Thursday, September 30, 2010

Let the work commence




So we had to pick the hottest week of the year to begin/continue our buildout. This week we are concentrating on making our tasting room a rated room. Basically, since our tasting room is a separate room from our brewery, the room needs to have a one hour fire rating from any production area (brewery). One of the items that needs to happen to achieve this rating is that we need to install 5/8" drywall 4 feet away from the room on the ceiling as seen in the picture.
Our plumbing needs is the first priority for our buildout because the entire brewery is cut up and waiting for concrete to be poured so we can be mobile again in the building. The biggest obstacle that we are encountering is that of our plumbing/waste line. The existing cast iron drain line is 3" with a 1/8" per foot fall (slope). A 4" drain pipe can fall at 1/8" per foot. We have been instructed that any new plumbing installed will have to meet code which would mean that if we are to install 3" pipe, we would have to have a fall of 1/4" per foot. This is virtually impossible to achieve unless we were cut up the entire parking lot and follow the 3" pipe until it connect to a 4" pipe. We have a meeting with inspectors in the morning to see if there is some feasible solution to this.
We are still on track to have our tasting room open by the end of October. Our plans are to get the tasting room open, continue to contract brew our beers at Dale Bros Brewery in Upland while we work on getting our production brewery in operation, which we hope will be by the end of this year.
We keep our fingers crossed that there will not be too many obstacles along the way.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Health Department

We finally received Health Department this past Thursday. We tried to post this sooner, but were quite busy with all of the brew events at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver.
This is/was the last step in getting our permits from the city of Anaheim to begin/continue our buildout. The approved plans will be picked up this week from the health department and delivered to the city so that they can issue a permit for buildout.
We met with the city inspectors a week ago for a pre-construction discussion at the brewery. The information that they presented will help with various stages of the buildout inspections and should save us some time.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Health Department

We know, those are two words that scare a lot of business owners. (including us)
It is much more difficult to get through the health department in Orange County than it is in San Diego County.

We are getting very close to have this approval. We just had to clean up the finish schedule...flooring, walls, base cove, ceiling etc., figure a way to enclose our roll up door and explain our operation (mainly the tasting room). Let's just cross our fingers and hope that this latest design along with our next finish schedule submittal will work.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Finally

We are getting our approved permit for the buildout by the city today at noon! Prior to issuance, we still need to submit an approved health dept permit which we should have within a week. The requests from the health department aren't too far off and can be taken care of during a scheduled meeting that we have just after the holiday weekend.
This has been a trying process, but now can finally get cracking on getting the brewery and tasting room together.
We have had many inquiries with regard to our tasting room opening, and have remained fairly confident that it should be ready within 30 days after we obtain our building permit.
We will do a much better job posting to this blog as we progress thru our buildout.
Cheers