Written by: Alex

Created: 20 September 2023

Hits: 0

I've spent the early autumn period of 2023 preparing the brewery for electrical rewiring. This mainly involves working out where everything should go and ensuring there is a sensible path for the wires to be routed to the various appliances. The walls in the brewery are very thick and time consuming to burrow through and some work was done by the previous owners of the building (Ceredigion Council) over the years to handle the electrical requirements. Surprisingly there really wasn't much in the way of electrics in the building, just a couple of socket circuits, a large lighting circuit for the dangling light battens and a immersion heater for hot water. The majority of the electrical wiring is routed up into the loft and then down through holes in the ceiling to supply the required items. I don't really want to go this route as the loft hatch requires a 6m ladder and performing maintenance requires crawling through a space barely big enough to crouch in at the tallest space. I'm not keen on halting all work just to erect scaffolding to fix some issue in the loft, I therefore want my electrical wiring to be high up on the walls but still accessible for easy access and periodic changes. One of the main issues with the building is that currently the consumer unit is on the other side of a rather thick wall to the main room and may need moving. There is a small plastic sleeve big enough for a single cable but not enough for the volume of cables required to handle all the capacity I want in the brewery.

I asked a local electrician to take a look and give me a quote and not surprisingly he added a hefty fee to widen the hole through the wall in order to add extra capacity for cables. There were a number of the other small changes that needed to be made so I decided to tackle these myself. I decided to hire a core drill to help me bore a hole through the 750mm of stone that made up the wall. This type of drill has an automatic clutch that will engage if the drill jams and prevents things like broken wrists and other accidents. It took two and a half days of steady drilling to bore a 52mm hole through the wall. I had some assistance from my father who helped me hold the drill above my head whilst standing on a ladder. We decided that perhaps it might be more sensible to move the consumer unit to the other side of the wall, routing the mains cables through the new hole we'd made rather than try and route all the cables from the brewery through a wall. This is something I will raise with the electrician agrees to undertake the work. Once I'd got the new bigger sleeve in place I re-mortared the hole and redid the plaster.

 

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Written by: Alex

Created: 30 August 2023

Hits: 0

Changes made by the government in the recent budget have altered the way that Beer Duty is calculated. Previously there was no distinction between beer that is manufactured to be sold in bottles and that which is to be dispensed from a hand-pull as draught beer. The new rules state that these two types of beers will now be charged different rates of beer duty, and that software that calculates duty contributions must be updated accordingly. I've wirtten my own brewery management software that will help me to track every stage of the brewing process. The duty system that I've written needed a few more changes as it was hard coded to accept only updates at the start of the financial year in April. This emergency budget on the 1st August didn't fall into this category and things needed to be rewritten.

To be honest I am feeling a little bit burned out from the physical jobs I'm doing in the brewery and these software updates have been a welcome change to drilling holes and smearing gunge on walls. I therefore decided to tackle some other software tasks that I'd been putting off. These all revolved around my point-of-sale system that I'll be using for my till software in the brewery shop. The first was to implement cash register opening via software. Cash registers use a RJ45 telephone cable to trigger the cash drawer to open and a computer can interface with this via a special USB dongle that convert the signal. This was a pretty trivial job. Next I focussed on receipt printing using a recently purchased thermal printer. It took a little bit of time to get this working and I also implemented printed daily and monthly reports for the accountant. I've also now got a system in which baskets can be archived and barcode scanner, cash drawer and printer hardware can be set in the settings panel. The last system I implemented was a rollback procedure for partial failed payments using multiple payment methods. Customers who wish to pay with multiple credit cards or cash/card combinations who have one of their payment methods refused can have the whole purchase rolled back on all payment types. This is now properly recorded in the till.

 

Written by: Alex

Created: 12 June 2023

Hits: 0

Now that I have a much more shiny sink ready to be plumbed into the premises water supply I need a method of supplying hot water. This will be necessary for washing hands, cleaning dirty pots and scrubbing the floor. The School building previously had an immersion heater and an old copper tank that they used for this purpose, but that has long gone. For general safety and ease of use I am looking at one of the electrical on-demand units that you see in kitchens everywhere nowadays. There seem to be two types, those that heat the water on demand like a shower and the other type that heats a small tank of water slowly so that it can be available whenever you need it. I debated the various merits of each type but it eventually came down to the amount of space I had available. There simply wasn't enough space under the sink for anything that would be suitable for my needs, and if the area under the sink is free of pipes and electrical items it also makes everything easier to keep clean. I settled on an "over the sink" unit and found a good price online. 

Today I mounted and plumbed in the on-demand hot water heater for the sink. I think it looks pretty nice! I was actually surprised how few companies manufacture this type of unit in the UK. Everything now is ready for the Electrician to hook it up when he does the rest of the building. I had to wait 4 days for this to be delivered, DHL are pretty rubbish in this area. The drama and constant failures to deliver parcels make them a courier company to avoid in my experience.

 

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Written by: Alex

Created: 06 June 2023

Hits: 401

Now that all of the big messy tasks in the brewery are finally finished I'm left with hundreds of little things to do. These include such things as putting up Fire exit signs, adding architrave and silicone around problematic gaps and buying a chest freezer in which to store my hops. I'm going to try and post smaller updates more frequently with some of these tasks as we move closer to finally being open. Today I'm going to talk about getting the sink installed.

When we bought the Old School from the local council they left behind a lot of stuff. This included School chairs and desks, a three phase stainless steel dish washer and a deep stainless steel sink. I was considering using this as a secondary hand washing station in the brewery but I've changed my mind after shopping around on the Internet. I'm sure that the recent Cost of Living crisis and Covid have changed a lot of things recently but I was shocked as to the price of what I would consider a proper food grade 304 Stainless steel sink. Around six years ago they were reasonably expensive but affordable, but the smallest 304 commercial sink with legs and a draining rack is around £450-550. Many sellers don't even tell you the grade of stainless steel that you are buying and in reality you are actually getting 430 grade or even 201 grade. The same thing applies to tables and some of the legs aren't even stainless steel but galvanized steel which will eventually rust. These lower grades of stainless steel are less resistant to acids and corrosion and this is something that is very important in a brewery where the beer and cleaning chemicals may cause a problem.

I have designed the entire room to essentially be a sink and it's possible to do my cleaning on the brewery floor and tip the waste down the trench drain, so I'm come the conclusion that a large sink may not be as important as I thought. I've therefore decided to use the sink left behind - clean it up, replace the waste and trap and plumb this in. This also saves me at least £350 if I were to buy a similar sized brand new sink. Removing the waste and plug unit has proved to be incredibly difficult. I've tried WD40 on the threads, oil, vinegar, plenty of heat via a blowtorch - but it won't shift. In the end I had to cut the locknut off with an angle grinder. The sink itself is pretty filthy and I've had to take a sander with scouring pad to it in order to clean the gunk off the outside. Six hours later and it has now come up nicely. It should be easy to keep clean from now on. The next job is to run the water pipe to the vicinity of the sink ready to connect a tap. I've decided to buy a small stainless steel serving trolley to act as a draining rack and storage shelves. This was only £85 and is probably made of 430 stainless, although it will mostly be dealing with soapy suds and water.#

 

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