At CCB we are trying very hard not to participate in the recession, but the City of Tampa's Construction Services seems disinclined to let us create jobs in the light manufacturing sector, which is apparently what they consider a brewery to be. After signing off on and thus approving our submitted plans the electrical inspector is telling us we can't have two electrical services on one building. However an exception was made and our plans were signed and approved and those plans were followed. Yet we still have no electricity because Tampa Construction Services is debating what to do with us. Meanwhile a nearly 600K project is in limbo and we are forced to delay brewing, again, while we wait for the Construction Services (the name really should be changed to Disservices because I utterly fail to see what service they provided in this instance) to deign final approval of the intallation of electrical plans they already said would meet code when they signed off on them!

In the mean time they also will not allow us to draw temporary power from the existing service. I sometimes wonder if they have any inkling of the financial hardships they place on people and how their slow movement and miscommunication could ultimately lead to their own unemployment as well as others. Protecting people from shoddy construction is important and I am not downplaying that goal. It is worthy and proper and inspections are vital to ensuring safety. But, sometimes the regulations go beyond mere safety and simply make it harder for business to operate. Especially when a business is told that what they are doing is ok and makes a sizeable investment based on that assurance only later to be told that it is not ok, even though the City said it was. How do you deal with that kind of thing? How do you plan for it? Assume that nothing Construction Services tells you is accurate? Or just that some of it is inaccurate? How do you tell which is accurate and which is inaccurate when they themselves don't seem to know? It can't be accounted for. There is no way.

Meanwhile we have a beer that is mostly fermented and with the temperature rising we absolutely must have power in the next week or we risk losing nearly $4,000 worth of beer! We are also prevented from brewing as we have no power to the brewhouse, pumps, chillers....anything! We can't even keep the nearly $7000 worth of hops we ordered cool in our own cooler, we have to split them up between off site coolers when the temperature rises. Had Construction Services approved our electric install we currently would have power and we could begin brewing and filling our other fermenters. As any brewer can tell you, empty tanks = lost profits. Empty tanks are evil! So this unexpected delay could potentially cost us thousands of dollars. And all of this could have been prevented had either the exception been approved or we were told when we submitted our plans that our current designs were not acceptable and that we needed to redo them. Neither of those things happened. And we get to pay for it.

I hope people planning to open breweries in other areas never run into these kinds of problems, but be very aware that they can and do happen. Not that you can defend against them when the powers that be hold ultimate authority and sometimes seem indifferent to the plight they themselves contributed to. But, at least you'll know going in that sometimes things really are out of your control, no matter what you do.

I hope to have good news later this week or next, but I likely will not post till mid-week next week. I am leaving on Thursday to go to Iowa to visit my Aunt who is in the end stages of cancer. It has spread to her brain and the family is going up basically to say goodbye. My Aunt Sam, as we called her, is a salty woman who doesn't take guff and is blessed with the comforting knowledge that the world definitely needs to hear her opinion, rather it knows it or wants it. I'd love to hear what she'd have to say to Construction Services. Anyway, I wont be back till Monday and I also get the thrill of rocketing through the atmosphere in a pressurized metal can while fighting off a spectacularly painful ear infection I got from the little petri dishes I call my twin daughters....and I can't even have a beer because I am on antibiotics!

It's hard for me to say it, because I don't feel it, but...

Cheers,
Joey Redner