Touring our lil' Brewery

Greetings, all!

Due to the large number of emails, Facebook posts, and Tweets requesting info about tours, I thought it might be wise of me to put a post here to explain ourselves; to explain just why the hell we haven't scheduled any public tours lately.

Let me cut to the chase here: it's all your fault! You wonderful, craft-beer drinking folks are out-pacing not only us, but every other small brewery who supplies the goods to our lovely city. We are brewing brewing brewing to keep up. We literally work every day to produce as much beer as we can. Not that we're complaining. We love our jobs. But this workload doesn't leave us much time for offering tours.

The value of offering tours to our devoted drinkers is immeasurable, we're not missing that point. But our main focus is - and always will be - brewing the best damn lagers we possibly can. All four people on our staff are devoted to this singular goal. All of our resources and money are dedicated this singular goal. Everything else comes after this singular goal is met.

Allow me to propose a solution to this (awesome) problem. For our part, we'll continue to focus on our brews, that's why we're all here, after all. And we cross-our-hearts-hope-to-die promise that we will schedule some public tours as soon as we can (we'll post them on on Twitter and Facebook). For your part, please continue to buy and drink craft beer. The more beer we sell -> the more people we can hire -> the more resources we'll have -> more public tours!

update on whereabouts and whatnot

Wednesday night, April 8th, we'll be drinking Metro at Northside Bar and Grill, 1635 N Damen, Chicago. As usual, we'll be giving out free beer so... you know... duh.

We've resurrected our Facebook page. Log into your Facebook account, search on "Metropolitan Brewing," and then choose the profile with the little flag next to it. That's the page we post updates, upload photos, and engage in the usual level of snark.

Also, we've been loading up our Picasa account with photos of hoisting a couple of chillers to the brewery roof, the post-party after the final performance of BEER!, and various other beer porn. Enjoy.

Listen... to what the beer people say

Last week, Karl Klockars from Chicagoist interviewed me about opening our brewery in Chicago, lagers, and how many awesome bars we have here. The first 19 or so minutes of the podcast is the completely unedited interview (glad I didn't drop any f-bombs). Enjoy!

Metro Launch Party at LunaR

Hey Villa Park Suburbanites! Come join us for our first official launch party at LunaR Brewing Co., 54 E. St. Charles Rd., Villa Park. The date is February 25th, the day is Wednesday, the time is 7pm, the forcast calls for large gusts of Metrosexiness! Both Dynamo and Flywheel will be on tap. LunaR's awesome brews will be on tap as well, so let's line'em up and try'em all! Whoop!

Don't bitch, we call this "lagering weather"

First, we're on tap! Find Metro beer at...

Hopleaf Bar, 5148 N Clark St, Chicago
Handlebar Bar & Grill, 2311 W North Ave, Chicago
Risqué Café, 3419 N Clark St, Chicago
Rodan, 1530 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago
Hackney's, 733 S. Dearborn, Chicago
Beer Bistro, 1061 W. Madison St., Chicago
Marion St. Cheese Market, 100 S. Marion Street, Oak Park
Binny's - South Loop, 1132 S. Jefferson Street, Chicago
Tavern in the Town, 519 N. Milwaukee Ave., Libertyville
Barley House, 1520 Randall Rd, Algonquin
Lunar Brewing Co., 54 E. St. Charles Rd., Villa Park
Bar on Buena, 910 W. Buena Ave., Chicago


Next, come check out for yourself what happens when a brewery has no rules. Metro Brewing plays host to the Neo-Futurist vision: BEER! This weekend was the first in a run of 6, so go to the Neo-Futurist's website and buy tickets for an upcoming performance. Just do it now. You're killing time anyway.

"When 10 year-old Boon pukes and passes out after drinking his stepfather's crappy beer, he awakens to find himself lost in a mysterious brewery. Together with his only friend, the puppet Puke, Boon must learn the brewing trade in order to go home. Through puppetry, animation, and a live band, learn about the world of BEER."


Finally, we've updated the website. Looky. And Facebook took down our page because it wasn't set up in the format they require. Stand by for a new Facebook page in the near future. As always, though... no promises.

Holy Moly

Our website and blog are two casualties of the speed and ferociousness of a business start-up. Oh, how we fantasize about processing photos, writing, and updating everyone on our whereabouts right now. Stand by, we're on it. In short, over the past month...

1. Doug went to China to dismantle and load our brewhouse.
2. We prepared our space for equipment installation, including but not limited to breaking into the concrete floor and repouring it.
3. We built (and by this I really mean *we*) three rooms in the brewery to accommodate various equipment.
4. We received our federal Brewer's Notice number from the TTB.
5. We've begun the street-pounding to hawk our beer-wares.
6. We bought big toys like a forklift, 128 1/2 barrel kegs, a glycol chiller, and more.
7. After a 2-day delay, our equipment finally arrived from China.
8. We rigged our equipment into place. (Teaser photo above.)
9. AND, we found out that our next-door neighbor... inside our very own building... is a new distillery!! Can we get a triple-dog whoop, Whoop, WHOOP!

You want more photos, don't you!? Well, we're only too happy to meet your demands. Just give us a little time. It may be a day or two, it may be a week.* But we'll get you the goods as fast as we can.

*With a righteous middle-finger held aloft to our present workload, we're escaping to Denver this week to attend the Great American Beer Festival. It's our version of what some folks call a "vacation." We're not bringing Metro beer this year. We've paid admission as proper beer-enjoying folks and will take this first and last trip to GABF as grinning drinkers. Next year we'll be there as grinning drinkers and vendors.

More to come. Hang onto your pants.

Biggest. Shopping. Ever.

Starting a brewery requires a lot of equipment. Big stuff. Shiny. Some of our brewery toys are new; the brewhouse and several fermenters. But with the price of steel going up, we've been hitting the used market for just about everything else.

Last week we rented a Penske truck on two separate occasions, for two separate noisy, bouncy road trips. On Monday, we drove to Dexter MI to pick up our 1996 Meheen bottle filler. It's old, but we got'er running at the brewery where we bought it, Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. Later in the week my step-Dad visited us, and the Meheen. Fortunately for us, he got that look on his face that only a tinkerer who loves a good challenge can make.

On Friday, we hit the road again in a 15' Penske to drive to Iowa City, IA to pick up our DE filter from Old Capital Brew Works. Again, it's old and needs some spiffing up, but it fit the budget.

We didn't do any photos of those two trips. The inside of a Penske truck doesn't exactly make my trigger finger itchy. But we did do some photography back in May when we purchased a hot liquor tank and 30 bbl fermenter from our friends at Two Brothers Brewing Co. Starting this brewery has been one, big exercise in logistics and I've never seen logistics like these. I know that you, like me, have long wondered just exactly how you get a 12' tank off its feet and onto a flatbed trailer. The hot liquor tank was no big deal really, but personally witnessing riggers working to load the fermenter was pretty damn cool. Check out the photos here.

Smell the dust... smell it!

Look! Photos of the space!

We'll be updating this page (or adding pages of photos) as we go so you may all share in the glory of construction and build-out.

One less vacant spot in Chicago

If you were to judge by our blog alone, it would seem that we've been lounging around, popping bon bons over the past weeks.

Probably the biggest accomplishment has been to secure our brewery's location. We looked at a lot of places. I'm guessing around 20-25. All in the city, and all with some promise. This was the first time we'd researched commercial space, so we found ourselves once again ferociously schooled in the Ways of the World. Any kind of manufacturing has physical logistics. When it comes to a brewery, most of those logistics have to do with the need to use gratuitous amounts of water. In the brew vessels, around the brew vessels, under the brew vessels. This requirement definitely narrowed our choices conveniently.

Anyway, if you want to know more about what finding a space for a brewery is like, buy us a beer sometime and we'll regale you with stories. For now, let it be known that the new home of Metropolitan Brewing is: 5121 N Ravenswood, Chicago. Folks, this was exactly the location we wanted! We lived in the Ravenswood neighborhood for 4 years. Had we not been booted by the condoization of our apartment building, we'd still be there.

Of course, we love you all dearly but don't come to visit just yet. The space was an auto-body shop for the last 15 years and the phrase "we need to clean this place up" has taken on a whole new scope. Sandblasters have stripped the rafters down to the wood and the walls down to the brick. In dramatic and ironic contrast, the floor is covered with 6 inches of oily, paint-soaked sand. Next, we patch and customize the cement floor. See again, there's the whole water aspect coming into play. The brewhouse needs to sit on a floor that slopes and drains to a trench. Personally, I'm hoping to get a chance to try using a jackhammer.

Now that we have our location, the floodgates have been rent asunder. Now we start dealing with our licensing, the TTB, build-out, etc. Our equipment broker told me that he's never delivered a brewhouse to a complete space, just sitting there ready for the equipment to be screwed down. I told him that we would be the first. I went further to predict that we'd be reclined in lawn chairs in the dock doorway sipping coffee on the morning of our delivery. I can already smell that plate of crow he'll be fixing for me.

What's old is new-old... again.

Pabst has decided to revive a more than 30-year old formula of Schlitz. The new-old product is packaged in bottles and promoted with a heavily nostalgic, "those were the good old days" message to Baby Boomers. (Yeah, we're going to be seeing a lot of this over the next 20 or so years, so get used to it.) Some of the adverts attempt to appeal to the Boomers at the expense of the Millennials, the electronic age, and contemporary urban life.

This is a little different then the revival of PBR. I'm not sure about the formula, but whatever version of Pabst is in those classic red/white/blue cans, tall boys, and bottles appeals nicely to the Millennials (chronologically we have: Baby Boomers, born approx 1946 to 1964 - Generation X, born approx 1964 to 1980 - Millennials, born approx 1980 to 2004). I freely admit that I drink PBR. I mean, not all the time, but I do like it when times are tight and the beer fund is running low.

Anyway, will this attempt at retro appeal work? I'm dubious of any marketing that is pointedly negative toward one demographic as a means of accessing a different one. The Millennials are the kids of the younger Boomers, after all. Scoffing at the fact that their kids instant message and know what "metrosexual" means may not motivate them to choose Schlitz. On the flip side, this could possibly be the reason PBR appeals to the 20-something set. It's the beer their mom and dad drank. Well, that and it's cheap.

We've been shopping for a 6er of the new-old Schlitz but have yet to come across any in Chicago. If and when we do, we'll do a taste test and report about it here.

Either way, Pabst should have gotten a Millennial to do the Schlitz website. The graphics don't work properly.

Honk if you're sad

Early warning rumblings gave way to the sad truth this week: Goose Island will be closing it's pub at North/Clybourn here in Chicago.

Click here to read the Chicago Trib article.

Now, I've always been bummed about the fact that the place closes down so early on Friday and Saturday nights. 11:oo pm hits and we always manage to find ourselves surrounded by chairs propped on top of the tables and mop-wielding staff who are clearly eager to split. But that isn't to say that GI-North/Clybourn isn't one of our favorite places to be.

The beer is excellent. Say whatever you want about the relationship with Widmer, the beer in the glass is what counts. We've been proud to hold countless business meetings at GI-North/Clybourn because the beer is so reliably tasty.

The Siebel Institute of Technology has called GI-North/Clybourn its classroom home since 2003. The Dugg earned his diploma in Brewing Technology at this pub. The Illinois Craft Brewers Guild has held meetings and festivals here. When I think about it, we've spent a lot of time at this place. No wonder I'm so thirsty right now.

Goose Island is one of the very few places in that shopping district that is truly Chicago. Depending on your direction, you walk past Best Buy; Bed, Bath & Beyond; Trader Joe's; Whole Foods; CVS; Crate & Barrel; The Gap; Circuit City; and Patagonia to get to the pub. If it weren't for Sam's Wines & Spirits, we would probably never step foot in that area again.

I will run in circles sobbing like a child if a Chili's moves in.

The Hops are in da Haus!

Starting a brewery during a hops crisis requires us to keep our proverbial ears to the ground (eyes to the interwebs) and pounce on opportunities like a cat on nip. So, when we heard about some available hops, the very hops The Dugg desires, we made one of our very first Huge Purchases. People paying attention know that we're still searching for Metro's home, so we had the hops shipped to our apartment. All 300 lbs of them.

We've never seen the UPS guy so pissed.

At our Top Secret Metro Hidden Headquarters, our bounty is safely stored. The protective measures taken are too numerous and Top Secret to list here.

Plenty of guile

Our friends at the Drinking and Writing Brewery took some time out to talk with us at this year's Rockfest, held at Rock Bottom - Chicago and hosted by head brewer Pete Crowley. Behold! Our very first official interview with the media. Well, very casual media. Guerrilla media. Media that drinks and swears.

Click here to hear the interview portion of the radio show. About 10 minutes long.

Click here to hear the entire radio show from April, 2008. Enjoy the frenetic, hilarious madness that Neofuturists channel with uncanny ease.

Drinking from the Firehose

Our "pre-production" phase officially began April 1st. This refers to the 6-month period during which we are allowed to spend our time pulling together all of the various aspects of starting a brewery, but aren't expected to actually sell any beer. We both officially work full-time for Metro now. Of course, I've been doing so since October 1st and Doug since March 21st. The difference is that now, we get paid for it.

I've never needed a nap so badly in my life.

MetroLocation
Every day begins early. We typically schedule appointments beginning at 8 or 9am with one of our six Realtors to drive all over Chicagotarnation looking at possible spaces. I'm not going to say that we've seen it all, because that would be exaggerating. But we have seen a space that was too lovely, oh so perfect and out of our budget; a warehouse space with "place rodent trap here" drawn in marker on the wall; a barn-like space that would have worked nicely but for the sagging and chipping roof; and a space that might work once the dollar-store merchandise has been liquidated. How do you put stuff that costs $1 on sale?

MetroBigGear
Last week, we took a field trip up to The Great Dane at Hilldale in Madison, WI. The brewhouse (the tanks in which you brew beer) at this location is the prototype of the system we intend to buy. The brewer was incredibly hospitable, allowing us to brew a batch of his Oktoberfest with him from start to finish. The entire 15 bbl system made us feel like really little kids in a normal-sized toy store. The hoses were big...
The mash rake in the mash tun was big...

And the amount of spent grain needing to be raked out of the mash tun was big...
And apparently, we need to brush up on our Cantonese in order to use the equipment.
Metroducation
We've been asked to give a talk at the Siebel Institute of Technology (this is the school where The Dugg earned his diploma in Brewing Technology) here in Chicago next week during a 3-day seminar named "Start Your Own Brewery Course." I guess we've actually gone through many of the paces necessary to open a brewery, and I suppose we do have some wisdom to pass along. But we don't feel like experts and we desperately hope that no one sitting in the course holds us to such standards. However, we are looking forward to sharing some of our experiences and even took some time to pull together a snazzy PowerPoint presentation in order to look more official-like. Our mantra: learn from your mistakes. Hell, learn from others' mistakes too, if you can help it.

Metrofficials
The past few weeks have also involved numerous meetings with our accountants, lawyer, insurance agent, and banker. Oh my! Now, each person involved is lovely and has helped us tremendously, but like the back of a thong on a 20-something, our inexperience is showing to the embarrassment of everyone involved. We were soundly scolded for mixing up our personal and business financials. A situation that is now remedied... but we do often "buy gifts" for Metro with our own money. Sorry, we love our kid and can't help but spoil it.

And we're waiting with bated breath for the appointment wherein a nurse (PortaMedic... hee!) comes to our home to take urine and blood samples. These, along with an interview that grills us for our health information will finally be distilled into a number for each of us. This number will be stamped on the life insurance policy - and our checkbook annually - required by our bank in order to obtain our bank loan.

A high point of our meetings with professionals involve our graphic designer. He is probably one of the strongest members of our team. He's a genius of graphic design, brewing, and marketing and we're relieved he saw fit to help us along our way. This week, he showed us a nearly-final version of our first beer label. Behold...

We're happy to be nursing our newborn through the first few months of life. But they say new parents are often surprised by the amount of work and attention their larvae-like offspring requires. We're no different in this respect. Fortunately, if we screw up too badly, no one dies.

And to think... we haven't even begun to apply for our licenses yet...

No! Wait!

Hands off the hops, Tom's. We need them in our beer, not our armpits.

Where are you, anyway?

It's not about being in the right place at the right time. We've learned that it's best to be everywhere, all the time.

Larry Bell, distribution, and the Chicagoland market

The Chicagoland craft beer community is buzzing... so to speak. We are once again able to purchase pints of Larry Bell's beer in several locations in the city and the 'burbs. To catch you up, Kalamazoo Brewing pulled out of our market due to a dispute with their IL distributor, National Wine and Spirits. Debate and rumors have been flying to and fro since.

Why do beer manufacturers need to use distributors?
This is due to the mandated three-tier system in IL. From Nicholas Day's article linked above, "The system, which stipulates that all alcohol has to pass through a middleman, was established to ensure that producers couldn’t run bars and limit consumer choice by exclusively serving their own drinks, a situation known as a “tied house.” Keep in mind that this is a good thing. This has kept us from being limited to haunting "Miller bars" and "Budweiser bars."

Why did Kalamazoo Brewing pull out of the IL market?
The problem Larry Bell ran into is described in Day's article: "... according to state law, NWS was entitled to sell Bell’s distribution rights to another wholesaler without his approval, and a few months ago it decided to do just that, in a deal with Chicago Beverage Systems— the Miller distributor in Chicago." It just so happens that CBS has been sited by folks in the local craft beer industry as a distributor that doesn't exactly have what it takes to sell craft beer. Larry Bell started his brewery with $200, boatloads of luck, and endless hours of hard work. For what? To be sold to a distributor without his input? What if he didn't want to work with CBS? Well, he had (as far as we know) 2 options: work with CBS or pull out of the market.

Okay, so screw CBS. Why didn't Larry Bell just make a deal with a different distributor?
Agreements between distributors and beer manufacturers are very difficult to terminate. This is due to franchise laws and the Beer Industry Fair Dealing Act, which was written to protect distributors from being financially ruined by large breweries. Say a distributor busts their hump to get beer out there and promote for a brewery; the brewery succeeds famously as a result; and then the brewery dumps the distributor for a different one. That type of protection seems logical enough, but the incident with Kalamazoo Brewing has highlighted a bias in the franchise laws: they apply to the relationships between small distributors and large breweries. Smaller craft breweries don't have the financial clout to bring down a distributor, but the laws apply to us anyway.

Distribution sucks... right?
No. Getting into the craft beer industry takes a lot of work and planning. Add to that the stresses of putting together and managing a fleet of trucks - tickets, towing, accidents, CDLs, maintenance, etc.?!? No thanks. We got into the industry to make beer. That's enough to think about. Even if we were in a state that didn't mandate the three-tier system (coughWisconsincough), we would still make deals with distributors based on our business model. That, or we'd get a friend to start a distribution company. Anyone interested?

Larry Bell was quoted in the articles above: "Normally when you go see a distributor, they say, ‘We’ve gone out and tried the beers and we’re very excited about selling Oberon.’ Unfortunately, I got into a relationship with a wholesaler that didn't have our best interest at heart." And that's the key, folks. Distribution agreements can be profitable for everyone involved, provided the deal you make is fair. The best bet is to get into agreements with distributors who know how to handle craft beer and who are willing to work collaboratively with manufacturers.

Okay, blah blah. Distribution agreements are complicated. The most important thing is that we can now enjoy Larry Bell's beer at some locations in Chicagoland again. How?
A new company exists: Bells Brewery Incorporated. This company is entering the market with a new brand called Kalamazoo. The first beer available from this company is Royal Amber Ale. We haven't tried it yet, but some well-beerducated folks we know went out this week to taste it. Apparently, they loved the beer so much that they had to skip their reasonable dinner plans for late-night burritos. This, as you know, is a very good sign.

We at Metro Brewing are thrilled to have Larry Bell back in our market. No, really. We mean this. The more craft beer available, the more people are going to drink it. Craft beer drinkers like choice and variety, so why not have lots of both available to us? Sure, we might have to fight for taps that Kalamazoo Royal Amber Ale now occupies, but you know, that fight would exist either way. And really, we love Larry Bell's beer. Having a few local taps will save us lots of gas money and time since we won't have to make as many border beer-runs. Now, if we could just get New Glarus down here again...

Writing a Business Plan - Torture and Triumph

Business plan. It’s self-descriptive. If you want to open a business, drawing up a road-map to your pending success is a good idea.

Specifically, a business plan is a document explaining what you want to sell and how you’re going to sell it. The two most important sections every business plan has are a financial plan and a marketing plan. Initially, you use this document to round up funding from banks as well as individual investors. Anyone who invests money into your business wants to have some inkling that you know what you’re doing. Yeah, some folks invest simply because they like you, or because they like what you’re doing, but it helps to show even these generous souls that you have concrete plans as to what you’re going to do with their money and more importantly, how you intend to make them more money.

Now, various friends and family members have been in business for decades and I’d be willing to bet that most of them haven’t sweated over cash flow statements or marketing strategies. In fact, they’ve told me as much. And here’s where you might expect me to launch into how successful they’d be if only they’d written a business plan, but I won’t, because I can’t. Many of them have and still run profitable businesses.

But the fact is we can’t run Metropolitan Brewing without a business plan. The Chicago craft beer market is full of savvy, smart drinkers. These people want and deserve fresh, tasty beers (done), that are distributed to places they like to drink and shop (done; with the right distributors), and marketed and sold to them in an appealing manner (um... what?). Breweries on both coasts and everywhere in between long to sell their beers here in this huge, thirsty market and they do so with gusto. See: New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, CO. I’ve never, ever seen a shipping palette at the front entrance of my Jewel loaded with craft beer before. My jaw hit the tiled floor and for too short a moment, the muzak ala Phil Collins faded into the shock hissing through my brain. We knew needed to start strong, hit the ground running, and all those other clichés that illustrate the notion of doing business with purpose and precision.

And so, we set about learning how to write a business plan. At first, Doug did all the work. He researched and he read and he wrote. We bought books that he read. We passed links to each other with yet more information to read and assimilate. He read other business plans. Not wishing to hog all the fun to himself, Doug eventually recruited me to lend a hand. We met with experts who helped us for free, and some who helped us for payment. We even went to a workshop or two. And so, we learned lesson #1: while a business plan has some key features, no one agrees on exactly how it should look. It was at this point that we realized that nobody was going to hand us an outline and tell us to insert the word “beer” anywhere the product was mentioned.

With four diplomas between the two of us, we were quite comfortable in a classroom environment, being guided gently through the learning process. But learning how to write this business plan was an agonizing process of self-motivated reading, researching, sifting, guessing, doubting, crying (well, that was mainly me), arguing, and endless hours of typing. Each new section was loaded with new information to learn and new questions to ask. We learned. We asked. And, as each section was finished, we realized that we’d gained more confidence about our brewery and how we planned to run it. I’ll be damned if we weren’t actually gaining confidence in ourselves, too.

Confidence points to the real reason for writing a business plan. Even though this type of writing calls to mind nightmarish all-nighters pounding out term papers in college, it does serve a real-life function. You’re forced to test the viability of your idea. Analyzing each aspect of your particular widget from concept to production to sales shapes the entire process in your mind. Systematically testing each of your assumptions leads to the ability to defend the defensible and dump the bullshit. In the end, you have in your hands this document that is your playbook; your strategy to succeed as a business owner.

And, a final point about your business plan: it lives and breathes with you and your business. All that work you did to plan out the next 10 years of doing business? Well, the reality is that everything can and does change. Stick to your core ideas and philosophy, keep an eye on your accomplishments and projections, but remain flexible. In a free market, the market will let you know what it thinks of your product. It would be wise to keep a proverbial ear to the ground and listen for any movements. You’ll never completely trash your business plan, but you will definitely revise and update it. The upshot is that you can change it as you see fit; as you accomplish what we see as the real American dream: getting paid to do what you love.