Weird Beard Update

It has been a long time since I last blogged. This has been for a number of reasons but mainly due to the day job getting busy, as it always does in July, and pure frustration at the the delays that were besetting us.

Still there has been a load of progress so here is a brief update as to what is going on.

Back in April we had some awesome meet the "not quite yet" brewer sessions at the Strongroom Bar, Egham United Services Club and most chuffingly for us the Rake Bar in their London beer week. All the beers went down well and we got some good publicity and some prominent bloggers said some nice things about us Here, Here and Here. Oh and we got to sign the wall at the Rake, a small rite of passage on the way to the ranks of the professional brewers. We also were invited to Ealing Beer Festival in July where a new prototype Black Perle was unleashed on the public to some excellent feedback even if there was a typo on the label.

We have started revamping our website with our friends at Fuzzy Memes. So look out for a new and improved website launch in the next month or so.

We have also been talking to some cool label designers and illustrators who are working on some new labels for us.

We think they look awesome and you can find out more about Josh and Chris at their blog.

You may notice that our skull motif has developed a personality, He has also earned himself a name. Lup'in (short for Lupulin not after the werewolf teacher at Hogwarts.) Look out for further incarnations of  Lup'in in the near future.

The frustration has mainly come from our inability to find a home. The last place I blogged about here was perfect except for a number of leaks in the roof, about 40 of them to be exact. This coupled with a backing up drain made for quite a wet unit. In fact we have as yet to come across a unit that does not leak in a few places. We gave the landlord a few months to get it fixed but nothing quite worked so we have ended up in a 3rd unit. This third (and hopefully final) unit is also located in Hanwell and There are some photos of it at the end of the blog. We are in the final stages of lease negotiation and hopefully we will be in sometime in September.

We have been assessing equipment options and an order should be placed next week for the first parts. Looks like, after a brief flirtation with tiles, that we will be opting for a heavy duty polyurethane resin floor. So with a fair wind we hope to still be on track to be brewing by the end of the year.

Anyway that is you pretty much up to date now. I will leave you with some photos of the new unit taken by Mike Ellenberg our co-brewery.

 Miserable wet day.

 But of course I'm still in shorts

 Idiot previous tenant could not drive forklift (holes in wall at top of picture)

 Has decent height again.

 Mezzanine already in place and they even cut a hole in the wall for us.

And left us a bike in the back.