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.