Bent Shoe Brewing: From Broken Backs To Broken Wallets

Dear Beer Nuts,
In the spirit of Muddy Creek and Gilded Goat, I'm breaking cover and letting you all in on the effort and bother of trying to make a living brewing good beer. Their threads are how I ended up here after all.

So three years ago, (Note that: three years!) my buddy Mike started looking into brewpubs. He felt that the profit margin could be good if things were run well. We started by looking at setups like the local brewpub in our area. (A nod here to hard working Steve and Rochelle at Cool Beerwerks) After a bit of research on Mike's part he decided the sweet spot was a 10~15 barrel system. Smaller and you're either up against a growth phase immediately, or you're not managing to keep your local taps happy. So we started looking for space.

Did you know there are a lot of land/building owners out there that have a complete disconnection from reality? We do now. I honestly don't remember how many places we looked at. Ceilings too low, no parking, owned by the railroad, (there's a whole story in itself!) major decon to put industrial in, not enough water, not enough gas, not enough etc.

We finally had to start looking farther afield than we originally intended, and found a great building in Lincoln, CA. I'm told Kneedeep was going to take it 5 years ago, but they found a building with floor drains already installed and went with that. (Their current location)

In the meantime, we'd found the brewdeck we liked, after having my fears about Radical New Technology quelled by visiting Coachella Valley Brewing and seeing their brewdeck in operation and tasting every one of their beers to make sure they weren't slipping something by us. If you can get your hands on a bottle, I can highly recommend their Black Widow. It's sweet, but it's darned good.

So, here we are. Half the tanks came in last Friday, and the other half come in on Wednesday. Brewdeck comes at the end of November. Mike is still getting shocked at the costs for install, and the tasting room. (I told him it'd be 3X whatever he allotted! )

Who wants to know what?

 

I cant wait to see some more pictures. Good luck and keep us posted!

 

I'm on board!

 

Welcome. If you need any advice or help, let me know. I own Twelve Rounds Brewing in Sacramento. We went through 3 years of hell trying to get open.

 

Subscribed!

 

maybe I missed it when I read the OP, but where is your location going to be at? Cool? Lincoln?

I'm semi-local to Cool (Placerville area) and id love to visit if you're in the cool area (hopefully not Lincoln).

 

Living the dream! Sub'd.

 

Sorry. It's in Lincoln.
We spent two years trying to get a suitable place in Auburn. After getting s****ed by PG&E on a perfect building we started looking farther afield. We spent three days driving everywhere in the county. Looking at everything that was for rent. Almost nailed a spot in Cameron Park, (where the Sears Outlet is/was) but the roof wasn't high enough. Finally ended up with a 45 minute commute to Lincoln every day. It is, what it is.

I'll get in touch. I have to admit, I'm not familiar with you folks, and I thought I knew all the Sacramento players.

 

Damn! Was hoping it was cool. I'm not usually on that side of town.

Sub'd and best of luck to you sir!

 

Good Luck!

 

Ten fermenters, and two brights all in a neat double row. Each tank had 6~8 tie downs on it. I think I have a lifetime supply of the things now.

 

Nice! What history do you or your head brewer have with such large scale brewing? I'm assuming you've brewed on big systems like that before?

 

Wow, sounds like you're making progress. Keep us updated!

 

That's exciting! Good luck with the build and I'm in Lincoln so I'll be checking it out when you guys are up and running.

 

Sweet! Sub'd

 

This is awesome, best of luck to you guys!

 

How much do you think you'll brew in the first year? What does a 10 bbl system cost?

 

I'm in West Roseville so I'll definitely be keeping an eye out as well! Good luck, and I'm looking forward to the process.

 

Pretty much... no. We had a couple people slated as brewers when the project started, but everything's taken so long that they've gone in different directions. So, for the time being, it's falling to me. That said, I've been home brewing since the early 90's, and for the last year I've been helping brew on a local 7 barrel system. Our lab guy is also quite interested in not being stuck in the lab 8 hours a day, so I'm planning on dropping him into the deep end of the brewing pool pretty quickly.

Our system is so different from a 'standard' system that I don't think familiarity with other large systems would be a lot of help. The closest 'sister' system to us is at Coachella Brewing, and I'll be spending a few weeks down there learning the system and the software, so I think I'll be able to hit the ground at a trot, if not running.

Our system is 20HL, (17BBL) so I'm unsure what the smaller system would run. The price differences were small though, as most of the expense is in labor. The system is built by IDD in California by people specifically trained for that job. So it's not a cheap system. However, compared to places like Premiere Stainless, it's not a lot more expensive, and has a lot more control and automation. Automation saves on employees costs, which in the long run, makes the system cheaper than the other systems.

To cover our overhead, we're going to have to do a lot of contract brewing. We have been contacted by several breweries who are either up against the limits of their systems, or just want to keep profits up by not paying to ship long distances.
Mike, the Man With The Plan, is supposedly leaving room for us to brew as much as 2000 barrels the first year. Brewing, of course, doesn't mean selling, which is to my mind, the real bottleneck. People have to try the beer, like the beer, and most importantly, ask the local bar to carry the beer. We have a salesperson lined up with past experience and contacts in the industry. Hopefully he can get us some market penetration pretty quickly. He's got some good ideas.

 

I can hear the clanging sound from your giant brass ones here several states away.

Good luck!

 

Gotta watch this one.

 

I'm excited to see one of these threads from CA! Especially in NorCal!! What have you done on the paperwork side so far?You're from Cool, that's...cool. I used to go camping up that way Coloma, or lotus, I think, and raft down the American river.

Good luck! I'll be following along.

 

Holy s**t that picture of the lined up fermenters and bright tanks is cool!

 

Paperwork? We don't need no steenkin'....

Application to TTB only went off a month or so ago. Mike kept wanting to wait for the permit to operate from the city first, and that kept not happening for a couple months. I assume the application to the state went off at the same time as TTB, but since I don't talk to the lawyers, I'm in the dark on that. Hopefully, since everything's been drawn up by people with experience both in building breweries, and with the City of Lincoln, we won't run into any major snags.

If you trip in Coloma, you're in Lotus.
The division is the middle fork of the American river. Lotus on one side, Coloma on the other. Hard to tell the difference really.

 

Wow, i cant imagine running a business in Kali... I love to read through these. I would love to try this someday though.

 

Sub'd!

 

Still thumb-twiddling while waiting for estimates on the various parts of the build-out. But the folks at Borges Architectural sent me a few interior renderings. Enjoy!


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Looks great. We'll try to get up your way sometime to check it out

 

The brewdeck showed up on three flatbeds. Another cloudy day, so things don't look all bright and shiny. Offloading was a lot easier than the fermenters were! The mash filter was a little wobbly coming off, due to the weight. It's the long blue thing in the wide photo. And just lookit that purdy heat exchanger!

 

For anyone who like me had no idea what brew deck or HEBS meant: [ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW_YarERHug&feature=youtu.be[/ame]

Good luck OP and keep us posted!

 

Humph! I gave you folks a link back in October!

Youse just gotsta pays attention!

 

Sadly I was paying attention in October but the older I get the shorter my span (that's what she said too). New brewery startups are apparently best left to the young or at least those younger than me.

 

Good luck, bud. Keep us posted on the progress and keep the pics coming!

 

Sub'd.

 

So whats does a brew deck or HEBS mean? Anyone have a link I could check out?

 

Scroll up to the 1st post on this page! But for laziness sake here it is...hopefully should answer all your questions...

 

A 'brew deck' is pretty much the area you make the wort on/in. A HEBS, is a High Efficiency Brewing System.

The difference in the HEBS, over traditional systems, (traditional being a pretty broad coverage here) is that the system heats faster, mashes faster, and boils faster than what most people are using. 2 hours from grain to wort, as opposed to 6~8 hours from grain to wort.

 

Thank you. (I was just being an @ss with my tongue in cheek question right after people just asked for links...)

So with the HEBS is it energy intensive to get up and running but low energy to keep running? Like recapturing energy as apposed to just letting it run off into the ether?

I heard on a brewery tour (Lagunitas) that one of the big cost to big breweries for a shutdown wasn't so much loss of productivity but the huge energy cost to get it back up and running. So they run 24/7, batch after batch.

 

I guess if I hadn't been on my fourth beer, I might have sussed that.

Like a lot of the better systems, the HEBS will run your now hot cooling water from the exchanger into the hot liquor tank. Supposedly, due to the awesome insulation, we'll only lose (working off memory here) four degrees Fahrenheit if the water sits in the tank for 12 hours. Added to that the calandria steam system that's installed, (5 minutes from cold to boil supposedly) and any temperature drop shouldn't be much of an issue.

They're big enough that they can sell the amount of beer made in 24 hours too!
The downside of running 24/7 (in addition to too much product) is the manpower cost. That's one of the reasons we went with the HEBS. We're hoping we can run one 8 hour shift day, and still keep every fermenter on the floor full. That's 4~6 fewer people to pay. Lots less overhead. Natural gas is cheap.

 

This thread keeps getting better and better! A question I have, after reading the above water conservation is when you add your water adjustments? I presume your cooling with straight tap water and need to adjust. Do you add these in a separate cool water kettle and mix into the total mash water?