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

And since there has been a dearth of posts for anyone who is interested, this is what the logo'd pints and 19.5 oz mugs look like filled:

 

And unfilled...

 

Those look awesome!

 

We have T-shirts too...

 

Also in gray, blue, red and other colors...

 

Our building is listed in the ... Well you can read it.

 

The kegs arrived today. 96 German made embossed and beautiful kegs.

 

Oooooo shiny haha

 

I give you the backside graphic for the Muddy Creek growlers...

Drink responsibly, but please, refill often! : - )

 

Lookin good

 

If you could only create a beer that INCREASES your ability to drive/operate machinery. I think you would see a windfall

 

Just got word that all that remains for our state licensing is the final interview. Course our tanks are still being worked on but other than that...

 

Really getting close now, eh? Very exciting, keep the updates coming!

 

Hey, did you miss me?

I want to give you the facebook address again. It's not a shameless plug, it's just the easiest way to keep up on what's going on with the brewery on a regular basis. https://www.facebook.com/muddycreekbrewery

The page also shows all the latest photos etc. I try to upload as many as I can here but things are much easier on the FB page.

However, here is all the inside skinny that YOU GUYS want to know that facebook people don't much care about.

We have finished all our licensing requirements from the Feds (easy) and the State (harder) except the final inspection walkthroughs. Those will no doubt be a bit of a pain but we have check-lists of everything that we need to adhere to so as long as we do meet all the requirements we are told that there will be no issues. (Ya... I know.)

We have built the bar and only need to front it and put the top on and lacquer and finish it. We need to wash and polyurethane the floor and paint the walls and the taproom will be ready for our customers. All our taps (along with 17 turbo-taps,) shanks, connectors, and bar line has been ordered. We are purchasing our gas-mixing system to deliver 2 of our beers initially on nitrogen along with the ability to regenerate nitrogen ourselves rather than purchase it which will over the course of about 16 months pay for the cost of the nitrogen regeneration system.

We have all our kegs on hand, this weekend we finish sheetrocking the fermenting, lagering and milling rooms. (That will finish all our drywalling.) On Monday we are having the lead electrican and the accounting manager back from our electrical company so we can figure out the rest of the work on the building to finish the electrical for both the taproom and the brewery control system.

The brewhaus tanks should be shipping within a couple of weeks and we should have them in house by the 3rd week of July. By mid August our goal is to have them all hooked up and start brewing test batches. By the end of August we hope to have everything dialed in so we can start brewing in earnest.

Basically, we have everything in place right now except the brewhaus tanks and some transfer hose which we will order as soon as the tanks are shipped. Starting out we are going to run everything pretty simply. We'll start with just 4 beers on tap, although we have 17 registered with the state and will eventually work our way up. We'll open with a stout, an amber, a blonde and of course and IPA. Immediately available we will also serve root beer and lemondade for shandy options.

Soon after we will add a wheat ale and a porter. After that we'll include a true hefeweizen and some fruit beers. Down the line we'll also include ginger beer.

We've already had some interest in local distribution. We've organized some limited tastings and local restaurants and some pubs are interested in carrying our products. We'll get to that as soon as we are clear on what our taproom volume is. We have a 10 bbl system and we plan on running 20 bbls a week initially until we learn what our demand is. What our taproom doesn't require we will distribute and with luck we'll find we may need to up our weekly production sooner than later.

We run a farmhouse system, so there's no substitute for time. We need to age our beer for it to be at it's best and that means a planned rotation and foresight for what's down the road. That's one of the reasons we went with a larger system than originally planned. We wanted to have the option to put down as many as 35 or 40 kegs each weekend and let them sit for a month aging while we continued to produce beer each week to supply whatever needs we may have.

In more interesting news, we built a Mobile Libation Station basically to take to one of the owner's nephews wedding. We made two beers last month, Muddy Creek Chocolate Stout and Dirty Blonde Ale, put them in a couple of corny kegs and built a mobile serving station out of a simple plastic trash-can on wheels. It holds the kegs, a 5 lb C02 tank, all the hoses, connectors etc and plenty of ice to keep the kegs cold and has a tower-double tap on the lid.

We also have all our T-shirts in. I don't know if I added those pictures yet, but I can show you some of those too. For the sake of brevity, I'll just show the men's black and the women's pink although we have other colors as well. Soon we'll be doing public tastings were people can buy pint glasses, mugs, growlers and T-Shirts if they like and we can start recouping some investment and perhaps making some attacks on the principle of our business loan. The good news is that enough people have asked us about our pint glasses, mugs and T-Shirts that we may be able to sell enough to order more and make the tastings regular events to maintain our high community interest until we can officially open. (Ah, but you ask, how can you do tastings if you aren't officially open or fully licensed?) We can GIVE beer away in our 4 oz taster glasses (or bigger, if we like.) at a location OTHER than our taproom. Fortunately, the Post Martini bar is right next door to our taproom so we can do tastings and also give short tours of our taproom if we like where people may choose to purchase "Muddy Gear".

And finally, we also have a YouTube channel if you'd like to see some of our other semi-cheesy stuff. I occasionally put up some vlogs I call "Meet your Maker" which refer to the guy who makes the beer. There are other segments to. Some are old beer commercials I found and put up, others are just vlogs from days gone by that talk about beer etc. If you want to check it out, feel free if not - don't. My feelings won't be hurt. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9dea2w_RaBaFWefvNGukPw

Anyway, we're getting closer day by day. It's a ton of work. I won't lie. Once you see the bar you'll see just how much love goes into that kind of endeavor. (It's 26 feet long by the way.) We need to install a dishwasher underneath but that's pretty minimal. All in all, things are going very smoothly. As smoothly as any new brewery goes, I suppose.

Have a great day everybody. RCDAHAHB!

 

Hey where did you go through to get your t-shirts? We are trying to find another place that doesn't suck and actually make a shirt worth wearing.

 

Awesome! don't know hwo i missed this before.... on my list to watch now!

 

Punity, we went through a local vendor in Butte. Trying to go local as much as we can you know.

The graphic we had done through a local artist who has done most of the local school teams etc. logos and we gave him an idea of what we wanted and a few photos of other logos we liked in terms of look and feel and he came up with a first cut that we really dug.

Then one of the owners who happens to be tremendously talented with graphics himself started playing with the file himself, made a few tweaks, sent it back to the original artist who made a few more updates and ultimately we had our logo.

Our glassware was done through Clearwater Glass, (Ironically they don't do clear growlers.) I highly recommend them for glassware. They do great work at super rates and they have extremely fast turnaround times.

 

Awesome thanks. Yea we are having issues getting metal growlers right now it's frustrating you can't give people money anymore and get a product back haha

 

I did not realize you didn't have all these pictures of the glassware. I also included one of our label concepts for when we eventually go to canning... Finally, you see the three owners with our first glasses filled with different beers so you can see what they look like with different fills, but the light isn't so good. But hey, we're Rock Stars. We like the light dim!

 

I'm a native Montanan (Chester) and graduated from UM. I generally get back to Missoula every year or so for a Griz football game and will definitely try to stop by next time I drive through. Never really had a reason to stop in Butte before...


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What do you mean you have 17 beers registered? How does that work?

 

Grizzly, you will have a reason to stop now. By October there will be 4 breweries in town.

Savory, the state requires you to register your beers and their ABV in order to get your licence. There is a $100 fee each time you make a change to the list so it's best to build a healthy list the first time. That's why we have so many registered. While we may only open up with 4 or 5, we can expand to our larger list any time we like without having to register more beers with the state.

 

Any idea why they got that B.S. going on?

Seems like it cuts the throat on creativity.!

pb

 

If you change a recipe, say for different hops, does that trigger a change and a filing cost?


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As far as I know you only have to register a change is the ABV changes specifically or the style.

In Montana, the Tavern association is very threatened by the brewer's association. They (Tavern Assoc,) have a very strong lobby and they do not like breweries having any room to breathe whatsoever. They like to keep us on a very tight leash. This is just one of the ways we are kept under very tight regulations.

We met with the electricians today and made final arrangements for our remaining electrical needs. A new panel will be installed for our brewhaus and all the remaining electrical work will be done in the brewery and then all our Taproom electrical will be done upstairs. After the brewery electrical is finished we can put together our control panel needs and finish all that up and hopefully get our final inspections done so our licensing can be finalized downstairs.

We are doing our first tasting party on Thursday. We'll be rolling out an Orange infused Wheat Ale as well as an E.S.B. and a bit of Chocolate Stout. The best part is that we'll have an opportunity to sell a great deal of our glassware and T-shirts so we should be able to pick up some money to dump back into our loan and also allow us to order more glassware and T-shirts for our next tasting party scheduled for next month.

We intend to do tastings on a monthly basis to keep interest alive and well until we can fully open. They will basically serve as our "soft-openings" until we are fully ready. We have to "give" the beer away but we can sell merchandise and keep people interested. We will simply feature a different product at each tasting so folks can try different beers and get to know which ones they like so once we are fully open they have already determined which beers they love and can stampede happily into the tasting room with their already purchase growlers and demand fills.

We also met with a mobile canning company out of Spokane and were astonished at how cost effective their solution is for us, especially in our early stages. They will provide us with an excellent option for canned distribution both in our taproom and in local venues. Later we will even be able to can enough product to self-distribute if we like at a reasonable volume to make decent money. We couldn't believe how low they came in with their bids. I expected to get into canning in 6 months to a year but at their rates we can't afford not to get into it right away. In fact we were so impressed we have considered purchasing a separate brite tank JUST for canning needs.

I have a couple more photos for you, just to keep your interest up and also because I starved you for so long...

featured is our little stage for acoustic performers (we are brewery, not a roadhouse people!) and our 28 foot bar frame which will be surfaced in maple and fronted in aged barn-wood to go with the rustic feel of the building. As you can see in the background we still have a bunch of work to do. The walls are being patched and will then be painted. (The wives are in charge of all that. They have taste.)

The floors have a beautiful natural grain and they will be simply polyurethaned over with several coats. When we put water on the wood floor it brings out the natural look and it's very nice so we're sure it will look great. More news later as it comes in.

 

So this is a pretty big week for us.

We're doing our first public tasting party at the Post Martini Bar which is right next door to our taproom which is in construction phase. We can't legally sell any beer, but we can give away samples of our products for free. So what we are doing is a "tasting" where each month until we are open we give out samples of one or two of our products and during the tastings we happen to have "Muddy Gear" (T-Shirts, Mugs, Pints, Growlers, etc.) for sale so people can buy them.

This allows us to stay on people's mind, lets people taste our products and see how well they like them and gets our T-shirts and glassware out there with our logo and web-address on them to do some advertising for us on the street, all while bringing some revenue in for us. All in all it's not too shabby an idea. We keep our core marketed pre-customer base interested and rabidly excited even though we aren't able to open quite as soon as we wanted to.

We are also going to introduce our root beer, carbonated lemonade and ginger beer (done properly at under 1% ABV,) so that the local distillery that uses ALL those items in their INCREDIBLE mixed drinks can come and try them out along with their spirits so they can see our mixers in action with their products. They've already said they would like to use our products and now they'll have a chance to see customers trying the products together in a live environment. If it goes well we have an account ready made. (I'm a sneaky S.O.B.)

I've tested our mixers and I think we'll do very well. I think the local distillery folks will be very pleased. I also plan on inviting several local restaurant and pub managers specifically so they can see how people respond to the tasting in order to impress them with the importance of responding positively when our sales manager comes calling. (Again, sneaky S.O.B.)

One of our major plans just before we open is to have a huge pre-opening party specifically targeting local business leaders, restaurant and tavern managers in a hosted party where they can come have free pints and we merely ask them to provide constructive feedback on our servers and our products so we may improve our service. They get free beer and we get constructive feedback. The underlying foundation part is that we are building positive bridges to local businesses that may one day carry our products. We are purposefully fostering relationships we build by including them in our development and growth as a brewery while building their loyalty and patronage. They become part of our team!

(For those of you who want to one day open a brewery, this is good marketing stuff people... write it down!)

The other part is, you don't only do a pre-opening with business people, you do it with regular Joes too. You have a "free-Pint" pre-opening for people so they can come in and simply give you honest feedback on how your servers are doing, how your atmosphere suits your customers and how your products meet their tastes. And then you have them BACK and you show them that you actually listened to their comments and made changes accordingly. That's how you earn their patronage and loyalty. They know you built the place with them and for them. And then it becomes theirs and yours and you truly have partners who will come in two or three times a week and buy a few pints and take home a growler or two and support your business.

Now, the important thing is that this is a PRE OPENING, not a Soft Opening per-se. You don't want to give the idea that your beer is "free". You are not so much giving your beer away "before" you are open. Rather you are trading beer because you are seeking a very specific and VALUABLE service. You are asking for feedback on your servers and your atmosphere and your product. The way you ensure that people know that this service is valuable is when you ACT upon that advice. You actually demonstrate that you LISTENED and you even explicitly state who gave you the exact advice you followed and why. That lets people know that you were paying attention and that earns loyalty and trust.

These will be the people who will go to local restaurants and keep pestering the servers for YOUR beers until finally YOU get a call from the restaurant manager asking if you distribute or the local distributor asks if they can give you a card. That's how it works. It takes time and it takes a little free beer up front, but in the end it pays off.

So, we're starting with free tastings and a good deal of our time given up to serve the beer and meet the community and tell our story and let them know that despite our delay we are doing everything in the world we can to get open yesterday! However by the next tasting we'll have all the folks who came to this one plus that many more. We'll likely sell just as much Muddy Gear and more and more people will start advertising for us with our web address and logo on their back.

And all it took was a bit of free beer, soda and some time.

 

Well, we had our first "Tasting Party" last night.

We advertised for about a week on Facebook. That was it. We ended up with around 200 people at the event, ran out of beer and generally had what I would consider a smashing success. While we didn't sell as much merchandise as I hoped we would, I suppose this serves as a baseline for what we can expect.

We didn't have all our T-shirts in so that slowed us down somewhat. We had all our men's shirts in, but the women's shirts weren't finished yet. That probably cut our T-shirt sales in half. I expected to sell more pint glasses than we did, but we ended up selling quite a few more mugs than pints. Nonetheless, we had a huge number of people come to the event and they were all very pleased with the beer and our soft-drinks. (We served root beer and lemonade as well as ginger-beer.)

We made some Shandys (or is it Shandies... I don't know. Guess I'll have to become better edumacated on that as they were very popular.) The brewer from the other brewery in town that will be opening about the same time as us came and he was impressed. He agrees with the marketing strategy of keeping our future customers engaged while we wait for those darn tanks. We also had another brewer from town who will be opening a brewpub come by and give us a sample of his maple bacon cream stout. It was very nice. I was likin' it!

We got a great photo of one of our customers showing off a T-shirt he purchased and we announced that he would be the June cover-model of next year's Muddy Creek Calendar. That has kicked off a flurry of activity on the page. Everyone is excited about the chance to be on the calendar which means they are all geeked up about attending the events and being involved. I'll post our Mr. June for you. While it may not be the most amazing photography in the world, it connects us with the customers which is what a brewery wants to do from day one, or in our case day -92 or whatever...

 

Are you going to be selling merch online? Your pint glasses look pretty slick, I wouldn't mind having one.

 

If i was local id come by and buy a few growlers and some pint glasses.

 

We'll mail the glassware to you if you like. We've already started shipping them out to folks.

The online store should be up in a few days (a week or two in brewery time, you know how it goes.) I'll let you know or you can just tell me what you want and I'll get a check from you and mail it out to you. We do stone-age ordering as well.

 

This just in...

The brewhaus tanks are ON the boat. Sure, it's a 22 day boat ride, but they are ON the boat.

Of course we're going to be the brewery that discovers the Godzilla really DOES exist and OUR boat is going to be the one that also has a ****load of FISH in the hold somewhere... but we'll deal with that later.

 

It's official!

We have been awarded our conditional brewing licence by the state of Montana. Our permanent licence will be awarded when we complete our inspections and all our facilities match our drawings turned in to the state. We have 90 days from the receipt of our conditional licence (yesterday,) to finish our inspection.

What does this mean?

Technically it means we are legal. Ironically, since our tanks didn't arrive in mid-May as we expected we don't have the 10 bbl system to brew beer so we don't have the means to produce beer on any reasonable scale to provide for our customers. However, as soon as our tanks do arrive and we can get them installed, we can start producing beer and selling it in the taproom.

Once we pass our inspection demonstrating that all our walls are where we said they'd be we get our permanent license and we are good to go.

It's been a trip and we still have TONS of work to do, but the brewery licensing side is over. We still have the food licensing side of it to go for the Root Beer, Lemonade and Ginger-Beer, but we can do that at our leisure.

It's a good day (sorta,) for Muddy Creek Brewery.

 

congrats! keep up the updates!

 

So, what would happen... since yeast you can't control 100%. If for example, the beer normally goes from 1.050 > 1.012, but for some reason, the yeast had a momentary issue of over eating and it hit 1.008... that changes the ABV. Does that require a message to the feds? or how does that work?

 

I know for the federal level there is an allowable variance in the ABV. I think it is 0.3 tolerance in either direction from the listed ABV but don't quote me on that.

Sounds like when it comes to pre-registering his beers that is a state level thing and am not sure about his local laws.

 

Opiate is right, there's some play in the percentage. You have to be in the ballpark within just about .5 of a percentage point as I understand it.

You gotta know your yeast and how it behaves. You spend a great deal of time paying attention to how many live cells you have in your yeast before you pitch it and you take care not to pitch too many generations of yeast. When you do that you get inconsistent beer that your customers start complaining about underneath their breath and to people on the street.

It's not like the State guys or the Feds are sitting at the bar with hydrometers waiting on you. I'm not exactly how sure how often we are checked for ABV. I'll have to ask a few of the other guys around the state about that.

 

Like all of us homebrewers that dream about what you are doing all the time but don't have the balls or the finances to actually do it, I say good luck and live the dream!
Thanks for sharing it with us.

 

The fire-line is IN!

Last week as I was getting ready to leave town for the lake the excavators were digging the trench to lay the fire-line from the water main on Main Street into our building so our last REALLY REALLY expensive bit of construction can go in. It's not our last bit of construction by a long bit, but it's our last truly expensive bit, (to the tune of $20,000.)

So now we can put our fire sprinklers in the basement and that will be that. We have a bit of mudding and taping to wrap up in the brewery and then we'll be painting down there. Then the electricians will be doing a bit more work getting our control panel installed as well as our mill connected.

After that our lights and fans will be connected upstairs and you can finally begin to see some of the "after" photographs that make the place look like a brewery and taproom instead of a construction site. The tanks are scheduled to arrive in just under 2 weeks in Portland and we'll have somebody in place to pick them up after they clear customs and inspection.

In no time we'll begin the process of seeing what it takes to become a real boy! And you'll have photos all along the way.

 

My partners and I are meeting today with the executive director of the Montana Brewer's Association (MBA) at our facility in Butte.

He's coming through town and we are planning on meeting over lunch to talk a bit about some new legislation that is coming up in the next session in the state. In a nutshell there are 50 breweries about to be open in Montana, making us the 2nd largest if not the largest brewing state in the country. This along with some problematic internal issues for the Tavern Association has made for some difficult relationships with the MTA.

Because of some very serious clout in the legislative and lobbying world the MTA has set the bbl limit for MT breweries at 10,000 where they must stop profiting from taproom sales. Furthermore, taprooms can only sell 48 oz of beer per person per day in the taproom and the hours of operation are limited from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Now normally this is no great hindrance to the brewery industry. In fact Montana breweries, as you see have thrived. The atmosphere is conducive to families because the hours are relatively reasonable and since the tap limits are set at 3 pints nobody is sitting around smashed and that makes it a relatively pleasant place to have a couple of pints with your friends.

This all leads to business ultimately being drawn away from taverns, which ironically was exactly the opposite of what they wanted when they set the restrictive rules in the first place. But I digress.

Now the MBA is gaining enough members and enough political and financial backing to gain footing against the MTA. Brewing is the fastest growing economy in the state in terms of revenue and employment. The MTA had to come up with a new method to compete with breweries that would both build their products while weakening the offerings and political power of the MBA.

The new legislation is for "stacking" which will allow both breweries and taverns to carry multiple types of licenses. If it passes a tavern will be able to acquire a brewery license and a brewery would be able to acquire an additional beer/wine license. On the face of it, this solves many problems for both parties. Taverns may brew their own craft beers on premises to provide their own products if they wish. Breweries can increase their hours of operation and their serving capacity with their beer/wine license if they choose to. The larger breweries could open their taprooms and serve their own products at a profit if they choose.

On the face of it, all seems reasonable.

However, the issue lies within the internal issues within the MTA I mentioned earlier. Decades ago in Butte Montana, right where I sit the mining boom drove many industries. Of course one of the the leaders was the tavern industry. Many many tavern licenses were issued in the state all over. Eventually, so many bars were open in the state that legislators became concerned that the state would be seen as too "boozy" and a decision was made to cut off the number of beer wine and liquor licenses. This caused a general state of panic as, of course many entrepreneurs were concerned at the vast amount of money to be made on a booming industry.

In order to assuage concerns another bad decision was made. Beer, wine and liquor licenses were made transferable. They could be moved not only from person to person, but from location to location. This made an instant seller's market from the licenses. Thus a license that was once merely a pittance became a highly valuable commodity. Now, the brewer's licence that costs $650.00 in Missoula County in Montana would not compare to the $500,000 liquor license (Yes, really,) that sells next to it.

And here is the heart of the problem. Based upon availability in some counties a beer/wine license may sell for a relatively reasonable amount. It could go for as little as $1000 for one brewer. However a brewer in an adjacent county could be forced to pay $10,000 or even $25,000 for the same license and that would be a deal. In a county like Missoula, small or mid-sized brewers would have no hope whatsoever to purchase a license as it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars..

Worse yet, the moment a large-scale brewer (who could actually afford to purchase a license,) got one he would naturally move over into the tavern world where his best interest is in limiting the taproom sales of actual breweries so that Tavern-Breweries can provide actual brewery beer. It becomes the MTA's best interest to further limit the production of brewery taproom sales so that more and more breweries are forced one way or another to somehow scrounge up enough money to purchase a beer/wine license. (Which frankly just isn't possible in most counties.)

The short-term effects of the legislation will be minimal until the MTA gets enough power (with the help of their additional members and the weakening of the MBA from the loss of their previous members,) to pass new legislation to further limit the number of ounces of beer that the brewery can sell from its taproom. This is the logical next step of the MTA. It's what I would do if I were a Brewery/Tavern.

Once that happens, the only way for a small and mid-sized brewery to realistically survive is to become a distribution specific brewery on a small scale and try to work up to large scale production and you all know how hard it is to try to increase your brewing output from say, 20 gallons a month to 80. Good luck with that. All the while making about 1/4 what you used to.

That's what the new MTA and large scale brewers are trying to pass with this new legislation and what the smaller and mid-sized brewers are trying to work on slowing down and discussing before a small panel within the MBA (of course made up of 4 Macro-breweries and 1 Micro-brewery in a small county who can get a $1000 license,) are trying to pass.

 

Got another working weekend. I'll update with some photos after we get going.

I'm putting together our pilot system this weekend. It will be a 1 bbl E-herms system with propane options under the BK and HLT. We're using 55 gallon SS drums for our kettles. I'll plumb it and test it this weekend and next weekend we'll try a simple batch on it to make sure everything is working properly.

I'm also putting in the ventilation system for our milling room and if I have time I'll put together the prototype for our fermentor stands. Ya. That ought to just about be enough. Meanwhile one of the other partners is putting in conduit from the taproom upstairs so we can run gas lines and ethernet and he'll be activating our P.O.S. system.

The ladies will do the finish sanding in the milling room and the aging room downstairs and if they get far enough along we may just get some primer in those rooms as well.

As I said, photos to come. Monday we have a meeting with the electricians to come in and finish up all the brewery wiring and after that they'll do the taproom wiring. All our brewhaus tanks arriving in customs tomorrow. (Portland.)