Wow, I can’t believe that I haven’t updated this blog in over a month!  I have, of course, updated Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram fairly frequently, but I use those for more “updates” and this blog for “big events.”   And we really haven’t had any big events lately.  Yeah, our manufacturer’s rep came out to set up all of the equipment, and we got the glycol system in place, and the boiler in place, and everything tested, and just about everything finished as far as construction goes, but to me all of those were smaller milestones.  There are three big ones:

1. Get our Brewers Notice from the TTB
2. Get our Certificate of Occupancy from the City
3. Grand Opening

Why are those so important?  Without the first, we can’t make beer.  Without the second, we don’t have a place.  And without the third, we don’t have you, which makes everything else irrelevant.

But back to today…I’ve actually been on the phone at least twice a day with the TTB for the past week, trying to iron out final issues and changes.  We’d already been moved to final status once and returned to the specialist.  I thought we’d finally gotten the last hurdle cleared, and I’d been checking my phone every 10 minutes to see if we had received the email telling us that we’ve been accepted.  Finally 3pm rolled around (5pm in Cincinatti, where the TTB offices are) and so I resigned myself to yet another weekend with no good news to share.  Hoping for a little good news, though, I logged onto the TTB website to see if there were any updates, and there it was:

Instead of “Review in Process”…it said “Approved”

I did a double-take.  Does that really mean what it says?  What happened to the email that was supposed to be generated when we got accepted?

Who cares!?  Finally, after 194 days of waiting, stressing, revising, complaining and following up we finally have our golden ticket!

So now we have to finish up the space, get it cleaned up, get some beer made, and get some folks hired so that we can have our Grand Opening.  We’ll have more details next week with our plans, but we’re looking at the end of February to finally get to share a beer with all of you!