This blog post is going to center around what’s going on at our warehouse these days.
To get everyone up to speed, here is how we got to where we are today. We purchased a warehouse just south of downtown at 727 E. Osie. It’s an 18,000 sf brick building that was previously used to warehouse chemicals. This old brick building will now be the home to our 15 barrel brew house and 60 barrel fermenters. We purchased our brewing equipment from Tallgrass Brewing out of Manhattan, Kansas. We were pretty lucky to stumble across them wanting to sell their equipment. No Tallgrass didn’t go out of business, they upgraded to a new building and bigger brewing equipment.
The building we are in will fit our needs perfectly once we are done with construction. But, we have to get through construction first to get to the brewing. Since it was just a warehouse, it didn’t have much infastructure to house a brewery. So far we have busted out concrete to put in floor drains throughout the warehouse. Then the new concrete was sloped and an epoxy was applied. The water service has been upgraded and new water lines have been ran to various parts of the building. One big water upgrade was installing a RO system for our brewing water. This will allow us to control what kind of water we are using to brew. The gas serice has been upgraded to make room for our boiler. The boiler will push steam to the boil kettle to heat it. The electrical has been the biggest upgrade so far. The building only had a few outlets and lights, but we will need a dash more power. To get more power, we had to get a large transformer set next to our building. Now we will have electricity running everywhere to power all the equipment. A large cooler was built to store all our cans and kegs. We are in the process of installing all the glycol lines to the fermenters, brite tanks, and cold liquor tank. Ask Greg about them sometime, he would love to tell you all about them. The canning line just came in last week. We purchased a four head filler from Wild Goose out of Boulder, Colorado. A beautiful machine but they somehow missplled Wichita and put Witchita Brewing Company on the machine. As long as it fills cans with beer like a champ, that’s all that matters. We have also built a lab where we will be able to monitor yeast and check vital information. We have teamed up with the Wichita State University Biology department and will be getting an intern next semester to help with some of the lab duties.
The construction phase is close to winding down and we’re hopeful to be brewing before the end of the year. If that is the case we will be launching our beer into the Wichita market at the end of January! We are going to roll out with five brands to start with (WBC Wheat, V6, Valleyview Vanilla Porter, What Winter, Seal Team 6). And no that’s not a typo, WBC wheat is what we will have to call the half-wit wheat. Another brewery already has that name. We will have 12 and 16 ounce cans that will be sold at liquor stores. This is exciting and nervous times for us right now. We also haven’t forgot about the brewer for the day winners from last Christmas. We will be in touch with everyone once we get brewing down there.
Thanks for reading! Now the important stuff. Up for grabs today is 2 WBC coffee mugs. To be entered to win you must be tagged by someone from the Facebook post that this link is shared on. Winner will be picked at random and since it was posted late we will give you until 9 AM Monday morning. Hope they tag you back. Cheers!
Written by Kyle Banick and proofed by Jeremy Horn.
