Muddy Creek Brewery: Hot Break!

[MuddyCreek]

Just put a new beer on tap, a mild Bitter called 2nd Base.

Cause, you know - you're only halfway there...

 

[Punity]

Bah dum dum tiss

 

[rlmiller10]

Glad to see a post again. The last couple indicate things are going well. Great to hear. Damn I need to get back to Butte.

 

[MuddyCreek]

We've been pretty overwhelmed. Unfortunately I have let my responsibilities here slide a bit.

We have the GABF coming up and that means our annual trek full of hope and likely heart-break. But hey, you can't win if you don't enter!

 

[todd_k]

glad to see you are doing well. I was following the other thread but I haven't checked in here in over a year!

 

[SeeMont]

I look forward to seeing you again at the MBA Brew Fest in Missoula, sure hope you are coming. I can't believe it has been a year.

 

[MuddyCreek]

Well, here we are, on the eve of heading out to GABF. We've entered a few beers. I'm looking forward to the festival. I know I've been M.I.A. for quite some time now.

I wish I had some time to catch you up on everything. Suffice to say we are STILL in business. Just had a couple festivals in Montana. The Montana Brewers Association Fall Festival in Missoula was a week ago and the following day we had our very own "Butte-toberfest" here in town.

We had a great time at both. Tonight we'll be sampling the beers we sent off to Denver for the festival. I'm ever hopeful that we'll do well, but of course there are thousands of beers entered so one has to be realistic. Regardless, the festival is a GREAT way to learn new things and taste some great beer while getting an idea about what's going on in the craft beer world around us.

And I get to meet tons of great brewers from around the country.

In other news, we had a meeting just the other day with our distributors. Things haven't been moving nearly as smoothly as either party would like. There are a number of reasons why so we have made some efforts to reconcile the issues that are holding us all back. The new goals for the distributors are to distribute a minimum of 10 bbls a month for us up to January, which will bring in an additional chunk of revenue for the brewery which we can certainly use. After January, their goal increases significantly and they'll be expected to hit 35 bbls a month both locally and regionally. (We'll be required to meet those needs as well.)

That's a big jump for us and if we can all hit it, that will be a significant step for us in the right direction. That would lead to us doing some canning shortly after that.

Anyway, that's if for now. I'll try to keep you up to date better from the road. I truly am sorry for the radio silence.

G.

 

[gl_az]

Well, here we are, on the eve of heading out to GABF. We've entered a few beers. I'm looking forward to the festival. I know I've been M.I.A. for quite some time now.

I wish I had some time to catch you up on everything. Suffice to say we are STILL in business. Just had a couple festivals in Montana. The Montana Brewers Association Fall Festival in Missoula was a week ago and the following day we had our very own "Butte-toberfest" here in town.

We had a great time at both. Tonight we'll be sampling the beers we sent off to Denver for the festival. I'm ever hopeful that we'll do well, but of course there are thousands of beers entered so one has to be realistic. Regardless, the festival is a GREAT way to learn new things and taste some great beer while getting an idea about what's going on in the craft beer world around us.

And I get to meet tons of great brewers from around the country.

In other news, we had a meeting just the other day with our distributors. Things haven't been moving nearly as smoothly as either party would like. There are a number of reasons why so we have made some efforts to reconcile the issues that are holding us all back. The new goals for the distributors are to distribute a minimum of 10 bbls a month for us up to January, which will bring in an additional chunk of revenue for the brewery which we can certainly use. After January, their goal increases significantly and they'll be expected to hit 35 bbls a month both locally and regionally. (We'll be required to meet those needs as well.)

That's a big jump for us and if we can all hit it, that will be a significant step for us in the right direction. That would lead to us doing some canning shortly after that.

Anyway, that's if for now. I'll try to keep you up to date better from the road. I truly am sorry for the radio silence.

G.

Wow, as the old saying goes, 'keep on keeping on bro'.

 

[MuddyCreek]

Made it to Denver, stopped in at the Yaak and Yeti last night. It's a brilliant fusion of Indian, Tibetan and Microbrews.

The beer was quite good. In fact they have a couple medal winners. The food was extraordinary. We had a great time. Today we'll be visiting a couple more local breweries.

As for the GABF, we entered our Vanilla Porter, our Chcolate Stout and our Habanero IPA. We'll see how it goes, but along the way we'll thoroughly enjoy the festival and the various brewers and beers and get some fresh ideas.

 

[MuddyCreek]

And we're STILL in business.

I feel terrible about the delays in keeping up for you guys. I really do.

So I will binge post for you today.

So much to update you on.

Let's see. You'll remember that we changed out our brewing system awhile back. We moved to Colorado Brewing Systems 4 bbl automated system. Let me start by saying the system has worked very well for us. However you know how brewers will tell you "never go smaller".

I'm about to tell you - "Never go smaller". We had a difficult time well, an impossible time really, keeping up with our schedule. I believed that with the more agile Co Brewing system we could manage it, but we just couldn't quite keep up. And ultimately we've had to go another route. I want make very clear though, that the system was never the issue. It was merely not scaled quite right for us. We're just getting a bit too big.

Last you heard we were going to GABF. We took 3 beers again and we did NOT place. I was particularly saddened because I felt one of them had a real shot. I thought our Habanero IPA really had an opportunity. However, it didn't work out. We're still waiting for our judging sheets. So until we see them we can't really say definitively what the judges saw that was either a flaw or possibly just less than ideal.

Nonetheless we had a really good experience.

This is our "distribution year". We are really focusing on getting our distribution brand out the door this year. We are also going to attempt to upgrade some FVs and Brites this year. You may remember that Butte, our town had 4 breweries. One of them unfortunately had to close down about 6 months ago. We rather liked those folks but they just weren't quite making it. I hope they are doing well elsewhere.

At any rate the other 3 breweries soldier on. I have a really tremendous lead brewer that we brought on just about a year ago. In fact he's a member here. He's done a wonderful job. He has recently introduced a couple new products into the brewery lineup and they are doing nicely. In fact we are likely to compete one of them in Portland in January. I'm hopeful that it will do well. He has a tremendous eagerness to learn and improve and he's been a great asset for us.

So essentially the short version of what we've been learning the really hard way - never second guess the difficult learned lessons of the experienced brewers that have gone before you. When they say "Don't go smaller!" Take a really long moment and think about that before you decide - you know better. Because, you know. I've said before - in these two threads that folks should listen to the experienced dudes and what did I do? I went off and did something contrary because I thought I could out think the process.

Ya... That didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped. So much work... For a smaller nano, that system would have worked so much better! We just needed to kick WAY more beer on a way more regular schedule. We just couldn't keep up ultimately. Wig shoulda listened.

sigh...

Heavy sigh...

 

[jiMithing83]

Tell me the stove is hot and I'll call you a dummy, let me burn myself and I'll be the dummy, eh? Glad you're soldiering on and staying afloat, it's always fun to read your experiences. Cheers.

 

[Bosh]

Know where you're coming from. It feels stupid complaining about too much demand for your product, but as a small business owner myself (nothing remotely connected to beer) I'm looking down the barrel of coming home at 10 PM every day due to increased demand and that extra money is just going to pay for the expansion that I had to undertake in order to keep up with demand for the foreseeable future, so I'm going to be working enough to not see my kids in order to be able to afford being able work enough to not see my kids.

But on the other hand you can never intentionally avoid fulfilling all available demand because you never know when demand is going to drop.

 

[MuddyCreek]

That's true.

As they say it's a good problem to have. We have an Oregon competition coming up in January. We have to register by the 10th. So we'll be finalizing what we want to submit tonight. We have several options, it's just determining what we think will do best.

We did get some very nice news yesterday. One of our fellows went down the road about 20 miles or so to a neighboring town and he may have just picked up as many as 5 new handles for us. That's not bad for 1 day's work.

Also, as you may have gathered from the above post - I'll be putting our 4 bbl Colorado Brewing system up on Pro Brewer.

As we roll into Christmas we're talking with distributors (I seem to say that alot...) and preparing our swag. We released our peppermint stout and it's doing really well. In fact 2 or 3 of those handles down the road are committed to that stout. We'll have to get them switched over to the non-peppermint version after the holidays.

We have also had to switch our yeast. The company we used to use has stopped producing yeast for commercial breweries so we're now switched over pretty much entirely to White Labs except for 2 beers. Overall we're happy with the results. We've had improvements or at least similar results in everything we've switched over. We are also working diligently to upgrade our FVs and pick up a couple more brites.

Every day is an adventure.

Oh ya. We've finally put up our website. There isn't a ton on it yet, but for the LOVE of GOD, it's up. http://www.muddycreekbrewery.com

enjoy.

 

[MuddyCreek]

Well, we've submitted to the Best of Craft Beer festival in Oregon. We'll see how that goes. I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season.

 

[MuddyCreek]

Well some positive news on a couple fronts.

We put our Colorado Brewing system up on Pro Brewer and within a day we had 7 or 8 people interested in purchasing it. So I'm happy about that.

We also made the decision last night as an owners' group to pursue better fermentors. As many of you know we've used some less than awesome fermentors for the life of the brewery and as we approach our 2 year anniversary we're ready to make the next step to being a "real boy". So we're going to make what may be the most important purchase in the brewery's life so far. We'll be picking up some 10 bbl SS jacketed fermentors and a glycol system that can independently control each of them. That will do more for us in terms of product stability and increased production than anything. I'm pretty jacked about that.

We're meeting once more with our distributors. (Believe me I could start an ENTIRE new thread on what I'm learning about distributors.) We haven't been doing our best and they haven't been performing as well as they could and as a result everyone has been frustrated. So I'm really really hopeful that tonight will be the LAST meeting.

I should say I hope rather than believe that's the case. However I do believe the distributors mean well and they want to do well. We'll see how it goes.

We have had to switch away from our main yeast supplier. They have stopped supplying yeast to commercial breweries and have switched over to only supplying home-brewers. So now we are using White Labs pretty much across the board except for 2 products. For one of those we use Wyeast and the other is a company trade secret. ;-)

I don't know if I mentioned this, but one of our beers made it to the medal round at "GABF". We didn't quite medal but we got fairly close. Sunburn Habanero IPA was in the running but ultimately the judges didn't quite pull the trigger on it. But we still feel pretty happy that it was close.

Our other two beers didn't do as well this year. But we were VERY happy for Uberbrew out of Montana how won 4 or 5 awards, I think 3 of them Gold. Nicely done fellas.

 

[Toejam792]

Thanks for sharing your story with us. I hope you keep posting updates, I find your story extremely interesting. Good job on your web site, it's pretty sweet. Hope those new fermenters improve your life, my little 12.5 gallon ond did for me

 

[pretzelb]

What will you the replacement to the CO Brewing system be? Or what will the replacement system do that the old one could not?

 

[MuddyCreek]

Actually Pretzelb, we went back to our 10 bbl system and we've been happily brewing on it for several months now. We're 100% gas fired and we're putting in a heat shield to make us a bit more efficient on that front. It's been going pretty well.

We are currently looking at an equipment upgrade for our fermentors. In fact on Sunday we're taking a field trip to a neighboring brewery to check out their equipment and see if the brewer is happy with it. If so we will likely work on a purchase ourselves.

That will move us out of the dark ages so to speak in terms of some of our processes. That will make me very very happy.

Tomorrow judging starts on the Best of Craft Brewing festival in Bend Oregon. We have 3 beers in the competition this year. I'll let you know how that goes. As you know, hope springs eternal.

In other exciting news we're coming up on our 2 year anniversary on the 27th of February. Interesting enough as fate would have it, Muddy Creek has produced 27 different products in its short career. We are back on track with our distributor and they are happily pushing us in the greater Butte / Anaconda area as well as Bozeman, Missoula and Helena. We even have some beer in cheery Stevensville MT.

On the IPA front, one of our biggest hurdles has been tackling the West Coast wall. We tend to have a very malty backbone in most of our beers. It's simply a signature and frankly one I'm rather proud of. However between our strong malt character and our water chemistry we have always struggled to produce really hop forward IPAs. It's been a real thing.

So, much work has been done to improve our water chemistry. We sent our water off to a lab for an in-depth analysis and then with that we did some heavy reading and some serious tinkering and we are finally getting to a point where we can make some fairly significant improvements to our water chemistry on a per-product basis. Our last couple of IPAs have been better and better received. I'm not quite ready to say we're there, but clearly we're on the road.

 

[BlueHouseBrewhaus]

Nice to hear even the "big boys" struggle with water chemistry. Maybe you could hire Martin or AJ as your water chemistry consultants (only half joking). I only wish I lived closer to MT. Haven't been there in about 10 years. I may have to schedule a trip to Big Sky

 

[MuddyCreek]

So we headed down to Dillon to visit Beaverhead Brewing. Had a few fine beers there and visited with the owner. We checked out their fermentors which are very nice indeed.

We're finishing our review of glycol systems and once we're satisfied we've selected on that meets our needs and can be serviced locally we'll go do the financing side of it. Then we'll be nicely upgraded in the brewhaus. We're all quite excited about it over here.

Our 2 year anniversary is coming up. We're trying to get prepared for that. Seems there's always something coming up. Another festival is on it's way as well. I am very fortunate to have an amazing team.

Hope you all are doing well. Valentines day is fast approaching. Take care.

 

[phatspade]

2 years and sounds like it has been a fruitful couple of years since the start. Has much really changed since the grand opening? Like most places that are new, has it been a pretty steady crowd or have you seen the varying ups and downs as expected? Really curious since human nature is always to try what's new and then move along to what's more comforting.

 

[CervezaMaLa]

After reading through your original post, real time, two years ago, I finally have a chance to visit. This visit will come after flying from Italy to DC, then driving all the way to Butte. That's a long way for beer! It will actually be at the tail end of my Army move, but my route just happens to take me to Butte for one night (completely driven by your original Muddy Creek postings). Last week of April...very excited to see your place. Now, I just need to figure out when to tell my wife why I've selected this specific route for our drive!

 

[Konadog]

Has anyone heard from @MuddyCreek recently? Should be around his 3 year anniversary, hopping all is going strong still.

 

[brhenrio]

Has anyone heard from @MuddyCreek recently? Should be around his 3 year anniversary, hopping all is going strong still.

Going by their facebook page they are!

 

[MuddyCreek]

WE LIVE!

I am so sorry for going MIA for so long. It's been a minute. We have done been working our way through so many upgrades and updates, I don't even know where to begin.

First off, we're not only still open, we're doing well. We've won 18 awards, we've expanded our fermentation capacity and we've significantly improved our fermentation tanks. If you remember, we used to have ambient temperature plastic fermenters. We had 9 or 10 100 gallon fermenters that we cycled between a fermenting room and a cold-crash room. Well, about 8 or 9 months ago we made the move to the 19th century and got ourselves a proper glycol system and some 10 bbl jacketed fermenters. Technically, they are unitanks. We can ferment, cold-crash and carbonate all in in one vessel.

That has significantly increased our production capacity. Right now my biggest lamentation is our facility. It has always been a terrible horrible place for brewing. We got in here due to the low cost and we have long since paid that price. Our goal has LONG been to find a new facility and we have been searching for some time for a better situation, but but of course the reality of brewery finances dictates that we've got to wait for a particularly good opportunity.

On the brewing side, we are constantly trying to juggle the commercial success of a beer we aren't really very proud of (Blue Sky) against those beers we really enjoy making and would like to make in the future. The problem is, the blueberry blonde is so darn popular it is now literally 1/2 to 2/4 of our brewing schedule. Although with the winter approaching, the demand may be dwindling a bit. We'll see. One of our distributors for the first time told us they have enough stock. (That's literally the first time we've ever been told they have enough.)

Our pumpkin spice beer is being released today. We're very excited about that. It was the first beer we ever had to win a gold. It tastes JUST like Pumpkin Pie. My head brewer desperately wanted to roast the 200 lbs of pumpkin we put in it, but we just didn't have the facilities to do it. Perhaps next year. Regardless it came out beautifully. We also have our annual fresh hop on tap. "Big Johnson" is made with local hops from a the backyard of the Johnson family. It's an English Bitter smash made with Maris Otter and those fresh hops. Wonderful beer. Everybody wants a Big Johnson!

Anyway, I will try to keep regular updates. We are having a Halloween party on the 27th, and I host trivia every Tuesday. We do some unique things with our trivia that really drives attendance. We had to kill our music which pisses me off, more about that in the next post or two. I also have some VERY exciting news about the brewery and taproom.

I hope everyone is doing well and again, sorry about the tremendous down-time. I've just been so darn busy and I have sadly neglected you all.

Gregg

 

[rlmiller10]

Great to see you back. That is quite the upgrade. We just started doing some work for a Butte client so perhaps I can get up that way in the near future. Wondering how many people are old enough to remember Big Johnson.

 

[NewJersey]

more updates on the brewery equipment!

 

[MuddyCreek]

Hey New Jersey, well it was some time ago that I posted about our visit to Beaverhead Brewing in Dillon. We have since purchased 4 10 bbl unitanks and a matching glycol system. That was 7 or 8 months ago. We have since been able to significantly increase our yield and I expect folks would argue that we've become much more consistent. ;-)

It takes all the fun of it when you can just dial a fermentor in at 67 degrees and walk away. Where's the stress and the worry? Where's the need to transfer 3 different fermentors thee times in order to get somewhere close to 10 bbls of finished beer?

Now we're just spoiled and lazy. We find new things to complain about on a daily basis. The truth is we've had a problem with our tankless heater that has been a epic nightmare. I mean it's been ridiculous. My head brewer is about to kill everyone in the building. We've had to use our HLT and our bubba tank to heat water for cleaning etc. and he hates it juuuust a little bit.

We're coming up on 4 years now. We can't call ourselves a new brewery anymore. We've learned a great deal but somehow we still manage to make a number of really dumb mistakes. We did have a backhanded blessing fall in our laps. In Montana at least distributor contracts are contentious at best. They are binding and very difficult to get out of. There is NO time limit. Once you sign with a distributor, you're locked in. We signed with a local distributor a couple years ago. You may have seen the posts about our somewhat contentious relationship. The truth is we have often been at serious odds with them and if I'm being honest the problems ran on a 2-way street. However, there was no getting out of the contract. Short of a 6 month termination period, you're just stuck with a difficult relationship.

However, our distributor sold out! They gave up! As an indicator of how our relationship went and how well they communicated with us, we literally got 2 days notice that they were going out of business. Yep. We were informed on a Friday that they would be closing up shop on a Monday. For 2 years we'd been asking for a listing of where we were placed by them to no avail... we got that list on that Friday. Essentially so we could either pull our accounts or try to manage them through some other distributor.

Honestly, we were thrilled. It was like dreading having to ask for and go through with a divorce and finding out your wife/husband left you because they were cheating with somebody else and the divorce papers just showed up and you simply had to sign. No alimony, no kids involved, just a relatively clean break. (Assuming we can find all our kegs...)

So we interviewed a couple other distributors. We learned our lesson. We have discovered the value of incorporating a couple Muddy Creek Friendly clauses into the contract that protects us and helps us out. (By the way, for those of you who have HAD a brewery for awhile you probably already know this, but for any new brewery owners out there... Minimum and Maximum monthly barrelage distribution requirements - Reviewable on an annual basis.)

The goal is as it has been, to increase our distribution and build a larger and larger footprint in the area. We just want to organically grow and branch out, letting people experience our products and hopefully enjoy them. Our next major goal is to figure out how to get into canning at any level. We've been saying that for 2 years, but now we're truly focusing on the reality. We'll see how long it takes to get there.

 

[MuddyCreek]

I guess other improvements we've made - things that in hindsight seem pretty much common sense...

We added a stainless T and an additional glass tube at the outlet of our plate chiller. The glass tube of course lets us see the wort coming through to the FV and we use the T to insert a digital thermoprobe. That way we can monitor the temp of the wort going into the FV through the chiller. We generally put around 2 bbls into the chiller and then pitch on top of that and re-seal the vessel. We also were having a TERRIBLE time with our carb stones in our unitanks. We couldn't get decent, consistent CO2 volumes for our lives. So, we moved them up. (We talked with another brewer out of Billings who did a couple different things and this is something we're trying.) So instead of having the carb stone on the lower part of the FV cone, we have it just up above the cone. It seems to give us better carbonation at a more consistent rate. I expect the carb stones were low enough that they were getting gummed up with yeast sediment before we pulled it. (Yes, of course we clean them very well before each fermentation.)

That's about it for new equipment right now. The jacketed FVs and glycol system have been really nice. Night and Day really.

 

[NewJersey]

Here in NJ most of the newer craft breweries self distribute. (It's allowed here)
As for canning there are several good mobile canning companies (Iron Heart canning does canning for a lot of craft brewers in the northeast)
Some breweries have already moved to setting up their own canning lines.
Self distribution seems cool because you have total control over who you work with and what special beers get released to who. Having to buy or rent trucks and pay drivers can be a hassle I'm sure.
LOL, i remember visiting a craft brewery a few years ago and they were loading like 10 or 12 sixtels into the back trunk of a bmw 3 series.