By now I assume you’ve heard the news: we’re looking to expand into a building on 7th street!
Now then, for a company that prides itself on brutal transparency you might find it strange that you heard this from Buffalo Rising and not, well, me. I understand! But: we hadn’t told you because we didn’t think we had enough to tell yet.
Be excited! But patient.
We are not going to be operating out of that facility for quite some time. I’m not going to give you a date, even a vague one. Make one up yourself, pick a card, any card, and then understand it will be longer, while knowing that the actual date is probably longer still.
Because hey: if it’s sooner, you can be pleasantly surprised!
We’ll let you know when we’ve made progress
People have been asking us fairly regularly what our expansion plans are. We’ve answered with varying degrees of caginess, depending on the person asked, the person asking, their mood and the alignment of Mercury.
But, while we quite like this building and are quite committed to it, things are still very, very early on. Getting approval from the Zoning Board of Appeals was the first step: without a ZBA variance we couldn’t go forward. No point in telling you all about a building that couldn’t happen.
The ZBA makes their agendas public, however. I do like transparency! This means that “hey CBW wants a brewery here” became something that others could find, and so they did, and so here we are.
OG CBW fans might remember the “progress thermometer” we had at the top of the site before we opened (and hey, did you know the plugin I wrote is on Github?). We’re back at step one.
…Sort of
Back when I started writing this blog (which, by the way, was over five years ago) we were a brewery in planning. Every small step forward was big news.
Now? We have new beers out almost weekly (something new Thursday: stay tuned). Events by the handful. I no longer need to spend an entire month talking about a damn cooler. I like the cooler. It serves us well. But back then most days were slow news days.
So: we will let you know when the big stuff happens, but for the most part I think this time around will be closer to a “ta da, it’s here!” than our initial “what we ate for lunch” endeavor.
You have other things to be excited about in the meantime!
We need to make more beer tomorrow. Today. A year ago. You know that Ballpark Brewers Series can? People love it. We love it. But we can’t make enough beer to make that happen regularly: Big Ditch graciously let us brew An IPA on their system.
Which brings me to another bit of news we haven’t officially announced but which is pretty common knowledge: soon, very soon, we will be brewing more beer at Woodcock Brothers.
I would like to stress that we will be brewing more beer at Woodcock Brothers. There are many ways to structure such an arrangement: the most traditional one is “contract brewing”, where Small Brewery A says to Bigger Brewery B “I will give you money and you give me beer.” Many breweries have done things this way, from Sam Adams to Shmaltz, and it is a perfectly reasonable way to make your beer.
However, we’ll be going with an “alternating proprietorship”, or alt-prop: on days when Woodcock doesn’t need their equipment Rudy will scamper in and brew, sort of like Ratatouille but with fewer health code violations. This will let us make significantly more beer while we wait for our expansion to happen.
And by the way: speaking of timelines, it’s been 11 months since Woodcock and CBW said “yes, we are definitely doing this”. Then there was paperwork, and filing with the TTB (which we’re still waiting on), et cetera, et cetera… “Fax mentis, incendium gloria cultum,” et cetera, et cetera… Memo bis punitor delicatum.
So: expect Woodcock very soon, and then also our good friends at Hydraulic Hearth, who always have fun up their sleeves.
More soon
Maybe one day I can talk about why we like this building so much, or go over the steps that need to happen. For now, though: be excited. Patient, and excited, and full of beer.
Until next week.
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