I thought that things couldn’t get much busier than they were last week. I was wrong!

This weekend CBW took up drill and saw and set out to turn an empty space in our brewery into a walk in cooler. It took four days, help from five people (our eternal gratitude goes out to Ed, PJ, Scotty, Mike and Kevin) and one trip to the ER, but we have gone from this:

Cool enough... but could it be COOLER? That was a pun. Because we're putting in a cooler.

To this:

I title this image, "Four people working, and Dan"

Gimp may have destroyed the EXIF data on that image when I cropped it, but it was taken at 11:11 pm last night. I don’t know about you guys but that’s at least 41 minutes after I’m usually asleep. I was the first to leave, too. I don’t know when the others finally went home. Maybe they never did, and are still cutting 2x4s and screwing them onto the frame with a glass-eyed, zombie-like stare. There’s no way to be sure.

As the pictures show, progress has been made. There’s a thing where before there was no thing. I’ve said in the past that it’s amazing to see the brewery area turn into what it will look like when we’re in production, and it’s an entirely different level when the change is happening through your own hands.

That’s excitement enough. Over the weekend I said to myself, “Thursday’s post will be about construction. That will give me a lot to talk about.” And then the news kept on coming.

The big one, which I hinted at last week, is that CBW is one of three finalists in Crowley Webb’s Twenty-Five Hour Workday. The winner will get 25 hours of ad work from the firm for free. This is, quite obviously, a big deal, especially for us as it will come right when we’re about to open. If you’re reading this then you know about our mission to Embeer Buffalo. We want that meme to spread to every man, woman and child in Western New York. You can make that happen: the winner will be chosen by popular vote, with one vote being cast per email per day.

This means that that gmail address you have counts as one vote. Your work account is a second. The .edu you still have laying around is a third, and maybe there’s still that @yahoo.com from the heady days before Google’s hegemony. All of those count as discrete votes, and can be cast daily. If we’re going to win this, we’re going to need a fully armed and operational voting bloc.

Even if you only want to vote for us once, that’s okay. We’ll take any and all support we can get: friend of the brewery Dan Gigante’s You and Who captured our early lead from us and is currently in first place, and Triad Energy and Recycling could rocket to the top at any time. All three of us are equally deserving of Crowley Webb’s efforts. But, as George Orwell famously said in his how-to book on building a successful society, some are more equal than others. Right? I mean, that’s what I took away from the book. What I’m trying to say is please vote for us.

Then there’s our Kickstarter. Wow. With 27 days to go, we’ve raised $12,440 of our $15,000 goal. As a reminder, if we don’t reach our goal by the ending date then we don’t get any money. At this point I have to believe that’s a “when we’re funded” and not an “if,” but that eventuality will only come about with your help. We are awed and humbled by the outpouring of support we’ve received already and I have no doubt that this exciting stream of love and excitement will continue.

Quite a lot of our success is due to the insane amount of press we’ve been getting. Yesterday Ethan’s face was on the front page of the Buffalo News, telling of the story “Giving Buffalo a beer — or many — of its own” contained within. Monday saw “Community Beer Works: It’s close, but needs your help!” grace the front page of Buffalo Rising’s website. Then there’s that ridiculous word, the blogosphere: we’re grateful to Carla at The Beer Babe and local homebrewer Aaron Chapnick for their posts about our Kickstarter.

I had intended for both the construction and the self aggrandizing link sections to be longer. In the end, though, I know that while I enjoy the sound of my own voice the rest of you have a limit. Thank you for reading this far. Allow me to link to the Twenty-Five Hour Workday one more time and, as a reward for reading all of this, please take my thanks and an animated gif of a dog that I found on Reddit.