Dude, where's the brew?
A study in (im)patience
It's been a while since we blogged about the brewery. Not that we've been idle, but so far, no beer has been pouring from our kettles, and zero foaming pints were seen to be raised towards thirsty lips just yet.
Here's a brief summary of the various delays and complications we've encountered the past month.
Excise and other paperwork
In between the paperwork and the umpteen routes it can take to finally reach the appropriate clearance, there's government websites to navigate, and the Gordian tangle of all the various interfacing services and their lack of centralised documentation.
Really, if you think your tax form is complicated, try working out how excise works.
It's like a paperwork adaption of Cube, only with less creative death traps.
Size & scale
You may know how do deal with things on a certain scale, but once said things get bigger, that knowledge and expertise become about as useful as a pair of cotton candy shoes. From supply delivery to milling to mashing to brewing, all the way to pitching and bottling, everything you know about the brewing process becomes disproportionally more complex and cumbersome once you scale it up to a size you can't just lift off the floor without a forklift.
Time
Apart from here being not enough of it, the above issue about size and scale also has implications towards time management. Simple case in point: filling a hundred bottles of beer isn't the most exciting part of the brewing process, but at least it doens't take forever. When initial estimates hint at bottling days lasting over 10 hours, bottling suddenly leaps from a minor nuisance to a priority process control point.
The Overlooked
You plan and replan.
You think and rethink.
You walk through the entire process and realise you've overlooked a few things that could have seriously screwed up your brew day.
So you re-rethink and re-replan and walk through the entire thing again.
And again...
And no matter how many times you do this, something gets overlooked, screaming you in the face on brew day.
So.
Is the beer ready?
Short story: no.
Slightly longer story: not yet.
Thanks for being such eager beavers, all of you, and our apologies for keeping you waiting. There'll be beer before long, we promise.
Watch this space fur updates.