It has come to our attention that this Saturday is St Patrick’s Day. That seems like the sort of thing a brewery should mention, right? Despite a Irish-sounding last name I’m actually more Scottish, however, and I don’t particularly like dry Irish stouts. Take that as you will! (Opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Community Beer Works LLC, etc etc) Corned beef and cabbage is pretty great, though. Steer clear of the green beer and everything should turn out okay.
This isn’t related to beer at all, but both this weekend and next are Maple Weekend in New York State. I hadn’t heard of this great tradition until a fellow member of the Niagara Association of Homebrewers sent out an email a few years ago. There are more pancake breakfasts than you can shake a stick at, not that I know why you’d want to shake a stick at something, and you can tour the various sugar shacks in Western New York. “Sugar shack,” by the way, wins the award for Best Name of Something Ever.
Ethan caulks. That's a pun. I didn't think of it, and it makes me sad.
Hey, Kickstarter backers: have you gotten two emails from us this week? If not, please email me: it’s about getting your rewards.
Last night I had a nice exchange on Twitter with someone looking for a homebrew store. It was a great example of how the medium can be used, with Flying Bison and Kegworks chiming in as well. He finished by asking about Twitter lists for Buffalo breweries and homebrewers. I didn’t know of any comprehensive ones, and so I decided to make them.
For the uninitiated: a list on Twitter is both a collection of users and a way to view all of the members’ tweets. As someone with a library degree, being able to cultivate a subject bibliography is cool.
If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know. The “Buffalo homebrewers” list is particularly barren, so @ us, comment, send me an email, whatever. Make yourselves known!
Right after I took this picture Rudy told me how much fun it was and so I paid him $20 to let me do the rest
I also said that there was quite a lot of work to do in the meantime. We have run directly into openingtodolist.xls*, yelling “Leeroy Jenkins” and fervently hoping that the reference we’re using isn’t dated (* this is slightly inaccurate: it’s a Google Doc). I personally spent about 13 hours at the brewery this weekend, and when I left on Saturday Rudy and Greg were still there. When Rudy left he emptied a large garbage can which we found full upon our arrival Sunday morning.
What have we been doing? My personal list of accomplishments:
This caulk had the consistence and color of cream cheese frosting. I really wanted to eat it. In hindsight, maybe we should have cracked a door while we painted.
Helping Rudy paint the sides of the coolers
Climbing on top of the cooler to paint the top
Not wetting self upon realization I had to climb off the cooler when I was done
Caulking the edges of the ice and water shield at the bottom of the coolers
Numerous “caulk” jokes
This doesn’t even include mention of Tim, who has spent an incredible amount of time building the cooler in which we’ll be storing our kegs for filling growlers despite not being an owner. We’ve made quite a lot of progress. Are we done yet? Oh no. Work has been going on all this week and the weekend will bring more marathon sessions. It has begun, and it will not stop for a long, long time (it turns out that once you open a brewery people expect you to produce beer?).
It’s not just physical construction that we’ve been spending time on. We’ve been talking about various logistical issues, such as what to do as a launch party, and what we’ll be naming our beers. Names are important, although Ethan’s facetious idea of naming them Product 001, Product 002, etc does tickle me a bit.
My attempt to show some label cleavage, sadly, failed
Here you might be saying to youself, “What about In C?” Well, the titular component of that beer is the citra hop, which is unavailable in all but homebrew-sized amounts until the 2012 harvest. You’ll be seeing In C, albeit possibly with a different name, but our initial offering will be a different and yet still incredibly tasty pale ale.
Behold: a growler suit! For when your growler has to go to fancy dinners or weddings. Like the growlers themselves, while Kickstarter backers at the $100 level and above will be getting them first they will be available for purchase at the brewery.
Kickstarter folks: check your email early next week. Information on getting your swag is incoming.
This week’s post is brought to you by Dave. He used the title in an email, and he’s the one who called me last week. “I have something to tell you,” he said, “and you can’t tweet it.”
He knows me so well. Had he instead opened with “The SLA has given us a conditional approval,” well, that would have been on Twitter before he had finished the sentence.
You want this, don't you? The beer is swelling in you now. Take your pint glass. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your desire for hops. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.
There you have it. We have our SLA approval.
Now, it’s “conditional” because they need to get a Certificate of Occupancy from the City of Buffalo, and that can’t be given until our construction is done. Do you know what we are doing this weekend? We are doing our damndest to finish construction. From there it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to get inspected by the Department of Agriculture. After that, we have to get down to brewing some beer! Once that conditions, well… check your local listings.
We anticipate this will all take about four weeks. It could be a little more, it could be a little less. The date when we are sending beer to bars will not necessarily be the same as when we start filling growlers, as that’s another permit we need to get. Depending on timing it might be day and date, but, you know, be forewarned.
Kickstarter backers will get to see the brewery sooner: our neighbors at Abaca Press have delivered the shirts and hoodies and so all that’s left is to get the growler suits in and we’ll be ready to go. We will ship your rewards, absolutely, but part of the rewards for everyone was a tour of the place, a spot for you to sign your name by our growler filling station and (the most valuable of all) some free high fives. It has come to my attention that some backers have already received high fives and so be warned, any from now on will cost you. Details on that soon, but we’ll be having office hours before we open.
There’s been an awful lot of talk about construction in our updates recently. Which is because construction is pretty much done (hooray!), so it’s been a big focus for us. I admit, however, that I am not the person who knows about that sort of thing. Greg and Dave told me what to do when we were building coolers and I did it, and in many cases that took the form of holding something up while they did the actual work.
This week, let’s take things into my realm: the internet. I’d like to talk about social networks.
Obviously we blog, which I quite enjoy, and we also tweet and Facebook (the latter of which I do not enjoy nearly as much, so if my friends haven’t posted something on a Thursday afternoon when I go to link to the Thirsty Thursday post on our page then I just don’t see it. It turns out one of my friends is pregnant!). Are there other areas you think we should explore? Should we be Pinteresting? I’d sort of like to Tumbl, but while their resharing seems nice it’s too close to a blog for me to justify having two, and we like WordPress. I’m pretty sure we can avoid Orkut and Cupidtino.
The cooler for the kegs we fill growlers from!
I like Reddit, at least when its users aren’t being predictably and terribly misogynistic, but beyond a planned AMA when we open I don’t think there’s much there for us. There, I said it, so now we have to do it.
The biggest question for us now is where to go in the realm of beer related social networks. Up until now I’ve personally used Untappd, though I can’t exactly tell you why since I ignore all its social features and am just in it for the badges. Carrots on sticks like badges and achievements trigger the reward center of my brain in ways that are kind of shameful. Pintley also seems promising, and not just because it actually includes all of its vowels.
Ideally we’d like to use the sites that the people who drink our beer use, or also venture down new territory and tell you about it because I’m the sort of nerd who does that on his own anyway. But if we overextend ourselves then that gives us too much to update and you too much to check: jack of all trades, master of none. Pintley and Untappd are the two sites I know of for “checking into” beer, and so if there are other beer social networks please let us know. There are also forums and rating sites like BeerAdvocate and RateBeer, but I see them as slightly different.
Pintley
I’ve been meaning to look into Pintley for about a year now, but only actually did it last week. I’m very impressed with the site from the perspective of a brewer: the potential to interact with the people who drink our beer is pretty amazing. There are no badges but you do have a “level” that goes up as you get points for writing reviews, spreading the word via social networks and the like. It also acts as a sort of beer Pandora, in the sense that it takes what you rate highly and will recommend other beers that you might like and not that you have hair sex using it. (That I know of; like I said, I’m just getting started.)
There’s an ongoing contest: whoever can accumulate the most points in a month wins a gift card for $500: “free craft beer for a year.” Unfortunately, you will never win this because the site is home to crazy people: the current leader for February has more than 35,000 points. You get 100 points for writing a review of a beer. So, yeah.
We already have a brewer’s account on Pintley, albeit nothing listed because we don’t yet have any definite beers (even In C’s name is just a working title, after all).
Untappd
Untappd is the same general idea, but you earn badges for things like drinking 10 different beers in a row or (my favorite) “Drinking Your Paycheck” for five beers on a Friday night. You can add a comment and a rating but there are no in-depth reviews like on Pintley. You can comment on and “toast” (like) others’ checkins, but I’m a social networking introvert and never do.
Where Untappd has an advantage is that it’s homebrewer friendly: you can create your own “brewery” and check in to beers you made yourself. This probably explains why my Twitter friends (primarily homebrewers) seem to favor the service.
We’re still waiting on our brewery verification with Untappd (to be fair, I only tried to sign up as CBW this morning), but I doubt I’d be able to speak to the services’ relative strengths as, well, we still don’t have any beer for people to drink. We’ll definitely be on both, whatever your checking in tastes are.
Have we missed anything? Are there sites we simply must check out?
I was already to write a post about beer social networks (particularly Pintley vs Untappd), but then so much news happened that, gosh darn it, I just have to post about it instead.
Power
Last week, I said:
We’re getting an upgraded service from National Grid, but first they need to replace the current hole-riddled pole. The estimate they gave us for when the new pole would be put in (with the new transformer coming at an unspecified time after that) is 3-4 weeks. If you think this is not a timeframe you want to hear, try being us.
Then, yesterday Greg sent out an email: it turns out there’s a homebrewer at National Grid, and we’ve been scheduled for the new pole, wires and transformer — you know, everything — for next week. Next week! That is significantly sooner than 3-4 weeks.
Kickstarter
Today a subset of CBW drove to Rochester to pick up these bad boys:
I’m sure the first question everyone who didn’t back our Kickstarter has is “Can I have one?” For the glasses, no. Those are Kickstarter exclusive and so everyone who’s getting one knows about it already. We only ordered as much as we needed. Sorry! The growlers and growler suits, though, will be available to everyone, although Kickstarter backers will get to choose which of the two slogans they want and so maybe there will be a run on “Embeer Buffalo” ones.
Speaking of growler suits, we don’t have them in our hands yet but we did get a sample image this week:
My precious
They aren’t in yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as they are. We’re just waiting on the suits, shirts and hoodies at this point.
So, how about that. I spend a few hours writing a post last week giving some estimates only to have some of them blown out of the water this week: and in the good direction!
