Some Assembly Required
Building a brewery is somewhere between assembling all of your kids gifts the night before Santa comes and putting together every piece of Ikea furniture in their catalog. Not that we went into this without the knowledge that this is just how things are within the realm of brewery building, however, when reality hits, you have to take a step back and stand in awe at what a monumental task it truly is. I recently finished the book, “A Walk in the Woods” by one of my favorite writers, Bill Bryson, which was made into a film with Robert Redford & Nick Nolte. Within the first chapter, Bryson goes on a long & comical description of his shopping experience when preparing to tackle the Appalachian Trail. He gets to a point in his overwhelming description of the gear he is purchasing, in which he has selected his pack to hold all of his equipment, and the sales guy comes back out with a rain cover and tells him that he will need to purchase this as well. Rightfully Bryson, deadpan, says, “you mean it's not waterproof”. Bryson’s experience of getting prepared to traverse the AT reminded me of our experience with the brewery, as in, “oh we need that too”. As we close out the heck of year 2020 has been, I wanted to write our final blog for the year to bring you all an update on where we are as far as getting the brewery built is concerned.
Town Approvals:
After two years of getting through the hurdles of getting the spot we will very soon call our home, we are pleased to let you know that all of the requisite approvals needed from the Town of Windermere have been completed. We will be able to operate as a production micro brewery & taproom in downtown Windermere. If you don’t know already, we will be located at 111 W. 5th Ave, between Dixie Cream Café & the Town parking lot.
Demolition & Construction:
Let us first say, we couldn’t be happier with the relationship we have formed with our Landlord, who has given us every possible opportunity to be involved in the external building shell plans & ensure we are setting our build out team up for success when we get handed the building. As you may know, the current structure on the site is an old residential house that will soon be demolished to make way for our brand new facility. Currently, we are in the final sign offs on permits for the building shell construction and will be pulling the demo permit fairly soon.
Buildout & Equipment:
We are lucky to have been able to form a rock star buildout team whose attention to detail has been both stellar & daunting all in one package. We are thankful that they have pointed out areas where we need to rethink our plans to ensure we start from day one with a facility fine tuned for production and more importantly, serving our customers. Between our architects, construction team, & brewery advisors & engineers, we could not be happier with the work we have seen thus far and are excited to be able to give everyone a very enjoyable & laid back space for you to enjoy your time at Windermere Brewing Company.
Timeline:
Ah, the question that no brewery in planning ever really wants (or can) answer. We are very cautious in giving out specific dates as we were hopeful that late summer 2021 may be a good window, however, we are now more conservatively looking at fall 2021 as long as we don’t get any other crazy spanners in the works (which of course may happen), alas, all good things must wait.
We hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, and in addition to building our brewery, we will be launching a new and fresh website in January that will keep you updated on our progress, start listing our flagship beers we will be producing from the start, & give you a better online shopping experience for our merch that thanks to many of you, has been very popular as we have been in this long journey to bringing Windermere a locally owned hometown brewery. We can never thank every single one of you enough for the support you have given us, you are the reason we keep chugging along, and we can't wait to share a pint or two with you! Cheers to 2021, let's hope it's a much better year than the last.