I finally have some good news regarding starting construction. I am meeting with the plumbing and concrete contractor on Monday at the warehouse. We will be discussing how the two will collaborate and construction. I have been told that we are clear on permits and they can start construction as early as the middle of next week. They will be drawing out the lines in the floor for the drain pipes. I will tell you more about this as I acquire more information. I am extremely pleased that it is finally moving forward after all this time.

            Joe and I kegged the Capricho Oscuro. That oak cask was bigger than we thought. We both assumed that it was 5 gallons but when we were racking the beer over, it filled the keg to the top and was still coming. We had some of the Little Belgian That Could Left in the keg and since I didn’t have another sanitized keg to put the rest of the beer in the cask into, we put the last .75 – 1 gallon of the beer on top of TLBTC. I guess we can just call that an unexpected extra bonus. The oak cask is most likely a six gallon cask. I was very surprised at how clear the beer was. I guess that yeast does flocculate out better if it has contact with wood.

            The bottling line came in last Tuesday. I unloaded it off the truck with the forklift and started inspecting it immediately. It is a fascinating piece of equipment and most likely one of the most complex pieces of brewing equipment that I have ever laid my hands on. We will have to buy a two stage ten horse power air compressor that has an 80 gallon tank at least for the pneumatics. The CO2 supply with need a surge tank and heated regulators to keep up with this line. We will also have to purchase a liquid ring vacuum pump with a surge tank for it in order to run double pre-evacuation on the bottles. This will give them a longer shelf life by reducing the total amount of dissolved oxygen at packaging time. Since none of our tanks can handle 30 psi of pressure then we will have to purchase a stainless open impeller pump to move the beer from the tank to the surge tank on the bottling line. In order to prevent the beer from coming back into the tank out of the surge tank on the bottling line we will have to put a check valve inline after the pump. Out of all the pieces of equipment that we will be implementing, this one will provide a hell of a learning curve but I intend to tackle it the best that I can. It will allow us to protect the quality of our beer and to package much more efficiently than any of the other bottling lines that we were considering going with previously. If you are interested in helping on bottling day, we definitely won’t turn you away. We will be using a manual labeler and hand sanitizers prior to bottling. This will take place the day before bottling day and we will need volunteers for this as well.

            I will be bringing a growler of Capricho Oscuro to the BA event at Oldsmar Taphouse on 9/06/08.  (The rest will be bottled and turned over to Tony with Wayne and I keeping five bottles to enjoy in the future- Joey R.)I am bringing another bottle but I am still undecided on exactly which one so I will just leave that a mystery until the actual event. Joe won’t be able to make it so I will be swigging solo this time around (prior engagements that he can’t break…I know you will miss him a great deal gunhaver). I am looking forward to sharing our beer and drinking some of the long list of quality beers that everyone else is sharing. Also looking forward to talking with Tony again and I want to thank you Tony for graciously supplying us with the cask and the firkins. When we get into commercial production you will be the first business that we fill a firkin for and I can’t wait to drive the tap into the keystone!

            Our new label design team of one is Matt Callahan (www.manmademurals.com). Check out his website because he knows what he is doing. We discussed five or six label designs on Thursday and he has been the most professional local artist we have dealt with. He will be doing a simplified version of our logo as well that will be on all our beer labels (and eventually on the top left corner of our t-shirts hopefully). We should see the first proof on Monday. I am told that Matt is also a mastermind with Photoshop as well.

            We met with a member of our electrical engineering team last week as well and he updated specs for the bottling line and took dimensions for the boiler room. We found out that we are going to need a boiler room to meet code since the BTU on the boiler is more than 250,000 BTU. They are going to help us make sure that the enclosure is built to code.

            I was planning on cooling down the barley wine this weekend because I noticed that the activity had slowed down significantly but when I looked at the fermenter on Friday, the damn thing was actively fermenting again. I guess it has a mind of its own and I am more than willing to give it whatever amount of time it needs to finish. The aroma right now is vinous and malty.

            There is a group of three gentlemen that are planning on opening a brewery in the Atlanta area by 2010. They were interested in interviewing us. If you want to read the Q&A then go here (It's a cool blog too- Joey R.):

 http://mondaynightbrewery.com/2008/08/22/interview-with-a-brewer-cigar-city-brewing-in-tampa-fl/ 

Thanks Jonathan for posting us on your website. I hope that you are able to get your brewery up and running with less hang ups than us.

            That does it for this week. Until the next post….

            Take care,

            Wayne Wambles

            Head Brewer   

            Cigar City Brewing