my hat in the ring.

Our building is leased, our contractors have had their fun sodomizing me, our LLC and EIN numbers are filed and our applications for a brewing license are en-route.

Muddy Creek Brewing Co. is on it's way.

I will try to keep a running thread about the journey. Having read ALL the threads about other guys who have started (or attempted to start) their own breweries I feel as though I am about 1/4 aware of all the crap that's about to be thrown in my way.

First thing... I have made every effort humanly possible to keep costs down, including arranging for a ludicrously beneficial lease agreement and this thing is STILL going to cost my partners and I a TON of money. I cannot find an inexpensive way to start a brewery. (And believe me, I have researched every possible method.)

I'll post photos and a running documentary on the process.

Have a heart, wish me luck!

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Gotta say, considering the content, "Worst Thread Title Ever".

I mean, if the effort had gone tits up, then the title would be dead nuts on. But for a start-up effort?

Cheers!

day_trippr said:

Gotta say, considering the content, "Worst Thread Title Ever".

I mean, if the effort had gone tits up, then the title would be dead nuts on. But for a start-up effort?

Cheers!

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Agreed haha. I was expecting to read about how his brewhaus failed :/

Hey OP, are you planning on having some sort of celebrational opening night?

Ya. Just yesterday I tried looking into how to change the thread title. I originally meant the title to mean something along the lines of "another home-brewer dives in to the dream pool" But it obviously didn't come across that way at all. Perhaps a mod can change the title to something slightly more appropriate.

Regarding the sprinkler question. The answer is $12,975 I believe. That's before the fire-line we need to have stubbed in from the city water main coming in off of main street. I expect that to run around another $6000 or so. The sprinklers are being installed sometime next week. The skylight panes are being replaced this week. The taproom floor is going to be started on tomorrow. The framing of the beer aging room will be finished tomorrow and the electricians come tomorrow to finish all the brewery wiring so we can have the final inspection for all of the brewery wiring done Monday except for the brewhaus control panel which still needs to be designed and built.

The sheetrock crew will come in on Tues or Weds next week and by Friday the 18th we should have the brewery pretty much ready for the fermenters and brewhaus equipment.

I'm ordering my mill, our 120 kegs and our transfer pump today and I'll decide whether we'll just buy our keg cleaning and filling station or build our own. It will depend on what our money situation is at. So far we've saved ourselves much more than we've expected. Mostly because we've used my father (a professional contractor) as our G.C. We also still need to get our gas mixing equipment to prepare our CO2/Nitrogen setup but we think we will be able to hit our festival goal.

(Butte Montana hosts several festivals over the summer months including the Montana Folk Festival hosting several thousand guests, the 4th of July Celebration, Evel Knievel Days hosting in excess of 50,000 visitors, and An Ri Ra, our Irish Folk Festival in August)

You wanted more pictures? Ok... I'll bring you more pictures...

First, we put in a water filtration system. We have 3 diminishing filtration units 60 / 40 / 20 micron filters and the world will never be the same. We need to change them out every month. (Our plumber told me with great confidence that we could change them out every 6 months!) The filters are rated for 10,000 to 15,000 gallons and we're running a 10 bbl system so it's kinda based on math when we change them. Well, math and humanity.

Next up is a photo of the automated CO2 tank switcher we just got in. It's not all that exciting but it will allow us to automatically switch from one C02 tank to another when one is running low and it's the first piece in our tool-chain that is going to allow us to add a couple of our products on N. (Nitrogen) We'll be starting with our Chocolate Stout on nitrogen and possibly our Amber, depending on how it tastes. It may not translate well and if not we won't do it. but we'll definitely put our Vanilla Porter on nitrogen and we'll undoubtedly find a pale ale or something else that will go well on nitrogen.

The third picture, blurry though it is, depicts the framed in milling room that will soon house my Apollo grain mill. Found the mill out of Canada from some nearby friends the Philipsburg Brewing Company. They've been using one since they opened and when I called around asking for advice they gave me Apollo's number. A few months later and the milling room is all framed up and the mill is being ordered tomorrow.

Anyway, J&S Plumbing is upstairs in the Taproom at this very moment installing the floor sink and the floor drain underneath where the bar will be and our G.C. is beginning the framing for the cold-room where the kegs will be held to hold your Muddy Creek Draught Beer behind the bar. My partner is off to the state capital dropping off the paperwork in person to finalize (fingers crossed) the information needed to state licensing and I sent payment off today for 120 embossed 1/2 bbl kegs from Stout Tanks in Portland and a transfer pump for our beer.

Oh ya, I also talked to the city roads manager and he's going to call me in the morning to set up a meeting to talk about cutting in to main street to put in a fire-line from the water main to our building so we can connect our fire-sprinklers to the water system.

All in all, I'd say it's been a pretty good day.

P.S. I know... We need to paint and put in the suspended ceilings. The paint will come soon. The suspended ceilings... well that may take a bit longer. The brewery is beautiful to me.

Hopefully you won't need a water meter and vault for the sprinkler system. Those babies can get pricey. As an architect, I've seen many owners faces drop when they find out they're gonna need a sprinkler system and what it's gonna cost them to put it in.


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Are you going to be getting the flow you need out of those filters? They are a size that I'd use under the kitchen sink in a residential installation, not to fill a hot liquor tank for a 7bbl brewery.

Looks great so far! Let us know how the finalization of licensing goes. For some reason, that water filtration system picture is wonderful.

Also, much better thread title

Love watching the build!

Renoun, talked to my plumber about that, he's installed 3 other breweries, 2 local and he promised me they'd work and he said that if I was really really unhappy I could simply upgrade to larger filters right out of the gate which is why he mounted the filters four feet off the ground. The system is 10 bbl rather than 7 as well.

levtbeas, I begged Yooper to fix it for me and she immediately did.

sdillow, when talking about sprinkler systems face-planting is always an option! Ours is going to cost us in the realm of 20-25k I'm expecting.

Great thread, love following along with your journey.

I'm sure you are very busy but if you get a chance I'd love to hear more about your background in brewing, what kind (if any) of formal training or experience you had in the industry before making the plunge on your own, what challenges have you faced in transitioning from homebrewing to large-scale commercial brewing... I dunno, I could probably bug you with a thousand questions.

Did you take beer classes, or just learned from home brewing?

Opiate, I've been brewing for about 10 years. I do not consider myself an expert by any means whatsoever. I have asked as many questions of as many people as I possibly can. I have worked professionally in software development for about 18 years and before that was an educator. Making the plunge to "professional brewing" was really very frightening and very liberating.

Now, the truth is, I haven't opened yet. Most of the major challenges are yet to come. Like all of you, I have a few great recipes that I've developed over the years and I have a bunch more that I've stolen or improved upon from other people. I always wanted to start my own brewery but didn't have any real faith that I had the ability or knowledge to do it. (Plus I'm married! I KNOW a bunch of you know what I'm talking about here...) But then something wonderful happened. Somebody else in my town opened up a brewery. The beer wasn't amazingly spectacular. In fact, it was sometimes inconsistent and occasionally kinda bad. But people came anyway! They came in droves. They loved that place.

After a couple years, I began to consider. My beer's pretty good comparatively. Maybe I could open a brewery. Then I decided to do a blind taste test of my chocolate oatmeal stout against Cold Smoke. Not a purely fair test since they aren't exactly the same category but Cold Smoke is a damn fine beer. I did a completely blind taste test. People I knew, people I didn't know, completely blind-folded, glasses completely the same size and shape with the same temperature and amount of beer in them and 90% of the 20 people test preferred Muddy Creek Chocolate Stout to Cold Smoke.

So, I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.

Am I saying I'm a kick-ass world class brewer who knows top notch beer science? No. But I do know how to make a good beer, check ph, adjust for my target gravity keep my equipment and taplines clean and treat my beer tasters well. I do make it a habit to continue reading and learning. My partners and I continue to attend our monthly homebrew meetings and I'm proud to say I'm constantly humbled by those guys and gals every time I go. Last night I sampled a black ipa a fellow brought out of his basement that was almost perfect had it attenuated just a bit less.

But the most important thing is, our third partner is a PhD Chemical Engineer with over 25 years of experience in chemical engineering, with emphasis on yeast strains. That may come in kinda handy... His name is Todd, not Walter.

I agree that there are breweries that have mediocre beer and are busier than crap. Good luck on your journey.

Muddy,
I graduate a month from yesterday with a BS in ChE, and even though I'm new to brewing i can already tell that the knowledge I've gained over the last 5 years will come in very handy if and when i decide to take the plunge as you have. If he's not an experienced brewer he might not add to the recipes, but chemical engineering is very applicable to many I'd the concepts used in brewing, abd his specialization in yeasts certainly won't hurt. If he makes a suggestion on optimizing a process, it's probably a safe bet.
That said, as a new beer I'm expecting to put at least ten years in before i consider starting my own brewery, but that had been the dream since before i went back to school. Friends and i sat around out local watering hole talking about it when I Was still a grease monkey, and the dream remains today. You are living that dream, and i can't wait to join you. It's really fun to watch the progress unfold, living vicariously through you. Best of as you approach opening, and thanks for the inside look at what may be in my future if everything works out.

MuddyCreek said:

it's the first piece in our tool-chain that is going to allow us to add a couple of our products on N. (Nitrogen)

Click to expand...

Have you priced out tanks rated for >20psi? If not you might get a shock.

MuddyCreek said:

His name is Todd, not Walter.

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Well played....well played.

I live in South Central Montana...... about 170 miles away from Butte........ not much in Montana Miles. Billings is the hotbed of microbreweries for Montana, but they are strewn clear across the state. A new one is opening in Livingston with intent of operating a canning line so they can supply beer for floaters........ Well chosen location, the former location of one of the wildest rowdiest bars in Montana.... The Long Branch, where cowboys, railroaders, and loggers interacted in some not so gentle ways. I have good memories of the place from back in the 70's and 80's.

Montana at last count was #3 for breweries per capita, behind Vermont and Oregon.

Butte is infamous for bar fires............ For a few years there seemed to be a bar burning down every few months for no apparent reason. Interestingly enough they all had good insurance, and all were losing money! ............. Imagine that!!

Butte is also famous for throwing that evil ***** Carrie Nation out of town after she attempted to trash a couple of bars, got in a fight with a madam of one of the local whore houses, etc, while trying to recruit supporters to her cause of temperance......... The inspiration behind prohibition, they should have knocked her in the head and tossed her down an abandoned mine shaft!!

H.W.

Gitmoe said:

Big Sky country has the most breweries per capita in the country from what I remember. But that's because there's no people from what I can gather... lol. Good luck with the adventure. I've watched a lot of small breweries open and struggle here in the Philly area. Our market is what I would call over-saturated at the moment. I do some freelance design work for one of the local places so I get to see first hand what they deal with. I work in the industry in other manners locally as well so I know a lot of brewery owners and brewmasters. It's a wild ride to say the least. Good luck with signing a distribution agreement. I know that can be a make or break decision depending how your 3 tier distribution is actually written in MT. Best of luck man...

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Rundown, Sticker-shock and I are good friends these days. We've done quite a bit of research on our gas mixing process. In fact Todd has spent a good part of the last three months hunting equipment deals.

Today the electricians are wiring the milling room, the aging room and the rest of the brewery excluding the control panel for the brewhaus. That (hopefully) includes the rest of the overhead lights, the 220 outlets for our test batch system (IE my tried and true home-brew setup) and the outlets around the rest of the brewery that power the water heater, the ejector pump, the radio, the lava lamp etc.

If they have time they'll also get upstairs to wire up the cold-room that we finished framing yesterday that will hold all the aged kegs that will serve the taproom. If that's finished we can get the inspector to come in Tues or Weds and then we can get the sheetrock crew to come in following and have everything sheetrocked and taped by the end of the week. Then over the weekend I can paint the fermenting room, the milling room and the aging room. (And if I have time the the keg cold-room as well.)

After that, it's just waiting for the fermentors and the brewhaus to arrive and assembling them. I'll have my master-plumber come back and help me with that and by mid-May I hope to have my brewhaus fired up and running assuming I have my control panel built.

Then it's practice brewing our recipes, scaling them with Todd getting the procedures down and giving away lots and lots of beer until we get the numbers dialed in.

Muddy Creek Brewery - Opening Summer 2014
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now Serving:

Conditioning: No Paddle Amber

On Deck: Muddy Creek Chocolate Stout

Heap Leach IPA

Nation's Nemesis Barley Wine

Blood of the Irish Red

Cave In Pale Ale

Dead Canary lager

Father Finnegan's Fudge Porter

Copper King Imperial IPA

:thumbsup looks like a pretty darned good starting list

Good luck with your new brewery. I really like the logo.

Thanks for the thread... it has been a very interesting read.

This is what a framed in keg-cooler room looks like. It will be wired today. Then we'll have it inspected and have the greenrock and frp put over it.

Although it looks unassuming it can comfortably hold 36 kegs at a cool 32 - 40 degrees and in a pinch another 12 when the place is jumping. The room is located immediately behind the wall that holds the taps and the shanks will come right through the keg-cooler wall and the lines will connect directly to the kegs.

This keg cooler room is located two floors directly above the aging room in the brewery where 120 kegs are patiently waiting for their chance to meet their public. "How do they get up the two stories" you ask? Through the historic dumb-waiter that we are lovingly restoring for exactly this purpose. Well, we're actually converting it into a rather small elevator rather than restoring it to a dumb-waiter, but you get the idea. The dumb-waiter is located right next to the aging room and we will move the kegs with a keg-dolly with an automated lift activate the dumb-waiter and presto, our kegs are delivered.

As long as our electrician doesn't run into any problems we will have our inspection tomorrow, our sheetrockers in on Wednesday and Thursday and the room should be ready for the frp and the cooling installation by next week.

Course my fermenters won't be here until the end of the month and my brewhaus won't be here until the first week of May but everything else is on track. (The kegs come with the brewhaus.) So far I'm on schedule. Knock on wood... so far.

Awesome that you're restoring the dumb waiter. That should really add to the feel and atmosphere of your brewery, as long as you keep it rustic looking. Looks great so far!

Oh, it's rustic-looking. I'll get a picture of it eventually. Right now the back room is pretty cluttered. The current owners have quite a bit of their stuff stored in there. We had to move a ton of stuff out of the way to frame the cooler. In another week or two though it will all be cleaned up and looking good.

I'd say in about a month things should be looking pretty ship shape all around. The brewery is already looking great and after the sheetrock is up and painted and the frp is in place it ought to look amazing. If I could afford the suspended ceiling I might even be a real boy!

8:30 Tomorrow morning.

That's when the electrical inspector will come in and check out our fermenting room, lagering/cold-crash room, our milling room, our aging room and our keg-cooler room behind the Taproom bar.

After they've cleared inspection (presumably, we did have professional electricians do the work.) We will choose between the three sheetrock contractors we had bid the job today and have them begin insulating and drywalling all four rooms probably Friday or Monday depending on when they are willing to work based on how the holiday works out for their schedule.

Either way the sheetrock will be put up and taped by Weds or Thurs. next week and by the end of next weekend we will have all four rooms painted and then you'll finally have some pictures that look like we have something resembling a real structure rather than just framed in walls surrounded by crap.

Now we'll have real rooms surrounded by crap. Next we begin cleaning up the crap in preparation for our fermenters, kettles, mill and transfer pump deliveries which are all coming sometime in early to late May.

Meanwhile, we're sanding the Taproom floor, painting the walls, building the bar, restoring the dumb-waiter, putting the cooling units in the fermenter, lagering/cold-crash, aging room and keg-cooler and generally working the hell out of ourselves until the equipment arrives so we can be ready to work the hell out of ourselves installing and testing the equipment.

And we're absolutely giddy about every single minute of it.

More pictures coming soon. Hopefully the skylight will be fixed sometime next week. Hopefully. I'm kinda getting pissed off with the guys who are supposed to be delivering the glass to our glass company. They're "back-ordered" and it's taking time to get our **** to us. This is just one of the MANY legendary delays you hear about when starting up a brewery. For us, it's waiting on the specific panes we need for our skylight today, as well as our electrician waiting for a breaker he needs to put in a larger panel for our brewery downstairs.

But... I digress. Generally things are going very well.

Great news! We passed!

The electrical inspector showed up a bit late this morning and I had to bail before he got there but the electrician was still there so he was able to walk the inspector through the rooms and we passed each inspection. The fermenting room, lagering/cold-crash room, aging room, milling room and the keg cooler behind the Taproom is now cleared to be insulated, sheetrocked and painted.

That finishes the plumbing and the painting. All I have left is the inspection after I install the brewhaus and the control panel inspection and after the Feds and the State say I'm legal I'm well... legal.

Course I have to insulate, sheetrock, paint, get my brewhaus equipment and my fermenters in, install them and have them inspected and have my control panel built and inspected but hell - that's just a formality at this point. ;-)

Here's the new breaker box that's being installed for the brewery downstairs. That will have to be inspected and approved with the control panel, but I'm not too worried about that. It's being done by the same electricians who did the original rooms. My main push was to get the rooms finished and inspected so I could get them sheetrocked and painted so I can get my mill and fermenters in place by the first of the month when they are scheduled to arrive.

So far things are going alright except for a relatively irritating delay in my keg arrival date. They are falling farther behind by the day.

All in all it seems like things are going pretty smoothly. Lucky you!

Don't forget the pictures when you're done painting

Haven't posted in a bit as we've been working.

Our fermenters arrived last week, however our brew-tanks which were supposed to be delivered to Portland sometime next week won't arrive for at least another month. Nonetheless, our Federal brewing application has been approved in just 63 days (the average is 96) so we're still ahead of the game.

Our embossed kegs will be arriving between the 14th and the 19th and our glassware should just beat that. We sanded our Taproom floor last week and there are a couple nasty little spots that we need to apply some de-greaser to before we can properly sand them down right. Then we will fill, stain and poly-urethane the floor.

But before that, the skylight glass is being replaced today and tomorrow, the insulation was already sprayed along with the sound- dampener and the insulation is being put in the fermenting room and the lagering / cold-crash room as well as the aging room and the keg cooler behind the Taproom.

This weekend we will drywall all the rooms including the milling room in preparation for the mill that's coming. Thursday we make our pkate chiller decision and order that.

Our website and e-store come online in mid-May and if our brewhaus tanks ever get here we can open by July. We have our sign being designed right now and our fire line excavation bids are being prepared.

Best part of all, wd haven't spent even half of our funding yet and we haven't submitted our grant reimbursement request.

So, so far so good.

Our kegs are on the way. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do:

Your gonna need more than three.....lookin good

We have 96 on the way.