Start up

"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…

Ever since our very cool Piney River logo was developed (Brooke Hamilton of Grindstone Studio—Thanks Brooke!), I’ve thought about putting it on a T-shirt. The logo is pretty color heavy, and I did not want T-shirts that had more weight in paint than cotton.  At the Craft Brewer’s Conference we met Graphic 22 or as they are known in brewery circles, The Hopman.  They specialize in a full-color print that blends with the shirt for a soft feel and look.  Iain Hursey, my sales guy, hooked me up with the first of what I imagine will be many more T-shirts.…

Just in case you ever wondered what it’s like to start a brewery, it’s a little crazy. We have day jobs which help us pursue our passion of starting a brewery. It also means that you get up and go to work only to come home and go to work. I’ve started playing this little game with myself where I try to see how long I’m awake in the morning before I think about something related to beer. (It’s usually right after I think about “coffee”.) We’ve been open most weekends since the beginning of March. We open for just…

Back in December we spent a memorable weekend with our friends Marian McKinney and Calum Learn at McKinney Forge and Design Studio in Bucyrus.  Marian and Calum helped us forge four handles for the big BARn doors. We completed the handles in a weekend, but Brian took them to work to drill holes in them, we had to polish them, buy big wood screws, etc., and we finally got our handles hung on the doors this past weekend, just a few days shy of the anniversary of our friend, Charlie's death.  We aren't master blacksmiths like Charlie was, but we…

You need a place for the water to go. Since we need a septic for the brewery water waste and a place for the human waste to go from those visiting the brewery, we installed two septic tanks last week. Again, that involved digging and more digging--places for the two 500 gallon tanks and deep ditches for the leech lines coming out of the tanks.  I'd really like to know how many feet of dirt have been dug and moved around here in the past six months. We had to install two tanks/systems because the brewery yeasts and cleaners can…

If you follow Piney River Brewing Company on Facebook, you may have had part in the PRBC quiz fun we had, asking our Facebook fans what the #1 ingredient is in beer.  Some of our fans figured it out, some didn't.  Either way, the #1 ingredient in beer is alive and well in the BARn tonight. Brian and I spent the weekend hooking up pex lines to the water hook up in the BARn. While we enjoyed the new album from The Decemberists, Andy did the honors and tapped the new water lines. We think we may have a future…