Where to begin? Guess I’ll address some of the loose ends from the last time I blogged. We got everything pushed through with the TTB with our address and name change. That means we get to enter the GABF as Morgan Territory Brewing. That is great news. All that remains with the TTB is to create an amendment to our application that changes our operational status from brewpub to tax determined tasting room.
We actually started our move today. Craig and I spent the last week preparing for today. We started out by kegging up what was left of our beer. Wow what a lot of work! All in all it was about 30 barrels of inventory. In the future this task should be a lot easier with our new toys (forklifts and pallet jacks baby!) and much more space to maneuver.
About half of the kegs are going to Delta Pacific Distributors. It was our first sale with a distributor. They are going to sell the beer under the Schooner’s name and prep their accounts about what is coming in the future with Morgan Territory while we get our new labels and keg collars approved by the TTB. They picked up the beer this afternoon. The remaining beer will be put into cold storage until we have our cold room set up.
Getting the brewery prepped for moving was a major undertaking. We had to disassemble all the fermentors, bright tanks, and brew house. It was not particularly difficult to disassemble everything and for the most part went smoothly (other than a few minor scratches and bruises), it just took a lot of time. Hopefully reassembling everything goes just as smoothly. Should be interesting.
Today we just moved the “clutter”. It’s all the smaller stuff that we will need at the brewery, but is just cluttering our current space, and makes moving more difficult. We hope to have everything out of Antioch by the end of the week.
On a personal level I moved to Tracy on Saturday. I drove down to find out my apartment wasn’t available yet so I had to drive around and kill some time. Turns out my apartment wasn’t available until 11pm at night! That and it took me about a half hour to figure out how to open my door. I had to angle the key at just the right angle and jiggle it just right to get the door to open. I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t call the cops on me because it had to look like I was breaking in. They must have been used to it though from the last tenant. No shower curtain either. Needless to say I wasn’t happy that first night and the next morning.
Its pretty stressful moving your person and your business at the same time. I don’t have internet yet at my apartment and am having a hard time keeping up with emails (yeah I can use my phone, but I need to reference a bunch of older emails and it is less than ideal). There is so much going on with the move that I’m having a hard time making the phone calls that I need to makeas well. This move is very labor intensive and time consuming. Things aren’t getting done that need to get done. Hopefully things will settle down next week and I can catch up.
On the bright side I live close enough to work to ride my bike which I definitely plan on doing (I hate driving). Prior to my moving to the bay area I lived in San Diego for ten years and had the luxury of walking and biking to work. I have missed that a great deal since moving up North and am looking forward to doing it once again.
I feel more comfortable living as close as I do to the brewery. I lived about forty minutes away from Antioch. I always had a deep fear that in the event of a disaster things would escalate from bad to worse in the time it took me to get there. That is definitely not the case any longer.