Start up

Keg cleaning is an ongoing job in a brewery.  There are always kegs in various stages of cleanliness. Kegs aren't just to be cleaned either.  They also have to be sanitized.  And filled.  And they are emptied at an amazing rate which starts the cycle all over again. When we first started home brewing, we used old soda or "corny" kegs because they were fairly simple to disassemble for cleaning.  As a microbrewery, we have a bunch of brand spankin' new, shiny "Sanke" kegs that are waiting to be put into the brewery rotation. Sanke kegs are not that simple…

If you would have been in the BARn at Piney River Brewing Company today you would have seen the brewer and his wife passing fittings and tools back and forth to each other, putting in lines to run the air compressor for our canning line.  Seven barrels of Missouri Mule India Pale Ale were glug-glugging happily in time with some tunes from the Drive-By Truckers.  Yes, this little microbrewery is getting ready to can our craft beer. We are very proud of the fact that our little craft brewery will be the first microbrewery in the state of Missouri to…

A year ago in September we still had some old barn wood on the BARn.  There were dirt floors, and there was certainly no plumbing or electricity.  The TTB probably hadn't even opened the box with our application for licensure. Somewhere over the past 52 weeks we got a concrete floor, plumbing, electricity, and we actually opened a nanobrewery.  Brian has brewed almost 70 batches of beer (10 gallons at a time).  I've cleaned a million kegs or maybe two million kegs (or so it seemed).  We've had hundreds of people come through the doors of our brewery.  We've had…

A craft beer fan told Brian today that if I didn’t blog about the brewery soon, they were going to start a “Piney River Brewery Won’t Blog” blog. I know you don’t want to read excuses, but this writer has been thinking about writing while helping Brian brew; cleaning, sanitizing and filling kegs; cleaning brewing equipment, and helping with general brewery construction and maintenance.  There’s the day job, too, and fall soccer has started for Andy.  But enough about that; I AM blogging tonight. Right now, the owners of Piney River Brewing Company are racing against the clock.  We’ve felt…

Visitors to Piney River Brewing Company last week got a chance to take a gander at some of our new brewery "stuff". First came more stainless--our new (to us) 7-barrel brew house. Yes, we were planning to build our own system, but Brian found a used system at Big Muddy Brewing in Murphysboro, IL.  Don't worry, we're going to use the parts we were already working on to add some components to this brewing system. It took two trailers and two trucks, but it all arrived safely at the BARn. Now, the fun part...getting it all hooked up.  Rees Oil…

If you read our blog regularly, you know that microbrewery ownership is a lot of planning, risk taking, sweating and late nights.  AKA...work.  And in our case, we already have day jobs and a small farm. This Saturday was another great example of why microbrewery ownership is so much fun even when it's so much work.  We had been closed for three Saturdays--two because we were traveling on vacation and at a wedding and one because we had no beer.  We hated to be closed for three weekends, but we didn't have a choice. We opened little earlier than usual…

Happiness is a great craft beer. Happiness is starting a nanobrewery. Happiness is starting a nanobrewery that cannot make enough beer. If you're the nanobrewery owners, you're happy when the brewery is crowded on Saturday.  You're happy when you're getting carpel tunnel from pulling the tap.  You're happy when there's empty keg after empty keg.  (Okay, I'll admit, you're a little stressed about the empty keg thing, too.) The aforementioned  publicity came out in The Houston Herald last Thursday.  That brought a few new people out to the brewery this past Saturday.  Then some of our previous customers brought some…

It was bound to happen. We started the PRBC Blog last August (almost one year ago, to be precise).  The Piney River Brewing Facebook page began sometime in late fall.  Our Web site, www.pineyriverbrewing.com, was up and running sometime this winter. Piney River Brew on Twitter began in March. We cracked open the door to the BARn the first weekend in March, and we've relied on word of mouth for word to spread from Bucyrus to Houston to Plato to Springfield to Minnesota to Alabama to New York, California and Mexico (just to name a few places where there are…

I'll admit, it felt a little insane at Piney River Brewing Company last Saturday. After moving in the fermentation vessels and bright tank, parts of the brewery looked like an explosion had happened.  We had to relocate tables, kegs and other miscellaneous items.  We needed to sweep the floor and do some rearranging (this will happen several times over the upcoming weeks, I'm sure).  Brian and I ate a hearty breakfast and hit the brewery by 10 a.m., cleaning and moving like mad folks.  We readied our slightly primitive bathroom--electricity, flushing toilet and hand sanitizer.  There was beer to taste…

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…