brewery

In the many moons it took get this project rolling, I've received lots of emails offering help and several resumes from aspiring brewers (no we are not hiring yet). By far the coolest thing to come in was a hand-scrawled postcard from some neighborhood folks who I don't believe I've met, Mark & Melissa Munson: Okay I promise to cut the sentimental stuff out real soon, but I've had this up on the wall in the basement office for a while and now as a constant reminder to keep the nose to the grindstone. Let me tell you, every little bit helps. Cheers to craftiness...Josh

This past weekend, I removed our new brewery equipment from its previous home at Bo's Brewery & Bistro in Pontiac, MI. Bo's is still open as a beer bar, but they stopped brewing last May and decided to sell their brewhouse located in the front window and install an outdoor patio. And with that front window is where the story begins.

I took the train to Michigan Thursday and rented a UHaul Friday morning to cart the small pieces and parts back to Chicago. A semi-truck came on Saturday to haul the brewhouse, fermenters and serving tanks. The general plan was to remove the storefront glass to lift the brewhouse out and then cut a hole in the floor to extract the boiler and serving tanks from the basement.

So Friday morning I parked behind Bo's and as I walked around the front I glanced in the trash dumpster and saw a pile of broken glass. Walking around to the front, I confirmed that their workers had just smashed the front tempered glass into cube-like pieces and we're in the process of sweeping the mess up. It seemed to me that taking the panes out whole would have made more sense, but I guess they thought this was quicker or easier. Oh well, at least it was tempered glass.

Here's a pic of the brewhouse following the removal of the glass:

I began by tidying up the small parts in the basement for shipping and deciding what was worth taking (pretty much anything stainless) and what wasn't (used plastic tubing). Given the out-of-control hop prices, I kept looking around for the secret stash of leftover hop pellets but never found them. All of the raw materials were long gone, and Wayne Burns, the former brewer had done a pretty nice job of organizing and cleaning things out when he left.

The glass story shows how removing a brewery is not always a pretty task. The next job was to disconnect the utilities before physically moving the equipment. Water, steam, electricity, hvac and the food grade glycol coolant system used to keep the beer from warming up were dealt with one by one. Soon enough, I was coated in slippery glycol and grain dust while trying to keep from bloodying my hands on the everpresent glass.

Around 6pm John Mallet and Jeff Carter from Bell's Brewery showed to help out with the more difficult items. In addition to being Bell's head brewer, John is a former brewery equipment manufacturer and frequently helps remove and install brewing systems. Jeff runs Bell's maintenance department they've both worked together for years on breweries large and small. Things started to move quick with their expertise around. Wires were labeled, cut, and pulled. Copper pipes were cut and stacked away. Bo's guys removed the awning and a temporary wall to keep it all safe overnight. We all crashed for the night and came back the next day to meet the truck.

On Saturday morning the first job was to lift the 7000 lb. brewhouse skid with the telescoping forklift we rented. We had to drive on the sidewalk to get enough leverage to lift it up, but it came out of the building without much difficulty. The mood was light:

Once getting it out of the building, John drove back into the street and then lifted the skid over the parking meters:

Next up was removing the cooling system from roof. Refrigeration systems are often the first parts of the system to breakdown and this piece has certainly seen better days. Living unprotected up on the roof for 11 years left a fair amount of surface rust, but we took it anyways. If we can replace a few components and make it work then we'll save a few thousand bucks, otherwise it will hit the scrapyard in a year or so. This shot is taken from the roof looking down:

The fermenters came out pretty quickly after that:

While we grabbed lunch, Bo's deconstruction crew came back to start ripping a hole in the floor. This took a little while but ended with the forklift making the final pull to yank the tile and concrete sub-floor up after the joists were cut:

Next up we slid the serving tanks under the hole and rigged them up to the boom:

Going up:

The boiler was the heaviest piece coming out of the basement, but I didn't grab a shot of that. It has some surface rust too, but since it's cast iron, we should get some good use out of it going forward. Around 7pm we had fully loaded the semi and box truck and left Pontiac for a pit stop in Kalamazoo. Got a little tour of Bell's amazing Comstock production facility and enjoyed a pint of Debs Red Ale.

I was back on I-94 in the UHaul early Sunday morning and made it to town just before the semi-truck showed up at California & Milwaukee. Getting into the alley was a tight squeeze:

Once again, the big brewhouse skid was the toughest nut to crack. It's 15 feet long, and the alley is only 16 feet wide. The Chicago moving crew put it on skates and pushed and pulled it into the space:

Now everything is just sitting in the corner waiting for construction to begin. Kind of an anti-climactic end to a busy weekend but it's good to see everything in it's new home.

I read in the paper that our Congressman, Rep. Luis Gutierrez just presided over a hearing about changing the makeup of the penny (only 2.4% copper) since it costs something like 1.7 cents to make. And in a meeting with a plumber today complaining about the constant increase in the cost of copper (it pretty much quadrupled in the last 5 years), I was reminded again of this fact.

All that makes our recent purchase seem like a nice investment at the very least for the scrap value alone. No, we don't yet own the building to put in, but we've got ourselves a brewery located a few states away. Soon it will sit quietly in a corner in Chicago for a good many months, but what pretty corner she will be.

Now I'm getting teary thinking about the recent family trips up to the Copper Country, the Italian Hall Massacre, and of course Shute's Saloon.