Are we there yet?
It’s 24 degrees below zero right now.
Alaskan winters are an interesting beast. For me, the cycle of winters in Alaska usually goes as follows:
October: Denial that it is truly going to get cold soon
November: Acceptance that it did in fact get cold
December-Spring: Anticipation for the snow to melt and the warmth to return
This year the anticipation stage started a little earlier however. We finished out Fall 2021 strong and excited for Spring 2022, ready to get to work the very minute that the ground is soft enough to dig in it. In the meantime, we have at least 1 metric ton of work to do before we get to do any of that. That work comes in the form of stacks and stacks of paper!
Anybody that has opened a business from the ground up (in our case, literally from the the ground up) knows that the Architectural/Engineering portion of a build can take twice as long as the actual construction does. A brewery is far from a quick endeavor to get off the ground. At this point it feels like we have gone through at least 15 different versions of building layouts. When I look back at my earlier napkin drawings of potential layouts, I laugh at how far we still had to go before settling on what we believe is the perfect layout.
Now that we’ve hammered out every inch of where things will go, we have begun the process of working with our team of Engineers to get a full set of stamped and approved drawings sent over to the city for approval. It sometimes feels like herding really well paid cats when it comes to trying to organizing Structural, Electrical, Mechanical, HVAC, and Fire Suppression Engineers that all operate within their own time frames. Nonetheless, we are extremely lucky to have a group of people working on this project that are both excited about the project and extremely proficient at what they do.
By the end of February, we should have a stamped and approved drawing set that we can push out to the tradespeople we are working with this spring! This seems like a small accomplishment but it truly is the biggest hurdle we have to overcome in order to begin construction, aside from that pesky 24 degree below zero weather of course…
The dreaming phase is over, soon we will order our brewhouse, Spring 2022 can’t come fast enough!
A colorized mockup of our future building