February Construction

No construction news for almost a month?!? I had an extra day in February and I still couldn't get an update out on time. Work in February was mostly concerned with concrete and plumbing and work on re-pouring the floor starts today. There is also even MORE structural reinforcement going on, though we've hopefully dealt with most of it by now.


Part I

The last construction news showed the concrete crew tearing out the brewery floor. Once that was complete, we laid out the plumbing trenches in the back of the building and then cut and excavated everything.

And, of course, cutting up the floor revealed even more quirks about this building. In contrast to the two inches of concrete up front, the back half of the building had two layers totaling almost sixteen inches of concrete. We also discovered a void with multiple pipes, perhaps part of an old furnace, which will end up filled with gravel and covered back up.

The good news in all of this is that I have no concerns about the floor cracking when hot and cold liquor tanks are placed on that rear slab. For Fat Bottom, that is a total of about 1,900 gallons, weighing more than 15,000 pounds...that's quite a load.

Sidebar for non-beer geeks: Hot and cold liquor tanks are for storage of hot and cold water. Quite a bit of energy goes into brewing, and we recover and store a lot of that as heat. Tap water is filtered and stored cold in one tank.  At the end of the brewing cycle, it is run though a heat exchanger to cool boiling wort down very quickly. That water is now hot is stored for use in the next batch of beer.

Part II
Once the trenches were cut, we forged ahead with laying out the in-slab plumbing. Trench drains in the brewery were installed, grease trap for the tap room, bathrooms, etc. Except for the drains, that wasn't too exciting, but obviously it is important to get everything right before we seal it in concrete. You can see all the pictures from the month on Facebook.

The other major work going on was opening up walls. There is an interior wall that had to be cut away, just so we could get the tanks into the brewery itself.

For excavation, back fill and pouring the floor, a archway into the brewery was also opened up. This is an architectural detail in the original building that was just bricked up at some point in the past. Since we don't need this to be a doorway in the finished building, I'm not sure yet exactly what we are going to do with it. Ideally it will be a large picture window looking into the brewery, but we have to figure out the cost of doing that vs. some other options.

Lesson for the month: If you're building a brewery, don't make any assumptions about site conditions. I can now guarantee you'll be wrong about most of it.