We find ourselves moving into the month of January shortly and things are going more rapidly now. The floors have been removed and repoured and the slope looks right to me (for those that don't know...industry standard for brewery floors sloped to trench drains is 3/8" per foot...this is a serious slope and when I spoke with our concrete contractor he questioned the degree of slope since it is more aggressive than exterior slopes but you have to stay on the contractors or love squeegeeing and I must confess that I prefer the former). The drainage and stubbed up water lines are in place.

The stubbed up water lines are ready for us to tie into when we start plugging them in to our brewhouse, the keg washer and other applications. The cooler is a mammoth to say the least. It makes the tanks look like toys. It looms over them as if it is demanding that kegged beer be put into it soon lest the tanks suffer from a bullying session. The electrical is still being ran but is not finished. The boiler room is under construction with the boiler and the feed water tank sitting inside of the framed room since the boiler is too big to fit through the doors that will be on the front of the room. Once the cooler and the boiler room are completed, we will begin installing fire suppression inside of both. The air compressor and the glycol chiller will have to be forklifted to their pad which will require laying plywood over the grass so that we can get to the pad using the forklift.

  The holidays have considerably slowed down the work. Our electrical team should be back on the job this Monday. Alan from Premier Stainless will be erecting 4 of the fermenters that are currently sitting on their side, following their trip to us from China. Alan will also be placing the tanks, leaving enough space off the wall so that we can begin running glycol lines to all the cold applications.

 The boiler team will be on site by January 5th or 6th to start running the steam lines for all hot side applications. They will also be venting the kettle to the roof. The pads outside will be enclosed with privacy fence and caged so that we aren't exposed to late night scrap metal artists.

 We had to hire a local scrap hauler to haul off the tremendous amount of packing material that our cooler panels came with. This stuff filled up one dumpster and roughly three truckloads. They also hauled away our scrap metal from what was left of the floor lift (it took them three days to remove this thing...it was a beast).

 Once I removed as much garbage as possible, I had my building back again. Everything seems like a puzzle inside the building. There is a constant series of juggling that takes place in order to keep construction fluid. I had to move the cooler packing material so that I could move the cooler doors out of the way for the framing of the boiler room. This allowed me access to my trench drain so that I could remove concrete debris from it to prevent any buildup. That is just a recent example.

 Our entry for the Atlanta Cask Fest is bubbling away. We feel privileged to have been invited to this event as it is one of the most intimate southeast events in my opinion. There are only 250 available tickets outside of the 15-16 brewery reps and those tickets are free due to Georgia state legislation. These tickets are gone before you can blink. The beers that are served there are all cask conditioned and have never seen commercial production (they are for this event only...however, they might see future production). Since we are so close to the date, I can tell you that our entry is the Mayan Chocolate (Which Joey has dubbed Hunahpu's Imperial Stout. In Mayan mythology it was Hunahpu who gave cocoa to the Mayans.). We have fine tuned the spices, etc and feel like it will be a top notch beer. I hope that you can make it to the event but if you don't have tickets already then your chances are slim to none. Google search Atlanta Cask Fest 2009 for more information.

 We are pleased at having positive press as of late. The beernews site is one example of this but also look for a feature article in Southern Brew News and some sort of mention in Celebrator and BA magazine.

 In addition to this positive press, we also must thank those that enjoyed our beers enough to rate them on BA and ratebeer. It seems that our pilots are rising to the top of some of the lists on ratebeer and we appreciate that you enjoy our beers and are thoroughly looking forward to putting them in your hands in the very near future. Also, thanks for the feedback. I always feel like it is invaluable so keep telling us what you like and don't like and we will have our ears and eyes open.

 As an added piece of advice to those interested in opening your own brewery, I offer this tidbit of information. Do not leave your precious last bottles of hard to make, time consuming pilots in coolers that are on site while there are working contractors there. Especially if they are working unsupervised. We ended up losing our very last bottles of Bolita Brown and cedar aged Zhukov's to one of our late night thirsty contractors. They opened the bottles and took a couple of sips and then put them back into the cooler open. We both agreed that we would have gladly bought them a case of whatever they wanted to drink if they had just left what wasn't theirs alone. Lock up your precious last bottles (Must protect the precious!!!). 

 Hopefully by the time that you are reading this you are relaxing with your favorite old ale or Christmas beer. We are hoping that we will be able to put our beers in your hands very soon. We plan on being in production by no later than the middle of January. If this takes place, then expect our first beers to be on draft in your favorite pubs by early to mid February.

             Happy Holidays to all of you from Cigar City Brewing! Hang in there...you will be drinking us soon.

             Take care,
              Wayne Wambles
              Head Brewer
              Cigar City Brewing