What’s happening in your Brewery: February 8^th, 2015

It’s been a big last few weeks at your local Co-op Brewery – so much happening and so much to do.

Let’s recap:

• We had an overwhelmingly successful Lease Signing Party happened on January 24^th a gallery of pictures coming soon!).
  Over 100 members at each of two sessions came out to see the space, sign our “commemorative lease” and visualize through drawings and design documents their forthcoming brewery.  The suggestion board was filled with amazing suggestions (what’s with all this “cat friendly” stuff?!?) – a lot of which your Board will act upon in the coming months.  The FBCB beers (all 5 in one place for the first time EVER) were all tasty and flowing freely, as well as a couple of “guest taps” (thanks to Stoup and neighbors Naked City) – and very little was left over at the end!
  

• We bought our first large piece of equipment: a large Glycol Chiller that will be used to maintain proper fermentation temps in our fermenters as well as supplement the cooling capacity of our walk-in cooler.
• The past couple of weeks the Finance team has been working hard with Build to finalize budgets so we can start spending money.  We’ve interviewed several General Contractors (more on this to come), as well as narrowed down our selection of brewing system and configuration.  We’ve also narrowed down our configuration and selection of the ADA lift the City requires us to install (due to our seating capacity).

• This past weekend saw us consolidating the majority of the contents currently in our space to the north side of our space so we can bring in a plumber to “scope and locate” our sewer lines, in preparation for cutting floor drains (this stuff is getting real!).  Also we sorted out the remaining insulation pile and saved what we needed and got rid of the rest via Craigslist to some guys doing a project up in Granite Falls. 
  

We continued demolition to open up a doorway to our future Malt Room, as well as the hallway down by the bathrooms necessary for ADA compliance.

We also finished pulling all the nails in our salvaged lumber and have saved most of it to be repurposed for various building projects around the space.  One significant “win” is all the old-growth 2x4’s we have saved from the center divider wall removal which will be recycled into tabletops for our Tasting Room!  Member Kent Davis has graciously donated his talents to cut, plane, and glue up tabletop “blanks” which he’ll then bring back in and lead a work party to glue them up into full widths and then stain and finish them!

We’ll have many more exciting updates in the coming weeks – so stay tuned!  And we will also be needing your help with many more tasks in the brewery space, so if you have an interest, please email volunteers@flyingbike.coop with your name, phone and email address, and we’ll be glad to involve you as well!  There’s plenty of work to go around, and we appreciate any and all help provided!

One last thing – you may have noticed that we are ever-so-close to reaching our Capital Fundraising goal!  If you haven’t yet, we’d love to have your participation to push us over the finish line – and possibly beyond!  If you have any questions about investing in your Brewery Co-op, please do not hesitate to ask our finance guys at finance@flyingbike.coop, or even myself: davidw@flyingbike.coop.

And thank you for all that you do for #MemberDrivenBeer!