We are going to be delayed in our opening.  I wish I could sit here and tell you something different, as we are so excited to open and share our journey and beer with you, but not unlike everyone else …. we are delayed.  It will end up being a combination of beer not quite being ready to go, not receiving all our permits, and construction of the tasting room not quite being complete.  I would say we are going to be open sometime before Christmas.  How much before is anyones guess.  Hopefully around the middle of the month.

Thank you for everyone that has offered their support and encouragement.  There have been days like today where I needed the words of encouragement.  Trying to get things finished in order to get final inspections, in addition to making sure you get all the inspections you need, plus submitting all the paperwork needed to move ahead is a lot of work … and stressful.

A few other things.  Take it from me, when you get a label that you are happy with, something you think you want to produce for your beer, go to a bunch of Liquor Stores and see how it looks on the shelf.  You will be surprised what you learn and I have no doubt that something about your design or direction will change.

For us, we have kept in touch with as many people as possible.  Bloggers, writers, craft beer enthusiasts, home brewers … basically anyone that wants to talk to us about craft beer.  We have asked as many people as many questions as we can about what we are doing, how things work, what they like, preferences in the marketplace, etc.

We did this with our name, via a focus group, and we did this with a bunch of other key items.  However, one thing we didn’t do was take our proposed can design and imagery into the marketplace to see how it would work on shelves.  What we have learned is key, and is something that you should know for when you design a can.  If I could distill the knowledge down to a couple things it would be this.  Put your key items on the top half of your can and make sure you get all the regulated information on the can correct (UPC number and positioning, font size, labelling requirements, etc).

We waited too long to do this, and what we found out was that our imagery, as cool as we thought it was, needed to be moved up the can, made bigger and work with the shelves and flats that would hold our beer.  Luckily for us, we hadn’t yet produced our can, so we can make the changes and then send the can off for printing.  Yes we are going to launch our packaged product in early 2015 once we are happy with the consistency and quality of beer.

Our tasting room is coming together very nicely.  We need to finish a few details, but today our tables went in, and they were bolted to the ground.  It means that we are getting close and soon we will have the final lights, chairs go in, POS and Stereo installed, and warm bodies to make it all come together.  We can’t wait to share this journey with you and we hope you find it as interesting and awesome as we hope you will.

Off to bed ….