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Legends!
Thanks for checking in. We’re now on Day 39 and still in top gear as we race down the highway towards our desination. Beertown.
It’s going well, but often overwhelming. A few times I’ve gone to bed feeling the weight of a full keg on my chest due to the unrelenting energy it’s taking to work through all the decisions, as well as pushing hard physically to get stuff done.
In no particular order, this is where we’re up to:
The Beer:
We now have 2 batches in tanks at our awesome neigbours over the road. Dave from Dad and Dave has been an absolute champion in letting us use his kit and work with suppliers to make sure we have everything we need to package the first batches. There’s 2,400L of 1st Edition Lager at 4.5% and 1,200L of Sunday Bitter at 3.8% (our take on an ESB) in the tanks. Tomorrow we’re dropping a 1,200L batch of Aussie Hazy Pale made from all Aussie ingredients ready for when we open.
Our Tanks:
Despite paying triple to get our tanks on the boat Pre-Christmas, we’ve been delayed twice and are now looking at a landing date of 21st December. Judging from the 400 photos sent through from the manufacturers in China, it’s going to be incredible and our brewer Tony jumps out of bed every morning with excitement to put another red cross on his calandar as we count down to firing it up. Our entire brewery, with piping, has been preconstructed and dismantled in China. This sounds like a good idea, but it’ll mean that the location of each tank and pipe will need to be millimetre perfect to work. We’re the first brewery from Brewtique to do this… but I’m assured she’ll be right.
We’re also not quite sure how we’re going to get the container on site. The rear of the building isn’t quite big enough to fit the 40ft container, so we’re toying with the idea of using the neighbours car park next door. It’ll be the middle of the Christmas/NY break, so we might be ok however it’s still a big unknown…. I’m assured she’ll be right.
The Fit-Out
The food grade flooring is in. My understanding of the initial quote was for $10.5k, and after they installed it I got an invoice for $33k…. Partly because of my misunderstanding of the quote, and partly because they ended up doing 170m2 instead of the 110m2 quoted without mentioning the extra cost involved. I think it’s a fuckup on both our parts, so we’re trying to work it out.
The cool room is in and it looks sick. We’ve put a huge window from an old butchers shop on the side, so everyone can see inside to our clean branded kegs. The idea is to give a sense of connection between the tanks, the kegs and the taps. It also puts pressure on our team to keep the room clean and tidy.
The stainless bar frame is in. It’s huge! We’ve set it up to have plenty of seats around the bar so our team can have a yarn to you guys about the beers and discuss all the different reasons Bucketty’s is the place to be.
We painted the entire interior the wrong colour. It turned out a slight shade of mauve, instead of grey. It’s amazing how a test patch of paint can look so different to 500m2 of wall space. Jim the painter isn’t stressed though, a coat of Royal Beige will cover up the mauve and she’ll be right.
We’re having a crack at building our own furniture and bartop, so Scotty, Tony, Roger and I spent a day in Bucketty milling up fallen trees and created some beautiful hardwood planks. Steve, our legendary neighbour who has a massive business building steel door frames has been kind enough to offer to weld together the frames for the tables, so we just need to build the tops and sand them back. Oh, and build 60 bar stools… or we might buy them. I’m about to head out to a furniture store with my son to check some out. He’s so excited!
Update – I started writing this post on Sunday and it’s already out of date. It’s now 9pm on Monday night after a massive day where we had 13 trades on site rocketing through the jobs. We also found out the tanks have been delayed for a 3rd time for an unknown reason. I’ll wrap it up here cause I’m recked and another 7am start tomorrow. I’m updating daily on Instagram and Facebook, so please follow along there because writing humorous witty posts has been pushed down the priority list for the immediate term.
Look out for 1st Edition Lager which will go on sale online or at the brewery next Monday (all things going well!).
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