Got the keys on Thursday, and took the essentials along - kettle, teabags, soap, towel, loo paper....you can see from this picture that the building has a lot of potential:
"Potential" is of course agent-speak for "a dusty hole", but we were carefully balancing location and rent when we selected this place. I wanted to be able to cycle to my new brewery, in less than an hour from home, and one of my co-conspirators wanted it to be reachable from Clapham Junction, to make his journey easier.
Yesterday we spent most of the day there. We've made some of the water system work, so there's a flow of cold water from the taps which barely dribbled before. We'll have to wait for an electrician before we can have hot water as well. Some of the water pipes have been installed with more enthusiasm than sense, but I've known for a long time that a plumber will often put a pipe where it's convenient to install instead of where it might be unobtrusive. The co-conspirators have taken down the unfinished office stud partitions on the mezzanine, and on Monday we'll be meeting the man from Building Control at the council about that mezzanine wall with the forklift holes in it. We want to take it all out and just have a safety rail across, like a balcony, with a gate for putting pallets of malt up there with a forklift truck.
Imagine that far corner boxed-off as the cold store, for maturing bottle-conditioned beers and casks, and the space through the archway lined with tall shiny fermenters. Some of the middle of the picture will be taken-up with the mash tun, its water heater, the boiler, the control panels....and the floor will be covered in a hygienic screed, perhaps in a tasteful blue.
There may be a bit of a race between getting the floor laid, and having time for it to cure; and the major brewery vessels turning up on a lorry. I'm not going to worry about that right now - there are plenty of things on my panic list before then.
