I know you know we have a Kickstarter project. You subscribe to our mailing list and follow us on Twitter and are our fans on Facebook. Thank you. We appreciate it. But this is for the people who don’t live and breathe CBW. I know, I know, they should!

Here it is. My baby.

Yesterday, our Kickstarter project went live. You’ll be hearing the word “Kickstarter” quite a lot in the next few months, because it’s going to be consuming what I do. I suppose that means I should make sure we’re on the same page about what it is.

Kickstarter is cool. I’ve thought that for a while, even before I knew I would be running one myself some day. I wrote a post about it here a while back, when we were considering having our own project, but weren’t sure. We’re sure now. It’s on, and will remain on until 3:25 pm EST on December 14.

The gist is this: we need $15,000. This will help pay for the construction of the brewery, for buying ingredients with which to make beer, for legal fees and other assorted things that pop up in the course of opening a brewery. There are quite a lot of these assorted things! You, the people of Buffalo and beyond who like our brewery and would like to support us, become “backers”: you pledge a certain amount of money, PBS style. In exchange, we have nine reward levels with increasingly awesome benefits. For $10 you get a sticker, you can sign the wall in our customer service area and you get free high fives from the CBW staff. For $10,000 you get a laundry list of rewards including being able to work with us to design, create and name a beer. Do you really want to make sure we have an imperial stout? You can make that happen.

Here’s the kicker (pun alert): if, on 3:25 pm EST on December 14, we have $15,000 or more donated, your credit card is charged and we start producing your rewards. If we have $14,999 or less then your card isn’t charged. We get no money and you get no rewards. We’re going to make sure that won’t happen. We have 39 backers as of this post, and I would like to make sure all 39 of their cards are charged, along with quite a few more.

Let's get kraken!

We know we’re going to succeed, of course. Buffalo is a thirsty, energetic city and we know that there is the capacity to collect much more than $15,000. If we get more, of course, we get all of it: it wouldn’t be fair to cut off rewards for the people who donated first. Maybe we’ll toss in a button that says “I backed CBW before it was funded,” hipster style. That’s actually kind of a cool idea. I’m writing that down.

Our confidence isn’t just enthusiasm and positive thinking. A mere 24 hours in we had over $2,500 towards our goal. I went home, ate dinner, played with my son, sang “Birdhouse in Your Soul” to him for the twelve millionth time and then settled in to finish this post. We’re $250 closer than when I last checked. We’re 18% of the way there in 3.5% of the time. It’s true that there was an initial surge of interest that may be hard to maintain, but we’ll be doing our damnedest. We have some fun stuff planned for these 42 days.

Yes, our Kickstarter project is running for 42 days. We were debating how long it should run and Rudy suggested 42 and suddenly we realized it was the only option. Chris tried to push for 33, but quickly realized he was up against total dorks. Shortly before I published the project there was a flurry of emails proclaiming the superiority of giant squids. I am constantly reminded of how lucky I am to be involved with this group of people.