You are opening a brew pub, right?

I get this question a lot, and I guess that is what everyone thinks of first is a brew pub.  They sound cool and its a romantic idea.  All your beers on tap, good food and your friends coming in all the time.  I'll admit, it is a great idea. 
However, that is not what I am interested in opening at this point.  I have done the restaurant thing, and it is a lot of fun and hard work.  Right now, I am just interested in a small brewery.  I really enjoy brewing and want to do that, but I am not interested in the extra work of a brew pub.  I don't want to deal with menus, and lots of employees.  Plus brew pubs are much more risk, and higher start up costs. 
I want to start something that is bigger than a nano brewery (200 gallons a year), but nothing huge to start with.  Really this is just a hobby and something I want to be able to do on the side for now.  My plan is to still brew on the weekends (just in larger quantities) and sell locally.  If I can expand from there, great!  If not, then Bexley will have some great local beer. 

Labeling beer bottles

I was recently asked what I use to label my bottles.  Years ago, as a homebrewer, I wanted to label my bottles for fun.  At first I used large blank stickers.  It was easy and I could just design a label on my computer and then print it on the sticker.  I would use a photo and just put text over it, or use Microsoft word to design something.  Either way worked.  I used the Avery stickers that were 6 to a full sheet of paper.  However, getting the sticker back off the bottle was an issue.  It took a lot of work.  Then, the more I brewed the higher the cost of doing stickers.  So I looked for an alternative.
I came up with a pretty simple solution.  I would still design the labels on a 2 x 6 grid on a piece of paper.  Then I printed them with a high quality color laser printer and cut the paper into labels.  I glued the labels on with glue stick.  While slightly more labor intensive, it worked really well to put the labels on and take them off.  They washed off easily in warm water and I could clean and sterilize the bottles for reuse.  This method gave me nice labels at a very low cost, and I used it for quite a while.  The only issue I ran into with this is if I wanted to put the bottles in a bucket of ice for serving.  The paper and color would hold up but the glue would wash off as the bottles got wet.  My solution was to never serve the beer that way!
Obviously that was not going to be a long term solution, so I tried some other things.  In place of the glue stick, I used spray mount adhesive.  It is basically spay rubber cement.  It holds up in water and is fairly easy to clean off the bottles.
I would recommend any of those solutions to put labels on the bottle.  Stickers, paper and glue stick, or paper and spray mount.  All work well, just find the one that best fits your needs.
For the label design, Microsoft Word is a great simple solution.  You can make the whole page into a table and easily copy the design to each cell.  If you want something a little more sophisticated, you can use Typestyler.  It is a program for Macs (they might have a PC version) that lets you design logos or other graphic items.  For label design it works really well and provides more tools than Word. It is more time consuming, but if you want more flexibility, I would recommend this over Word. Of course there are many other ways to create the label, but those are my two preferences for homebrew.
Let me know if you want more details, and if you have a better solution I would love to hear it. 

What to do with all that spent grain

I was brewing one day and had spilled some of the crushed grains on the
floor. It really was just some of the powdered bits that kind of get
everyone, but I noticed that my dog was licking the floor where it spilled.
She had always sniffed around the grains before, but I thought that was
just because she sniffs everything. Now I noticed she seemed to really
love the taste. I was not too concerned since it is just malted barley,
but it got me thinking. If she liked that so much what else could you do
with the grains. Of course other people are smarter than me and had
already figured that out.

A quick internet search turned up lots of recipes for spent grains. It is
something great to use, they are just grains that have soaked and had some
sugars removed through the mash process. I know that some big breweries
ship the grain out for cattle feed. We found one recipe for dog treats and
decided to try that. My dog loved them! So ever since then with every
brewing, I have saved a few cups of the spent grains and made dog treats.
(I have also made granola, flour, and breads.) I have played around with
the recipe and made it into one that the dog and I really like. It is easy
and bakes up nicely.

My kids thought I should try selling them, so I have added them to the shop
page on the website. Who knows, maybe they will catch on and be a hit.

Website updates

I wanted to look at changing the website. I am currently using iPage as
the host for the site, and they do provide a lot of nice tools to build a
website. However, the tools do not provide quiet as much flexibility as I
would like. They do offer some other services at an increased fee per
month, but I wanted to look at other options.
Through some web searches I found SoftPress' Freeway Express. They offer a
free trial for 30 days and I have been using it for the past 26 days. I
have to say it is a very nice program. It provides all the flexibility
that I need and I am able to do just about anything that I would like. The
big drawback is that it is very flexible and lets you do anything.
I have ended up spending a lot of time trying out all kinds of different
things and building the pages multiple ways. To me it is fun.
There is a bit of a learning curve but if you have some experience with
design software you can use Freeway. If you want to build a website on a
budget and have the time to do it yourself, I would highly recommend it.

Logo Design part 2

I did not hate the design I got from Infinity Logo Design, but I wanted to keep looking at my options.  I started thinking that something else had to be out there. 

After many more searches, I came across another company.  This one sells a program called TypeStyler, and they offer a free 30 day trial.  As I said before, I am not the most creative person, but I thought I could figure out this program.  So I set up an account and requested the 30 day trial. 

They sent me a link and I was able to easily download the program.  What was really nice, and unexpected, is that this did not trigger a bunch of spam emails or constant emails asking me to buy the program. 

It took some trial and error to learn how to use the program, but it basically works like a paint program.  I am sure I have not learned all of the functionality, but I was able to put together a log using it.  Here is what I came up with. 

I liked that I was able to add some other colors compared to what I got before.  It is a little more fun for the logo. 

I would love to hear any comments on the logos.

Logo Design

For a while now, I have been thinking about a nice logo for the Bexley Brewing Company.  However, I kept putting it off.  I am not very creative and figured I needed some help, and design firms can be expensive.  Since I am working on a very small budget, I needed to find a low cost option.  

I searched the internet for “logo design” and “free logo design”.  I thought there would be some website that did low cost design or I could find someone who did it in the spare time for a small fee.  The first sites I found offered free logo designs on their website.  They give you a number of images to pick from then you can change the color and add text.  Basically these are pretty much a joke.  If you are able to create something that looks good, you are not able to save the file in a high resolution format without a fee.  In my opinion, what you come up with on these sites is not worth paying for.  So I went on.

I found two web only companies that offered logo design.  The first one (99designs.com) has some great reviews and a offers three different cost options which is nice.  The second one (infinitylogodesign.com) has some mixed reviews, but also offers different cost options.  Infinity design is much less expensive than 99designs, but the mixed reviews were concerning.  Their site also has much less in the way of information on what they provide and fewer examples.  

Being cheap I decided to go with Infinity Logo, and it turned out to be a great experience.  With the package I picked I figured I might get something and would not be out any money if it did not work out.  I have to say I was surprised by the level of service they provide.  They assign a rep even on the plan I picked and he was very responsive to any request or question I had.  They provided the design a day faster than promised, and each revision only took a day or two.  

However, I did see a lot of drawbacks, but most were due to the package I picked.  I could only get
three revisions, and they only provided two samples to work from.  So if I did not like where they started, I was in trouble.  At the end of the day, I got a design that is OK and certainly one that I can use. 

I also found that they keep their cost down by offering a bunch of add ons.  If you want them to assign the copyright to you, it is an extra fee (99designs includes this in their packages).  Also, if you want something where you can get a lot of revisions and initial designs, it will cost you.  Overall it was a much better experience than what I expected.   I think they are trying very hard to improve their reputation, and if you are willing to spend a little money (and not looking for free options) I think they provide a nice service.  

One additional note on the copyright.  What any of these places charge for the copyright is pretty high.  The real cost to copyright and register something is $35, and the government offers an online system to make your filing.  More information can be found on copyright.gov.

Bad Day?

I really wanted to brew this weekend and work on a new recipe. I am very detailed and take lots notes so I can repeat the process and get the same beer every time.  I have had this idea for a new recipe and really wanted to try it out.  I was thinking that this weekend would be the perfect time.  I have been working on the recipe for a little while.  It’s a variation of one I came up with last year, and I really wanted to see how it would turn out. 

I decided to brew early in the morning so I could get other things done later (it is Mother’s Day weekend).  The weather has been bad, rain and thunderstorm.  I was not going to let that stop me, so I went ahead with my plans. When I was about to mill the grain I decided to check my grain mill and somehow the rollers were really out of wack.  It’s a good thing I checked.  

Maybe I should have taken this as a hint that things were going to go wrong. I moved them back into position and began to mill.  I had the grain weighed out in a couple of different paper bags.  First one went well, then I grabbed the second bag and it ripped as I was lifting it up.  I lost about 2 – 3 lbs, and the floor was not clean enough to try and use it anyway.  I did not have any more.  Now I could have stopped and go out to buy more, but for some reason I decided to press on.  I figured I was going to lose a little bit of the alcohol content. 

So I started to mill that bag.  About ½ way through, the grain mill just stopped moving the grain through.  The rollers were turning, but nothing was going through.  I had to scoop the grain out and see.  Nothing, it looked fine.  I dumped the grain back in and same problem.  After trying that whole process again and pushing on the grain it finally started to mill again.  I was getting pretty ticked off at this point.

I started the mash and as I added the grain, I realized that some of the un-milled grain was mixed in with the milled.  It must have been when the grain mill stopped working.

So now, I have a mash going with an unknown amount of grain and I am not sure how much is not milled properly.

I tried to relax and figured I would just push on.  At this point I should have realized that the whole idea of trying this new recipe was shot since I don’t know what I have in the mash tun.  Of course I was not thinking that clearly. 

I was heating the sparge water and then looked back at my recipe.  Somehow I had set it for a batch sparge and not fly sparge, so my grain amounts were off anyway.  I had too much grain for where I originally wanted to end up.  I reduced the sparge water amount a little and pressed on. 

The rest of the process went well.  Somehow I ended up with the SG in the range I wanted, but I am really not sure how.  And I still will have to try this all over again with the recipe, because I really have no idea what I did.  One nice thing about brewing is that if you make a mistake you still get beer, so at least it will be something to drink.  However, no matter how good (or bad) it is, I will never be able to repeat this one. 

After lunch I was thinking I was going to try the last new beer I made.  I have been tweaking my IPA recipe and brewed it last month. I knew it was ready to drink, but had not tried it yet.  This made my day.  It’s prefect, exactly where I wanted it to be!  Great aroma, the flavor is wonderful.   So this recipe is final and I will certainly make it again.

With that I can say the day was a success.