Neshaminy Creek Brewing

….almost, anyway.  We’ve got a few more hurdles to overcome in the coming weeks, but rest assured we’re so close to ‘beer o’clock’ we can almost taste it.  Right now we’ve got seven events lined up for Philly Beer Week 2012 and we’re really excited to be a participant this year.  Our first two events will be Philly Beer Week’s official Opening Tap Night at the Independence Visitor Center followed by Bella Vista’s annual Beer Bash at the Devil’s Den.  After that we’ve got a bunch of really awesome events throughout the week at places like The Hulmeville Inn, Capone’s, 12 Steps Down, and many more!  We’ll be posting all the details we have very shortly.

In the meantime we’re going to be participating in this weekend’s Washington Crossing Beer Fest.  This will be our last beer event using our pilot beer as we’re now up and running on the brewing side of things in Croydon.  We’re still waiting on a few things like our first shipment of 1/2 and 1/6 BBL kegs that we hope to have real soon for all these beer we’ve got fermenting away, as well as our kegger, which was supposed to ship this past Monday but has now been pushed back to next Wednesday.  Fun, right?  After two years of putting up with delays you’d think we’re used to this but it’s probably even more frustrating now that we’re even closer to being ‘open for business’.

Just in case you’re wondering the three beers we’ll be featuring during beer week are our flagship County Line IPA and two limited release beers in our Mudbank Milk Stout and Tribute Belgian Tripel.  We didn’t have enough time to get our  Trauger Pilsner ready for Beer Week, but we plan on brewing that for the first time on the big brewhouse very shortly.

So, to quickly recap….beer will be on the market in early June, and we expect to start receiving visitors to our humble brewery sometime in late June/early July.

Hope that tides a few of you over until our next untimely update.

Cheers!

Here’s a quick look at some of tanks in place.  More coming soon, both tanks and pics!

We received our federal TTB Brewery Notice approval on March 18th of last year; hard to believe it’s been nearly a year since.  Since that time we waited over seven months for the PLCB to give us our initial approval to operate a brewery. Right now we’re finishing the build out and eager to schedule our final inspection with the PLCB so we can get this ball rolling.  Thank you to everyone that’s been supportive and eager to see this project off the ground.  Without you we wouldn’t be here.

This past Saturday we participated in the Philly Craft Beer Fest at the Navy Yard.  Thank you to everyone that came by and cleared us out of beer!  We were thrilled with the feedback and can’t wait until we’re making these beers 15 BBLs a shot.  Now that we’re completely cleared out of beer we’re going to brew a few more batches on the pilot system and hopefully we’ll be up and running on the big gun real soon so we’ll have plenty of beer for future events.

Gonna keep this one short and sweet.  Again, if you’re not following us on Facebook, please do so.  We post stuff much more often than on the website/blog, so we promise you won’t get bored.  Until next time….

As we inch closer and closer to what will be the largest production brewery in Bucks County (hey, you’ve got to start somewhere, right) here’s a quick update to tide everyone over until we’ve got more exciting news to talk about.

Our brewhouse and some aging tanks showed up last week.  We’re in the process of finishing up some mechanical things in the building, and should be spotting the brewhouse into place soon.  We’ve got a ton of work to do on that end in regards to all the process piping and other important equipment, but it’s another small step towards being up, running, and making tasty beer.

We’re expecting a delivery of some more important stainless steel tanks next week as well.  I guess from here on out we’ll be getting all sorts of important deliveries, each one bringing us closer to our goal of completing this “Death Star”.  Hopefully our fully operational, planet destroying ‘beer’ cannon won’t scare the neighbors.

We’ll be pouring some pilots at this years Philadelphia Beer Fest at the Navy Yard on March 3rd.  Most likely we’ll have Trauger Pils, Croydon Steamer, and one other beer for you all to check out.  Go here for more details.

Since we get asked this a lot, here’s some speculation: We hope to be brewing and in production by April 1st.  We’ve got a small bet amongst ourselves, with a few people predicting before that, and some of us hedging their bets on a date later than that.  We’ll have to wait and see.  Things have really picked up around here, and as soon as we can be up and running, as well as legally allowed to sell you beer, trust us, we won’t be keeping it quiet!

Another thing we get asked a lot is if we’re going to be hiring soon.  The long and short of that is, no, we won’t be hiring anytime in the immediate eight to 10 months.  Believe it or not, a brewery of this size won’t need a lot of hands on deck until we get to the point that we’ve got to brew a lot of beer.  You can help make that happen sooner then later by supporting us whenever and where ever you can once we’re out in the market.  Want to know the importance of buying local?  Supporting a local business just like ours directly creates jobs in your community.  The more beer we have to make, the more people we need to hire to make that happen.  So,  you buy a lot of beer, we make a lot of beer.  In order to make a lot of beer, we need to hire people to help us do this.  Our hope, if you can’t tell by the size of the brewhouse and tanks we’ve purchased, is to make a lot of great, tasty craft beer.  We are looking forward to bringing in new hires as soon as we can afford to do so, and we will most certainly announce that on this website.

Of all the local breweries opening in the coming months throughout the Philadelphia area, and I think I can say this pretty safely, in terms of brewhouse size and overall capacity, we’re the largest.  Our initial fermentation capacity will be at least 120 barrels.  Depending on how our budgeting works out we may be able to squeeze another tank or two in there, which will bring our capacity up to 150 or 180 barrels.  This is probably at least three times more than any other new brewery in the Philadelphia area.  We choose to concentrate on just making beer as opposed to a smaller scale brewpub that would also serve food.  Being that one of us is a culinary school trained chef, you can expect something along those lines from us in the future, but for the coming months we’re going to focus solely on the beer.  That doesn’t make us any better than the other guys out there that will be coming online in the coming weeks and months.  We just have a different focus, and our past brewing experience is also something that dictated this direction.  We do feel that, even with this larger brewhouse and capacity size we will be able to brew finely crafted, great tasting beers that will challenge us as brewers and you as beer drinkers alike.

Alright, so that’s enough jibber jabber for now.  Time to get back to work.  Until next time….

Sorry it’s been a while since we last updated our website. In all honesty, we should be doing a better job of it, but with all the social media choices out there it seems as though we’ve been doing a much better job of keeping people up to date on what’s going on in our neck of the woods via our Facebook page. If you haven’t had a chance to ‘Like’ us on the ol’ FB, please do so. We promise to keep you much more abreast of what we’re up to.

So, since we last updated our tiny part of the Internet a bunch of important things have happen. For starters, the State of Pennsylvania has been nice enough to approve our Manufacturer’s License, subject to final inspection of course. To say that we’ve been waiting for this approval for a while now would be an understatement. This approval was crucial to several parts of this project, and now that we’ve finally received it things should start to move along much more quickly now. I’d like to take a quick moment to thank our State Senator, Tommy Tomilson, and his staff for the crucial help in dealing with the bureaucratic machine that is the maze of our state government. Without their help I’m sure I wouldn’t be writing about such positive news today.

A lot of work still needs to be done in our building and because of some circumstances completely out of our control and some tied closely with the approval of our state license, we’re still not completely operational. We hope to have that resolved within the next three months. Things really should move very quickly now as we’ve put ourselves in a good position to move forward very efficiently.

In a sign that things should be a million times easier from this point on, last week the TTB approved our first two bottle labels for County Line IPA and Trauger Pilsner in as little as four days. Here’s to hoping this trend continues.

Right now we’ve got a ton of beers we’ve been tweaking and we’d love for you to check them out. In our gift shop at the brewery we currently have pilots of our Russian Imperial Smores Stout, Dubbel Honey Weizenbock, Hefeweizen, and Pale Ale. Sixtels of County Line IPA and our Tripel will be joining them shortly along with the first batch of the Croydon Steamer and the return of Trauger Pilsner in the weeks to come.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has given their support to this project over the past 12 months. It’s hard to believe that Rob and I have been hard at work on this for almost two years now, and we’re really excited that things are finally coming together. We’re eager to put Bucks County on the beer map and thank you all for your kind words, feedback, and support.

We have a fun announcement that we’re going to make tomorrow, so keep your ears peeled for some exciting news! Until then…..

Here we sit, the first day after Labor Day, 17 days from the start of Fall, and yet when you look at our space you’d think it’s still the first week of May.  Mother Nature has delivered a cruel set of blows in the form of the wettest month of August on record ever for the Philadelphia area; all that before a Category 1 hurricane decided to whip its way up the East Coast and dump a considerable amount of water on the Delaware Valley and our neighbors to the north and south.  All that weather pushed our original hookup date for our building’s three phase power from August 19th to the 29th.  And, as luck would have it, the 29th was less than 36 hours after Hurricane Irene made a mess of the Neshaminy Creek and other tributaries up and down the East Coast as well as knocking out power to over 50,000 customers in Southeast PA.  Needless to say, we weren’t expecting Peco to be able to get to our new install very quickly in the face of such a large number of customers without power for so long, but today we got the call informing us that our newly rescheduled date for the hookup is now Tuesday, September 13th, which oddly enough, is the same date as our rescheduled shipment of our brewhouse and tanks.  Fate?  Omen?  You be the judge.

In the meantime we’re still awaiting the final approval of our Manufacturer’s License from the State of Pennsylvania.  Coincidentally enough, September 13th will officially be 120 days since our application was received by the PLCB.  Are you starting to see a pattern here?  It took the TTB 131 days to approval our federal application for a Brewery Notice so at this point we’re not out of the realm of the unexpected, but it’d be nice to see some positive news and paperwork in the mail any day now.  Right?

Keeping our licensing situation in mind, right now we’re scheduled to participate in the Newtown Beer Fest on September 24th.  We’re really excited to be involved this year and right now it looks like we’re going to have our IPA, Brown Ale, and Oatmeal Sweet Stout with us for sampling.  One thing we’d like to mention though is that we’ve let the promoters know that if our state license isn’t approved by the fest we’re going to have to cancel our appearance.  Since we’re not legally allowed to sell any beer yet we don’t want to run into any grey areas that might jeopardize our license status.  We simply don’t want to take any chances by representing ourselves as a legal brewery at an event that is charging for admittance.  So, keep your fingers crossed that everything with the state gets sorted out in the next 18 days because we really want to show everyone at this year’s event what Neshaminy Creek Brewing is all about!

Keeping things positive, we’re excited to report that our gift shop and tasting room are almost complete.  We’ve just got a few final touches to add and we’ll be ready to rock ‘n roll.  We’ll most likely be pouring samples of our pilots at the brewery in the coming weeks and what better way to celebrate the delivery of seven shimmering towers of stainless steel awesomeness than with a few samples of beers you can expect to see from us in the coming months fresh and on tap in our tasting room! This wait is so frustrating but we’re excited with what the future holds and can’t wait to help put Bucks County beer on the map!

There you have it, the latest and greatest of what is going on in our neck in the woods.  Hopefully we’ll have some great things to report on in the coming weeks.  Thank you to everyone that has come out to one of our tastings and shown so much support to this endeavor.  It really means a lot to us to see how much people have really gotten behind this project.

Until our next update….

The idea to start this brewery wasn’t one that was treated very lightly.  Having come from working at a small production brewery for almost two years, as well as my time spent at Siebel, I was far from any delusion of the amount of time, money, and energy it was going to take to get this project off the ground.  Here we are, nearly 18 months from the first time Rob and I began to actively work on this idea, and we couldn’t be any closer than we are now, yet I still feel like we’re a million miles away.  The almost endless list of things that have to be done seems to never get smaller, but hopefully we’re only a few months out from seeing all of this come together.

In the next two weeks we’ll begin to see a lot of this project come together rather rapidly.  All the electrical work, and there is a lot of it, will finally get off the ground this week.  In the larger scope of this project, the amount of time that’s spent on the electrical necessities of our building and brewing equipment, as well as the large amount of plumbing (read: drainage) that needs to be taken care is rather small.  Everything should wrap up on these almost as quickly as it started, relatively speaking, and that’s no small feat.  Honestly, the hardest things to deal with in a project of this size are usually the ones you have the least amount of control over.  After that, we’ve got a few other small details to sort out before the delivery of our 20 barrel brewhouse and 40 barrel fermentors at the end of the month.  All of this, which goes without saying, could more or less hold true, but like most things, we’re planning for the worst, and hoping for the best.

Lately I’ve read a few articles online about other brewers and their adventures starting their own breweries, both big and small.  There is one theme that a lot of these entrepreneurs and brewers are massively overlooking or misjudging, and that’s the amount of time they think it’ll take for them to get up and running.  I can say with a lot of confidence that when we submitted our application to the federal government concerning our TTB Brewery Notice that we were well prepared.  We weren’t required to submit any additional paperwork outside of what they normally require, nor did we have to make any changes to our original application.  As far as I can tell, our state application has followed the same course.  That being said, it took 131 days (over four months) to receive federal approval to operate a brewery.  This approval is required for both brewpubs and production breweries.  There is no distinction between the two on the federal level.  The only distinction the feds make is based on annual production output, and of course, how that output is taxed.  In the state of Pennsylvania you cannot be approved for a state manufacturing license without a federal TTB Brewery Notice approval.  I can’t say for certain whether your able to actually apply for the state license while waiting for the TTB approval, but that’s another topic of discussion.  I also can’t say how long it will take for us to receive our approval, but at the very least I can say that you can expect to wait no less than the 60 days we’ve already been waiting for ours.  Most likely I see us waiting another 30-45 days.  So, for all our brewing brethren out there, take these numbers to heart.  No fancy lawyer on your side is going to be able to do much about it; maybe on the  state level, but certainly not on the federal level.  If you haven’t submitted your paperwork yet you’re no less than 7 months from being able to legally operate a brewery or brewpub, so take that to heart, and be prepared for the long wait.

Speaking of waiting, one of the things that takes a bit of time to deal with for all breweries is label approval and beer registration.  The federal government requires all labels that will be used on packaged/bottled beer to go through a formal review and approval process.  This takes some time as well.  Let’s not forget about the registration laws at home here in Pennsylvania.  These approvals take some time, so plan accordingly.  In our case, we’ve got a few things to show you like this picture of a sample of the designs we’re looking at using for our first two year round offerings, Trauger Pilsner and County Line IPA.

What do you think?  We’ve got our good friends over at Tricycle Design working on our six-pack holder and case designs right now as well, and should have something to show you for those very soon.  Oh yeah, remember that earlier topic of waiting?  How long do you think it takes to get some six-pack holders printed?  Let’s just say, ‘Plan accordingly!’

So, of course, one of the first questions we’re asked whenever we’re discussing the brewery with those that do and don’t know what we’ve got going on is, “When will we be open?”  Right now we’re trying our best to make September 1st a reality, but in all honesty, October 1st is looking more like a reliable date to work with. We should be completely operational well before October 1st, but remember the theme of this post?  Wait for it….

I think we’ve said it a million times before, but “Hurry up and wait.  Hurry up and wait.”  I think that’s a good name to use for one of our beers in the future.