The process of getting things together is moving much faster now. We received our certified bond for our state license today, which gives us four months to wrap up state licensing and the Federal Brewer's permit. I'm told that is plenty of time. Our tanks may be here as early as June, huzzah!

Wayne and I have also finalized much of what we'll need as far as prepping the space. We still need to remove concrete to slope the floors and cut drains. Then we'll scrape and coat the floors with a fancy, but tough, covering that will hold up to the abuse we'll heap on them. The covering is also ant-bacterial which is a nice bonus.

For the cooler we are going with a 20 ft wide X 30 long ft X 16 ft high walk in cooler with 6 ft of space in the back set up as a cellar room. So the first 14ft will be kept at 35 F for product heading out and 6 ft X 30 ft will be kept at 55 F for cellaring vintage and cask conditioned beers. One of our major goals is to offer plenty of one-offs and unique seasonals for the Florida beer geek community. This cellar space will give us the ability to play with a few beers in order to fulfill that goal.

Speaking of cask conditioned beers, Tony Falso from Oldsmar Tap House has supplied us with two brand new metal firkins. So expect Oldsmar Tap House to have some exclusive Cigar City Brewing cask ales on tap right out of the gate.

Back to more mundane happenings we also got in touch with TECO and they are working on running the gas that will power our boiler and our second direct fired kettle for part-gyle brewing. We will also be using a hot water on demand system for steeping second runnings. Bob Sylvester uses one at Saint Somewhere and he is very happy with it. We will be bottle conditioning and force carbonating so we are getting set up with bulk co2. We also need two brite tanks for that so tomorrow we are heading to beautiful Haines City, Florida.

There is a dealer of used dairy and food processing equipment out there. Hopefully we can pick up a brite tank that can hold pressure and one more for bottle conditioning, on the cheap. We'll let you know how that goes. And to anyone planning on opening a brewery with less than a million dollar budget, I highly recommend used dairy tanks for cold liquor and holding tanks. You can save a good bit of change. We saved several grand on our cold liquor tank going this route.

Were also pretty much set on kegs. We will be using 50 liter kegs with sankey couplings and 5 gal converted corny kegs. With our new 3 station automatic keg washer, we will be able to turn over kegs very quickly and efficiently.

Bottling is another story however. We are hoping to go with an applied bottling system that is versatile enough to allow us to quickly switch from 12 oz, 22 oz or 750 ml formats. That kind of flexibility is expensive though and the bottler and labeler will set us back about 90K. We could get a decent used system, for around 30-50K, but used bottling equipment makes me nervous. We are seriously considering cutting out the little extras, like A/C, in order to include the bottling line.

Well, that's all for now. Look for an update from Wayne later in the week.

Cheers,
Joey