New hats, more t-shirts (new color), and another brewery update…

Hello friends! Want to send a HUGE “thank you” to everyone who ordered t-shirts back in Feb. Amazingly enough, we sold out of our entire stock in 4 days!! Can’t tell you how much we appreciate everyones support. As mentioned in our previous blog posts, we are a bootstrap operation, so every purchase you make truly does help us bring more beer forward to you and everyone in our neighborhood.

As promised, the revenue generated from the t-shirt sales was used to buy a small canning machine from Oktober Designs. As a result, we’re super excited to announce that we’ll have 12oz and 16oz cans, to-go, from the brewery tasting room. For those that were shut out on t-shirts previously, a new batch of t-shirts just arrived. We have more of our heather green, heather grey, and our NEW dark charcoal t-shirts available. Along with that, our branded low profile trucker and flatbill hats also just arrived!! These are quality snapback hats with the BKS Artisan Ales logo. Check out our ecommerce site and get yourself, a friend, or a family member one of our hats and/or a t-shirt!! Your support and purchase of a hat and/or t-shirt will help us add additional 3 barrel fermenters to our brewery. More fermenters = more beer for everyone.

During our last update in early Feb., we mentioned that we had run into delays with getting our brewery space finished. At the time, we were optimistic that we would get the build-out completed, and brewing started, by end of March. Well, those delays continued through Feb. and into early March. Long story short, we have been hung up getting approvals for the upgraded power needs and drainage/plumbing for our space. In sum total we’ve been delayed about 3 months from when we thought we’d be ready to brew.

The great news is that the needed inspection permits/approvals with the City are moving forward. All we have left are finishing touches to the space and final City inspections to ensure the space is compliant to City code. We can’t say a specific date this will happen because it really depends on the approvals going through. That said, we have our brewing and liquor licenses, we’ve got our core brewing equipment, all of our recipes are perfected, and we are chomping at the bit to get our beers into your hands!!! Stay tuned for the BIG announcement when beer starts brewing. Shouldn’t be too much longer.

With the delays we’ve run into, we’ve had plenty of time to think through how we will do our soft openings. The plan is to do soft openings for our first 3-6 months in our retail/tasting room. Our soft openings will include ticketed tasting events for customers on Saturday’s, and to-go can/bottle releases on Sunday’s. The Sunday to-go can/bottle releases will only consist of retail purchase to-go (no draft pours). If you want a tasting room experience with draft pours, you need to be on the look-out for tickets to our Saturday tasting events. The Saturday tasting events should be plenty of fun and the perfect start to your Saturday evening in the Brookside/Waldo neighborhood.

If you’re a member of our email distribution list (sign up here), we’ll announce dates/releases for our ticketed tasting events, as well as all details regarding can/bottle releases. We’ll also post the same info on our Facebook page and Twitter account (make sure you like or follow to stay up to date). Overall, following or liking our pages will keep you up to date on our progress.

That’s it for now and stay tuned for further updates. -Mary and Brian Rooney