The Brewhouse – the heart of the Brewery!

Posted February 23, 2015

Some questions we tackled this past week:

What's the most important piece of equipment in a brewery - the "beating heart" of the brewery?
What is the hardest thing to size, specify, and decide upon?
And upon doing the research, what is the most difficult thing to fit into a budget?

Well, it's the BrewHouse. Where the Brewmaster performs the magic that makes the soup, that our yeast partners convert into beer!

As I alluded to in my last update, we made a roadtrip to the west coast mecca of Brewhouse manufacturers, Portland Oregon. Not that good things don’t get made in Seattle (think: Beer, Coffee, Dot-com’s, and of course Co-op’s!) – but Portland houses a disproportionate amount of extremely talented Brewhouse fabricators. And we had narrowed it down to 2 – and one importer.

(Why an importer? Well, because in truth this one has a lot of reference customers for brew houses in the size we were looking for, AND they fit in our budget – not an insignificant consideration…)

So fueled by biodiesel & coffee, we took off at the crack of dawn for PDX, where we first visited Stout Tanks. This outfit was started by John Watts – a brewer (professional and homebrewer) who wants to provide the best value he could to small brewers (nano and micro). And the best way to do this is to do the engineering in the states, and source the raw materials and labor in China.

It was very impressive to visit their warehouse and talk with our account manager Jabien about our potential brewhouse. We toured their warehouse and they have a very impressive stock of tanks and brewhouses.

It appears they have very high quality items made in China, and John is to be commended for what he’s accomplished. We got a finalized quote from Jay for a 5bbl system, and left pretty impressed.

Next on our tour was the very highly regarded Portland Kettle Works. These guys are the counter culture rock stars of the industry! There are innumerable PKW systems all across the country – and quite a few in Washington State – so they were definitely on our short list of vendors.

We met with Joe, who was brutally honest about their delivery schedule right out of the gate. It looked like if we went with them, we’d get a great system, but about a month later than we needed it… But we took a tour and their shop was awesome - loads of fabricating happening real-time - all to the blaring soundtrack of the likes of Alice & Chains and Audioslave… They have some very innovative designs (especially their fermenters).

In the final analysis, they couldn’t meet our delivery schedule for a June opening, and they were over our budget – but man, do they make nice stuff. There are many breweries around us that are using their gear and producing awesome beer!

Our last stop was a dark horse – a relatively new fabricator that was founded by a couple of guys that learned their welding craft in various places, including some fabricators in Europe. Combined Brewhouse fab experience = 40+ years... Word on the street was they made some quality stuff, and their initial quote was compelling (ie: close to our budget). So we made the eastern detour to Gresham, OR.

I gotta say, by this time, we’d been 10 hours on the road, and we were driving out to Gresham? We were tired, and pretty impressed with what we’d seen up to now. But we needed to see this outfit to round out our visits, and be able to present to the membership that we had done our due diligence. So we did. We drove up to the industrial tilt up building in the middle of nowhere, and Loren, one partner in Bridgetown Brew Systems met us at the door.

We briefly discussed their [over the phone] quote, and went over our requirements. Then we moved out to their warehouse and saw a system they had just packaged up to send to Gig Harbor Brewing (up in Tacoma). The quality looked very good, and the design details looked to be pretty well thought out. To top it off, Loren said that they were looking for a customer to sign up for a 7bbl system that they would take to the Craft Brewers Conference in April. We had a lot to think about on the drive home.

We came home, spent a lot of time checking references (some supplied by them, and some we found through our own research) and sharpened up the cost comparisons between the options (apples:apples is a challenge, really!).
All the references for Bridgetown checked out as a company that delivers (sometimes ahead of schedule), collaborates, recommends, and had unimpeachable high quality. Bridgetown’s customers raved about the service and quality that they provide. And the fact that we can not only buy USA-made, but also buy Pacific Northwest made – is worth a lot to us!

We weighed them against the others – including another dark horse in Colorado: Bennett Forgeworks - and balanced delivery dates against cost against features against quality against references…

So we took it to the board, and we debated it late into the night – literally. All the glory and imperfection of the democratic process that is your Board of Directors. Differing concerns, differing capacity for risk, differing priorities for purchases, differing prejudices of what is “value” – the whole smelly and complicated mess that is the democratic process of a cooperative.

…And then we selected a brewing system. Bridgetown got the order from us last week for a 7BBL, direct fired system with a 10BBL electric HLT! Like everything in starting up a brewery (Co-op or not), it's a bit of a risk, but we've done a lot of homework, so hopefully it’s not!