Its been a great two months!

It’s hard to believe we’ve been open for two months now! Ray and I are grateful for the support of everyone who has come out to visit our brewery. We had a great and very busy opening weekend and have continued to remain busy ever since. In fact, we are too busy for our own good. We have been struggling to keep up with the production of our beers-particularly our Butterfield Blonde.  We are now doing double batches of the blonde which should help a great deal but it appears that we will have to upgrade to a larger brewhouse much sooner than we had anticipated. We hope to have a system that will double the capacity of our current one in the next 60 days.

We have requests for growlers every weekend and I am happy to announce that growlers have been ordered. Ray ordered one liter growlers about two weeks ago. They are called Vita growlers and are a new, cool looking style. But there was one problem. Ray called to confirm the delivery date, which should have only been two weeks from order date and was told that it would take 4-6 weeks! It seems the growlers are made in Italy and would take 3-4 weeks to get to our supplier then another 1-2 weeks to get to the brewery. So with that order still to come, Ray then ordered 2 liter growlers that we could have delivered within 10 days. So we should have the 2 liter growlers by next week and 1 liter growlers in about 3 weeks.

If you have been to the brewery a few times you know that we had food trucks coming a few weeks in a row and then they stopped. We had some issues to work out with the building management regarding having the trucks on the property. Things didn’t go too well dealing with them so Ray contacted the landlord directly. The landlord was easy to deal with and the short of it is that we should have food trucks returning next week.

Lastly, we are now going to be open for business on Thursdays beginning today . The taproom will be open at 4:30 and we will close at 9:00pm.

Again, thanks to everybody who has supported us.

Cheers!

We are opening!!!

We passed our final inspection last Friday after many months of work. We will open on Friday, July 27th! On Friday we will be open 4:30-9:00pm and Saturday 1:00-9:00pm. Our website will be updated later today. We plan adding another day of operation very soon.

Ray speaks to the inspector during our final inspection.
We passed! Woo hoo!!

We passed our ABC premises inspection!

We are not quite ready to open to public with last minute minor construction going on but we have just passed our ABC premises inspection! We are now taking groups 5 or more in our tasting room by appointment. Call us or email and we will accomodate your group. We are not set up for cash transactions yet but we will take credit cards. We have 5 beers on tap which we sell by the taster and the pint. We hope to be meeting other beer lovers soon! You can contact us at Ray@chinovalleybrewery.com or Matt@chinovalleybrewery.com
You can also call me on our business line at 951-291-7117 and leave me a message and I will get back with you as soon as I can. We are very excited to be meeting craft beer lovers in the area!

Well, a lot has happened since our last post. We have had a lot of contact with the city building department and have had to make a lot of changes in the brewery the last few months. I don't want to go into detail because we are still actively working with the building department but I would say that if I had to start again I would probably have started in another city-'nuff said.

Floor drain and floor sink trench

We had our first building inspection a few days ago which was very brief and didn't go as well as we had hoped. Our bathroom size is ADA compliant however the sink and toilet are too close together so we have to repostion them before the building department will come back out. This means we will have to bring out one wall a few inches. We also have to submit plan revisions to include the new work.



Cement filled back in

The inspector did give our floor sink and floor drain the OK so we were able to finish the cement work behind the tasting counter. We are still holding out hope that we can open at the end of this month but it is really a matter of the city approving our plan revision. The work itself to fix our bathroom will only take a few days.

Taps are ready to go!

We will be sure to post an update as soon as we get another inspection!



TTB approved!

We received our TTB approval on March 21st! The process was actually pretty smooth and not as long as we thought it was going to be. We applied for our brewers permit through the TTB's new Online Permit website. So every single document was uploaded to them over the internet. It was a ton of paperwork! But the process was expedient, so it was worth it. We only had one interview and a few weeks later we were approved.

So, where are we now? We are now completely licensed by state and feds. However, we are still dealing with the city of Ontario building department. It's been very frustrating for us but things are moving forward. We were told we now need to add a cleanup drain in between our tasting counter and sink-this is something that is in addition to the floor sink. We also have to add a kithchen hood with ventilation out and air return back in for our brew system. It seems like overkill to me but who am I to argue with the building codes?

Our first batches are going to be brewing soon with the hopes we will open in May.

Next update coming soon

We are also on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chino-Valley-Brewery/#!/pages/Chino-Valley-Brewery/197318420317519

We have our ABC License

First, let me say I’m sorry for such a long gap between updates. My partner and I both have regular jobs and have been busy; and don’t get me started on the bureaucratic paperwork that has really taken much longer than I anticipated.

A lot has transpired since October. We finally had our Conditional Use Permit (CUP) hearing and were approved! I can tell you I was a little nerve wracked when I got to Ontario city hall for the hearing. The hearing room seemed so big to me! I was prepared for all kinds of questions from our hours of operation to the methods of tracking our cleaning chemical waste. The hearing went so smoothly I was surprised as to how quick it went. We were the only business on the agenda for the day and most of the questioning was between the Zoning Administrator and the Planning Department rep that put our case file together. Our local ABC officer was also there to answer questions from the administrator. I was finally asked to stand up at the podium and speak at the end. The Zoning Administrator basically asked me when we would be open because he was eager to try our beer. Oh yea, he also suggested putting Ontario into our company name. A few days later we had our CUP in the mail.

The hearing room at city hall. It seemed ginormous!

ABC Notice on our door

We have also received our state ABC, Small Beer Manufacturer license. That process was paper work intensive but moved forward rather quickly. We currently are still waiting on our federal permit from the TTB. The TTB has a new permit application process that is done completely online for those who are computer literate. I submitted a TON of paperwork to the TTB all online. Most of the paperwork was supporting documentation that Ray and I had to provide regarding our finances. Lots of bank statements! We had our first interview with them 2 days ago. The interview went well and the TTB specialist was very helpful. According to the specialist, she was approving our application and sending it to her supervisor for final approval. We should be having another interview with her supervisor soon and she said we will probably have our federal license in about a month or so.

Our brewers license

And our main stumbling block at this point is the City of Ontario Building Department. After we received our CUP we had to submit more plans to the Building Dept. They had a 5 week turnaround for “first” comments. We just received the plans back today. I almost had a heart attack when I saw all the red marks on all 5 pages of our plans! I had to stop and have a beer with Ray while went over the comments to lower my blood pressure. There were some comments that I didn’t quite agree with, such as the handicap parking spots not having the blue unloading zone painted hash marks on the correct side of the car even though those parking spaces have been fine the way they are for years before we moved in. And there were a lot of little changes that have to be made to the plans themselves to show more detail such as exactly where on the top of our walk in cooler the compressor units are located ( I can deal with that). BUT what really exasperated me is all of the comments regarding plumbing, sinks, electrical, flooring and ceiling issues that are clearly for restaurant and food establishments. And on the first page in big red letters were the words “where is health department approval?” It looks like we are going to have to install at least one floor sink no matter what because of a plumbing code that is not related to health codes. I already had to go over why breweries are not food facilities during the CUP process and it looks like I’m going to have to try to explain it again during this process too.

Our "authentic" Bavarian highwy sign

Today, I called and spoke to the building inspector handling our file and made an appointment to meet him tomorrow to review his comments and explain how we are exempt from the health code regulations for food facilities. I briefly described our exemption to him over the phone and he seemed very surprised to hear about our exemption but he also seemed like he had an open mind. So hopefully our meeting with him will go well.

Our grain mill

On another note, I would like to say how good it is to be in a close knit, supportive community like that of the craft beer industry. I had the pleasure of being at the opening weekend of I&I brewery in Chino. The beer there is great and I have been back a few times since to talk business and to share some good beer with Chuck and Eric. I would recommend that you head over to Chino and look them up. Here is a link to their site http://www.iandibrewing.com/

New update coming soon!

Well, we've done a lot in the last month yet it seems like we have done hardly anything! We have been so busy with our regular jobs that we have not made as much progress as we would've liked with the brewery. However we are making a concerted effort to get the brewery to the point where we can start brewing our first batches in the next 30 days.

The brewery currently is a construction site in the works. We have working refrigeration units on our walk in cooler now! As of today, we had some 220 outlets installed so we can run the larger of our two cooling rooms.



Electricians installing 220 volt electricity



Under construction

We installed most of the plumbing, including installing a hot water heater and plumbing our 3 compartment sink. We had a few quotes from plumbers but we just decided to do it oursleves and save the money for other things (including the copper piping, which was not cheap).

We finally finished building our tasting room bar. We initially planned on putting a concrete counter top on it but in the end we decided to just keep it all wood (we had more than enough lumber laying around).

The making of a bar

Further along

almost there

Finally done!

One of my favorite moments of the last 30 days was picking up our kegs! We decided to get our kegs at Plastic Kegs America. Luckily, they're in the LA area so we didnt have to pay for freight delivery and just picked them up will call at the factory. There's nothing like seeing your brewery's name on a keg for the first time-so cool!

We are concentrating on paperwork right now and are waiting on our public hearing for our CUP. Hopefully we will make more progress in the coming month!