PRBC Blog

It's late, and the day job will come around real soon, but here's the photo that Brian e-mailed to me this afternoon-- That's a 15-barrel fermentation vessel and a 15-barrel bright tank headed to the BARn. Brian's buddy, Jamie Smith, helped out in the whole process of unloading the equipment and putting it into the brewery.  Thank goodness.  Unlike many of the things we've done in the process of building a brewery, this was not just a two-person job. Moving the bright tank into the brewery. The fermentation vessel unloading and setting up were a little more heartstopping because they…

"So what does it take to build a brewery?" you might ask. We've built a nanobrewery.  Now we are officially on the road to building our microbrewery by purchasing the equipment to brew 210 gallons at a time instead of 10 gallons at a time.  In the past couple of weeks, we've taken shopping to a whole new level. Meet the newest members of our family.... There are two fermentation vessels and one bright tank, delivered to Brian's manufacturing company last week.  We're hoping to bring these babies home to the BARn later this week. Brian ordered a chiller today,…

I heard a story today about a Dallas Maverick player that tattooed the NBA Championship Trophy on his body before the season this year because he believed that much that he was going to be a recipient of that trophy at the end of the season.  We haven’t tattooed our logo on our bodies, but we have the same passion for creating craft beer in the Ozarks. Here it is late on Monday night, and I’m downloading photos and blogging while Brian brews up batches of McKinney Eddy Amber Ale and Missouri Mule IPA.  Both things HAVE to be done.…

Pull on your good jeans.  Find a shirt with a collar.  Grab a beer.  It's time for a serious, official brewery meeting. We had one of our first official brewery meetings yesterday.  Since we are the owners of our LLC we don’t have a lot of “official” meetings. For our official meeting, we took four growlers of Piney River brew up to Grellner Sales and Service, a distributing company in Rolla, for a meeting with Rodney Edwards.  The folks at Grellner were recommended to us by the owners of the Public House in Rolla, and our local package store, The…

May 18th is historically a good day in the life of Joleen and Brian Durham. On May 18th in 1996 we college sweethearts married.  We have spent all of our anniversaries together, and many times we have spent them doing some sort of fun outdoor activity.  (Which is WAAAY more fun than an actual wedding—what were we thinking back then?!) May 18, 2011, our 15th year in the great adventure of marriage, was spent on the Big Piney River.  This is not a first, but it was the first time we had craft beer in a can in the boat. …

Since early March when we first cracked open the brewery door just a tad, we’ve heard from people how we need signage.  Of course we need signage!  It’s “on the list”…the same list that has things like bigger brew house, canning system, tap room and bathrooms on it. Our lack of signage was driving John McCarty of McCarty Signs in Houston quite crazy, too.  After all, he’s in the business of signage. When we bought our property in 1998, there was a sign at the driveway that said “Little House on the Piney”.  The sign was actually painted by my…