When you sit at home thinking of what it would be like to open a craft brewery, you don’t think about stuff like this.

If you read my last post on the electrical issues with our space, you would know that our electrical bill went from an anticipated $30,000 for a simple upgrade the transformer on the power pole, to almost $120,000 for a pad mounted transformer.  It turns out we can’t put a pad mounted transformer in the parking lot, as our landlord needs to keep these spaces for tenants in our building and other buildings he owns in the area.  In fact, he has already received a variance from the City of Vancouver for the number of parking spaces he must to have, and anything that takes away from this number is not permitted.

This results in messing this situation up even more, just when I didn’t think it was possible for this process to go off the rails any further.  Now instead of a $120,000 bill, which believe it or not we think was actually doable, we are now looking at a substation.  Holy crap, I think building an actual Submarine station would cost less than this thing.  Initial estimates for a sub station in our building are about $250,000.

Unless we can find a economical solution to this problem, there is no question about it, we are done with this space.  When you consider that we spent about 8 months on this space, hundreds of hours of time and effort laying out the space, getting quotes, planning equipment, designing tasting room, etc. it seems almost surreal that this is happening.  It doesn’t end there.  Financially, we spent over $30,000 in fees, permits, lawyers, engineers, accountants, architects and other misc items.  When you add all this together, it’s really painful to have reached this conclusion after so much.  But at the end of the day, it is better to walk away without $30,000 than it is to walk away with a business that failed to get off the ground.

We have our last ditch effort to find a solution on Wednesday of this week.  I hope that the people we have relied on so much throughout this process are able to come up with a creative idea that works for everyone involved.  One thing is for sure, I won’t be getting much sleep tonight.