This is one of those things I look forward to every year.  I haven’t missed a Belgium Comes to Cooperstown since the very first one and I don’t intend to miss one any time soon.  I was a little afraid that the opening of our new restaurant would coincide with this year’s event and that I wouldn’t be able to get away.  But the restaurant opened on time, the staff is trained and my tanks are full.  Time for a break!  Last year I and a group of friends rode our bikes up to Cooperstown.  Great trip.  You can read my account of last year’s trip, it’s archived on the Brewlounge.  For a more concise and professionally crafted account read Joe Sixpack’s piece. This year there was no way I could take a whole week off for such a trip.

Our fearless leaders Jeff and Lara are making the trek again though, and this year they’re blogging about it.  BCTC is a great time, and this is from a guy who’s been to a lot of beer fests.  I often tell people that if I had to choose between attending the Great American Beer Fest and BCTC, Cooperstown would win it.  I’m packing my camping gear tonight and heading up  first thing Friday morning.  I’m sure I’ll see a bunch of you there.  We’ll have a beer.

Cheers,

Chris

Today Gary Bredbenner will be laid to rest.  Jack Curtin says it all better than I can, and this photo of Gary was lifted from his site.  Gary was a homebrewer and beer aficionado and I remember seeing him at a lot of events.  What set him apart is that he was always smiling and if you were a brewer he always had kind words about your beer.  He came to our opening last week and he made it a point to come over and congratulate me on the opening.  It was a busy night for me and of course now I wish I’d gotten to spend more time talking to him.

It’s been a rough couple years for the brewing industry and the social network that surrounds it with the passing of Jay Misson, Bill Brand, Michael Jackson and now Gary.  I remember in high school there was a t-shirt circulating that said something to the effect of “if there’s music in heaven they have to have one hell of a band”, then it listed all of the great musicians that passed.  Well heaven must have a very warm and friendly pub as well.  Hopefully Gary is enjoying a pint in it right now.  Rest in peace Gary, you will be missed.

Chris

We’ve just gotten finished with three days and nights of practice lunches and dinners.  We invited all of our “friends and family” in for a meal on us.  The list included local officials and business owners, the contractors who have been working hard to get this place built, friends and family of the staff, local brewers from other breweries and a whole bunch of Iron Hill staff from our other locations.

This gives us some friendly Guinea Pigs to practice on.  No matter how much training we give our chefs, bartenders, managers and servers, there’s nothing quite like actually doing it.  We’ve preempted a lot of opening night snafus in the past few days. The practice dinners cost us a ton, but it’s worth it to make sure we’re up to speed when our real guests sit down for a pint.  We’ll be opening our doors to the public tonight at 5 pm after the mayor pours the ceremonial first pint.  I’ll be here giving brewery tours and chatting with our guests all night.  I look forward to meeting you.

Cheers,

Chris

As you may imagine we’ve got an almost entirely new staff here in Maple Shade.  All of our managers and most of our chefs are Iron Hill vets.  So are our trainers and most of our bartenders.  We alwas try to promote from within here. That also leaves us with a good majority of folks who are brand new to Iron Hill and many who are new to craft beer.  I’m excited about this group.  I’ve had the opportunity to get to know a bunch of them over the past week.  We’ve got some great people with even a few beer geeks and hard-core foodies thrown in.   Those of you who have already been to Iron Hill know that our staff really know their stuff.  As the brewer I have to humbly admit that there are plenty of other brewpubs out there that make world class beer.  But none can touch our staff and their level of knowlege.  Quite a bit goes into that.  I’ve just gotten done teaching three two and a half hour beer classes.  (Sounds long but at least a half hour of that is just chatting and drinking beer!)  It includes some ingredient sampling, a brewery tour, descriptions of our beer and some lecturing on beer history and culture etc.  We also give the staff classes on general Iron Hill information, our menu, alcohol responsibility and even the lesser beverages like wine and spirits.  They’re also tested pretty heavily, every staff member who serves our guests has passed a food, beer and general information test.  Of course we want everyone to have fun too!  Sunday after all of the classes were complete, we had a little field day for the staff.  It was a chance for everyone to get to know the people they’ll soon be working with and to relax a little bit before they get into some serious studying and testing.

We’re ready for you beer drinkers!  Just try to stump them.

For the past month and a half I’ve been in my own little box building the brewery and making beer.  (By the way, the blog is a little behind reality.  I do have beer in the tanks.  More about that later)  It’s been kind of fun to pop my head outside of the brewery every now and then and watch the progress go on in the rest of the building.  I’ve watched a construction site slowly turn into an Iron Hill.  It’s been a sort of metamorphosis that I wish I’d taken more pictures of.  I’ll see a bare concrete floor opposite the vaulted copper ceiling that pops up in most of our restaurants.  Or a bunch of bare sheet rock slowly turning into the dark wood panels.  Well I popped my head in yesterday and was amazed to see how far along things had come since I’d last checked things out.  It looks like we’re down to finishing touches here.  (By the way, note the sexy growler filler behind the bar.  We’ll be able to fill growlers without losing any carbonation or introducing any oxygen.  Mmmmmm.)  Keep posted, I should have the official opening date soon, just have to check with the bosses first.  Can’t wait to have a beer with you!

Cheers,

Chris

Had to throw a little Beastie Boys reference in there…  I remember once Tim, our head brewer in Phoenixville, and I were having a conversation about customer service.  Actually we were hemming and hawing about a couple of our brewery vendors. We agreed that it was mind boggling how some companies can stay in business with such lousy service.  Tim theorized that because we were in the restaurant industry, where we bend over backwards to make our guests happy, that we had a skewed perspective of what service should be.  We figured that these days it was just mediocre all over.

Over the past couple of months though, I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with a company that changed my mind about modern customer service.  It’s a mail order company named McMaster-Carr.  They boast that they have over 480,000 products and I can’t believe its not more.  Moreover, when you order those products they arrive the next day.  If you’re in New Jersey, and you order early enough, you’ll see them by the end of that day.  I’ve been using them a lot lately.  I know all of the telephone operators on a first name basis and the UPS guy is having my girlfriend and I over for dinner next week.

When I first took over as head brewer in West Chester, my predecessor Brian Finn left me with a phone list of all of our vendors and service people, their phone numbers and what they offered.  It read a bit like this; Briess – Malt – 800-555-5555, Atlas Dowel – wooden bungs – 888-555-5555, Fisher Scientific – lab equipment – 888-555-5555, McMaster-Carr – anything and everything.  It wasn’t an exaggeration.

The good book itself is 3824 pages long.  It’s filled with just about every industrial tool, supply, or part that you can imagine.  Sometimes I’ll lay in bed at night and leaf through the pages until I fall asleep.  Need a two inch steel left hand threaded stud?  They’ve got it for $1.11, next day delivery of course.  Got $9770.83 you’d like to spend on a Low-temperature Circulating Process Chiller?  They can do that too.

Gordon from Nodding Head and I are planning a brewer’s field trip up to the McMaster-Carr location in New Jersey.  I’m only hoping they’ll accept us.  Who knows, maybe how they do things is top secret.  Gordon and I think that you can probably see their warehouse from outer space.  Mark tells me you can’t.  He says that they operate on something called “just in time ordering“.  Frankly I think that was a bit like telling a kid there’s no Santa Clause.  I choose not to believe him.  You can see it from outer space.

Their website is incredible. It really walks you through all of the decisions you’d have to make when ordering a product from them.  I’ve been ordering a lot of parts that I’ve never ordered before, and parts I don’t know much about to be honest.  McMaster takes care of all of that.  Type in “pressure gauge” and it will bring you to a page full of sections with black and white images.  Each section offers several options.  You just keep choosing options and the page will get smaller and smaller, narrowing down your choices every time.  OK, so you need a pressure gauge, are you measuring gas pressure or liquid pressure?  High temperature or low temperature?  How high, would you say?   Higher than 180 degrees?  Stainless or plastic?  How big do you want the face to be? Does it need to withstand corrosive chemicals?  Do you want liquid filled or dry?  Don’t know the difference?  Visit the “about” page and it will let you know the advantages and disadvantages of both. It’s like industrial parts and tools for dummies!

The paper catalogue is great too.  The about sections tell you pretty much everything you need to know.  There are even sections that you can physically put a part up to so you know what size it’s inner diameter is or what sort of thread pitch you’re working with.  These guys thought of everything!

I love this green-and-yellow robed catalogue and everything in it.  I’ve decided that if I ever hit the lottery and become a billionaire I will proudly call McMaster-Carr and casually tell the operator “send me one of everything”.  Her jaw would drop and she’d sputter  ”but sir!”.  I’d quickly silence her and arrogantly up the order.  ”No, send me two of everything!”

Anyhow, enough rambling.  I’ve got some parts to order.

McMaster, ship ship (wic a wic) ship faster!

I guess one of the downfalls of buying a used brewery is that it leaves you with quite a bit of cleaning to do.  When you buy used its often from a place that went out of business.  I guess that when the bank comes in and tells you to close your doors the last thing on your mind is tidying up for the next guy.  Plus brewing is 70% cleaning to begin with and every part gets a scrub.  Just fermenters and bright tanks alone account for about 125 parts.  And that’s not counting disassembling the parts into littler parts (zwickels, carbonating stones etc.)  That’s a lot of little parts to clean!  Make a mess, clean it up, repeat.  Not a very exciting post, but this is reality folks!  This is my life!

Remember that big empty brewery from the last post?  Overnight it’s taken over by electricians, carpenters, plumbers, welders etc.  They’re all in there working to get me up and running and I’m trying to keep up with them as well as I can.  Basically they’ll take care of everything up to the walls and I take it from the walls to the tank.  About a week’s worth of work is just hooking things up, ordering parts to do so and making sure it all works once I do.  I also spent a couple of days working with the welders.  Again, we have a specific way of doing things, so with used equipment, modifications are a must.  Once the equipment is in, the welders can make the changes we need.  It’s not easy to move in here at this point.  I just have to clear out a corner for my tools and paperwork and work around everyone.

Well, it looks like I’ve been slacking a bit in the blog category doesn’t it?  It’s not that I don’t care (you don’t call you don’t write), I’ve just been up to my eyeballs in construction lately.  Plus I’m sure if you all had to choose between getting a delicious pint in your hand a few days sooner and reading more of my drivel, you’d probably approve of how I’ve prioritized right?  Apologies aside, you’ll be glad to know I’ve been busy at work getting the new brewery ready.

The next step of course is getting the equipment into the brewery.  Before I worked for a brewery I’m not sure I ever looked at a restaurant and asked “how do they get that stuff in there?”  Let me tell you, it can be quite a production.  Of course its a lot easier with an empty parking lot and a big open space with no tables, chairs  or windows, but it can still be a bit tricky.  Fortunately we’ve got Larry on our team.  Larry’s been installing and “decomissioning” breweries as a side job for a while.  Over the past couple of years I’ve worked as one of his hired hands on a couple of these, and when it came to building Maple Shade I was glad that I had.

Experience aside though it takes more than a few guys to complete a project of this size.  A new brewery installation is an “all hands on deck” day for Iron Hill brewers.  Brewers from all of our locations will put the pumps to rest in their own restaurants and come out to load and unload the equipment.  The trickiest thing though is actually getting it into the building and the brewery itself.  It takes lots of fancy equipment (boom lifts, chain falls, good old pallet jacks etc) and a careful mix of brute force and finesse to get the stuff in unharmed.  I like the fact that we all get together for these projects.  It’s a good group I work with and we have a good time when we get together.  Plus I know I like the feeling when I  drink a beer in Lancaster or Wilmington and feel like I had a little something to do with that beer because I’d helped to install the equipment.

Once the equipment was in the building and my coworkers had left for the day it was on me to get everything in its place and level.  The floors of a brewery if done properly aren’t level.  They’re sloped to allow water and (gasp!) whatever beer we may spill to run to the drains.  So getting all of the equipment straight and level can be a bit of a challenge.  So for the next couple of days a wrench and a four-foot carpenter’s level were my best friends.