Faces of Monday Night: Scott “Social Butterfly” Williams

We’re going to attempt to start a new feature in which we briefly document some of the Monday Night die-hards. How often can you expect a new “Face of Monday Night”? Approximately whenever nothing else is going on. So let’s get to it.

Scott “Social Butterfly” Williams

Scott is what we call a workhorse. He’s not the best workhorse, however, because he’s really social. Sometimes we have to throw hop pellets at him to get him to focus on cleaning fermenters instead of talking to people. He is best known for carrying our wrenches around in his back pocket while walking around because he think it makes him look like a badasss (it doesn’t).

When he isn’t stealing wrenches, Scott works in commercial real estate. But don’t ask him about it, because if he had a bad day there’s a good chance he will take a swing at you with a Monday Night wrench. We don’t care about your safety, but we could be liable.

In summary, Scott “Social Butterfly” Williams is definitely a feather in our cap. Always willing to help out (as long as he has a Monday Night in his hand), he’s THE go-to guy when we’re looking for someone to “disappear” our wrenches.

The definition of grassroots marketing

My brother posted this picture to Flickr this morning. Never mind the fact that our Drafty Kilt is a “Scotch Ale,” not a “Scotish Ale.” Bringing craft beer to the Nashville masses in sketchy, unlabeled bottles. Grassroots marketing at its finest. I think the Twitter handle is a nice touch.

July 4 rough on the beer industry

Independence Day (possibly the greatest day in the world, for our friends across the pond) is usually one of the highest grossing times for beer brewers. This year, in the middle of a recession, was a little different according to this Advertising Age article.

Sales for Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light and Budweiser plunged 7% and 14%, respectively, in grocery, convenience and drug stores during the two-week period ending July 5, according to scanner data from Information Resources Inc. Miller Lite suffered a 9% drop. The big importers were hurt badly too: Corona marketer Crown Imports watched sales decline 6% to 8%, while Heineken and Diageo each saw double-digit drops.

Ouch. So what happened? In part, people were buying less expensive beer. Busch, Natural Light and Keystone all posted gains. Cannibalization is also playing a role, as Bud Light Lime posted a 9% gain. Still, overall A-B sales were down 5.5%, and MillerCoors sales were down 3.3%. Which leads me to this.

I’d love to see some craft beer stats for the July 4 holiday 2009 if anyone comes across any. Overall this is disappointing but not unexpected news. Sure glad we’re not trying to launch a brewery in a tough economic environment.

Creative Loafing gets their act together

Yesterday we were featured on Creative Loafing’s website in an excellent article written by Jeff Holland, with special photographic guest, Matt Altmix. That’s right, we’re big time. I encourage you to read the article in full, as it is a great example of how journalism works. You will notice that the number of quotes attributed to a specific person is in direct relation to that person’s sexiness. I, of course, come in at the top of the list. Jeff also has a quote in there, as he is not a bad-looking individual.

And Joel has… let me double-check this… zero quotes. Looks like a certain someone hit every branch of the ugly tree after a certain sexier someone knocked him out of the tree with a well-placed rock.

Brewing canceled, Jeff sheds single tear

Due to circumstances beyond the comprehension of the human brain, we are going to have to cancel brewing tonight. We thought about canceling Monday night itself, but that seemed a little excessive. Instead of awkwardly showing up at Jeff and Hannah’s house and ruining a romantic dinner, we suggest you pop on in at Hop City, buy some craft beer and ask for the “Monday Night Brewing” discount as you’re checking out. It works, we swear.

Sorry, I’m going to have to cut this post short. Jeff won’t stop crying in the background. JEFF. STOP CRYING. OMG BRB.

Building a beer fermentation chamber

Jonathan and several other blog readers have been asking for this post for some time now. For those of you who don’t care about fermentation temperature controls this is going to be really boring (I’ve warned you). For those that do, hopefully my experiences can provide a nice blueprint for building something similar.

The goal of this project was to create a way to provide customized and stable fermentation temperatures for our beer. There are many great examples of converted chest freezers out there but we had a few unique requirements including:

• House our 2 sweet Blichmann conical fermenters
• Provide both heating and cooling capabilities so we could leave the whole setup in Jeff’s garage year round
• Easy access so we’d be able to take samplings for gravity readings

Our starting point was a freezer we found off Craigslist about two years ago. It has served us quite well, but the main issue with using it as is was that it wasn’t tall enough to fit a conical fermenter and the lip for the motor prevented us from fitting two in there. We began researching options for extending the freezer and there are many detailed tutorials from people who’ve built great “collars” that extend the height of the freezer. The key issue in our situation was the fact that if we increased the height too much we’d risk being unable to lift the conical fermenters over the lip and into the unit (at one point I actually exported a pulley/hoist system for this but it proved impractical the more I thought about it). After a few days of research I decided our best shot was to create a collar that could collapse on both sides and a platform on the bottom that would allow the fermenters to sit level with each other and high enough that they could be easily accessed.

You can see the piece of plywood which creates a flat surface in the bottom (and the holes allow circulation)

The collapsible sides allow us to (somewhat) easily lift the fermenters into the freezer despite the high collar

Our next challenge was temperature control and humidity. Since chest freezers are built to be below freezing (duh) they typically experience a good deal of moisture and then ultimately condensation. The solution we’re currently testing for this is a plug-in humidifier. It cost about $20 from Ace Hardware and seems to be doing a decent job so long as we remember to plug it in every week or two (for it to “recharge”). For temperature control we wanted both heating and cooling. I had seen an example here of a dual stage controller but unfortunately we had a bit of a tough time locating one online. We finally ended up buying it from here and it seems to be some other more official part that someone has wired themselves (notice the very professionally looking “stage 1″ and “stage 2″ notations). For the cooling needs, obviously the freezer is what we use, but for the heating element we have been using a 150 Watt infrared heat bulb. I found this at the pet store and thus far it seems to work really well at heating up the the freezer. Granted we don’t have the most intense Georgia winters but due to the fact that it’s a closed and sealed space we didn’t have any issues with it retaining the precise temperature (except for the time that we forgot to plug it in!).

The 2 Stage Temperature controller. The freezer is plugged into the top socket and the heat lamp into the bottom one.

For the overall construction I used 2x6s and 2x10s. I glued 3/4″ foam board to the wood for an added level of sealing and insulation. As you can see from the pictures I used weather proofing foam/tape and weather stripping to give it a full, tight, leak resistant seal on the seams of the collapsible sides.

Weatherproofing tape and piping creates a nice seal on the collapsible parts of the collar

The locking clasps on the front of the fermenter. These are nice and tight to provide a solid seal.

Honestly at this point there is nothing I’d change about the design yet. I’ve contemplated added some small fans inside to help circulated the heat (or cold) when either stage is operating but I’m not sure if that would be very useful (it seems like the temperature inside stays very consistent). We do have a sweet temperature/humidity sensor and plan to install that at some point for additional testing/monitoring. Eventually I’m interested in building a 2nd fermentation chamber off of this one somewhat similar to this. The 2nd chamber could potentially be where we place beers for additional aging or for bottle/keg conditioning when we need it. We’ll see.

Drafty Kilt 6-pack carrier mockup

We’ve been working on our 6-pack carrier, in addition to the tap handles. While we have made a couple minor changes since mocking it up, this is essentially where we stand. As always, we’d love your feedback. If you knew nothing about us, would this 6-pack carrier give you the right impression about our brand? Would it be interesting enough for you to purchase the beer?

Just so you know, there is a description of the beer and some suggested food pairings on one side, and on the other side is a brief intro to Monday Night Brewing. After we’ve gotten this carrier where we want it, the next step is to sneak into a package store and stick it on the shelf with both black and white caps to see which work better in a 6-pack carrier’s natural habitat.

I wonder if you get carded when you try to bring beer INTO a package store?