This one is NOT like the first one. The yeast somehow got contaminated with a wild one and it became a sour beer instead of my beautiful Belgian IPA. We were doing a little more experimenting on the hops and tweeking grains, and we did change the yeast but it should NOT have gone off in a direction like this!
That being said, it is still a drinkable beer and while it is definitely NOT what I or Keith wanted, others like it. And it is actually aging well and has a really nice, white lacey head that lasts a really long time.
But it is no longer a Belgian IPA, it is a more like a Session Blond or American Farmhouse Ale.
Brewed in December 2023, ready the end of January 2024, still drinking now.
UPDATE: 5/6/24
Defiled was blown at this year's Big Brew. EVERYONE loved it, despite Keith going around and saying it was "contaminated." They didn't know what to expect and thought that it was really good. Many said they were expecting a disgusting-tasting liquid, thinking we were trying to make it a teaching experience like we usually do, but were shocked that our "contamination" isn't sour or icky like many other brewers. They were kind of bummed at the realization that we would never be able to reproduce it.
You remember in October 2022 when we made the pilgrimage to Colorado to work with Nathaniel in Big Choice for Tom Hennessy's Immersion course? Link to story. Tom was so very kind to invite us to Ridgway to visit with him personally and he even set up a meeting with Lance from the Forgeworks foundry (on his day off no less!). We are still very grateful and are not yet giving up on the brewery, but as expected, lots of things started to become roadblocks and segue-ways and rabbit-holes.
Here's the beginning of the story:
When we got back to Washington, I set about doing a little revising on our 42-page business plan to incorporate some of the new things that we learned while in the course. This took a bit over three weeks because of my obligations to my church choir and the upcoming Requiem Mass rehearsals, and the sheer size of the plan. We had it pretty solid before the course and it was a lot of rethinking and reorganizing of thoughts afterward. And Keith got slammed, as per usual when he gets any time off from work, when he got back. They have a really small group and it always falls to him to shoulder most of the burdens.
In the downtime that he did have, he was searching for any places that could accommodate us: we had two real estate brokers that we were in contact with that were feeding us some leads as well as his own searches. We changed the specifics when we got back and one broker immediately ghosted us.
When I had the plan where I thought it should be, I handed it and the spreadsheets off to Keith to send to Tom like he'd requested. Keith then decided to look them over to “double-check” my thoughts before this move. This lead to another THREE weeks of revisions plus the Thanksgiving Holidays! GAH!! And a horrible back-and-forth over turkey with our “best friends” about how they don't think we can do this…
Then BOOM! We are now in December and Christmastime 2022… and he hasn't sent off the files to Tom, won't let me send them off, and now is unsure of us moving forward because of our friends and their lack of faith in us.
But we kept plugging along, driving around looking at the properties the remaining broker sent us. None, fit.
Then, as you all know from the 2023 blog (Link here), May 15, 2023, I was in contact with Betsi Hummer and she sent me some information about who to contact with the City of Bellevue. Little did I know her reputaion preceeded her, and the response I got in July would turn out to be not very helpful; they really just told me to contact the Washington Small Business Development Center (WA SBDC).
Around April 2023, Keith also heard of this program and how they helped small businesses get started, and especially to get SBA funding. They are only in Redmond, WA and that city isn't one that we were really looking at for our place. After much back-and-forth between us and our retirement financial advisor, (I wanted to just go to the credit union, and Keith wanted to go the WA SBDC, and the advisor wanted us to have a fundraiser), they had me contact the WA SBDC because they felt it would be better to make this a Woman-owned Brewery and see about getting a better loan rate. So, in August I finally contacted them and we made an appointment.
Also late May 2023, we stopped hearing from the last broker… she couldn't find anything that suited our needs and simply ghosted us too. We doubled our efforts to look on our own. He searched every few hours online and we drove by several places, and even scheduled a visit with one of them. The place looked really promising until the realtor told us we couldn't mess with the floor. Depression started to kick in a bit now but we kept looking and touching up the spreadsheets.
First off: we really don't think this organization is for people like us:
people with
a clear idea of what they want and already have a business plan, but no major funding
avenues and no contacts to find property.
True, there are a couple small weaknesses in the plan, like under-fleshed-out Profit and Loss and Sales Forecasting charts, but these could be fixed with perhaps help from Tom, Cameron from CEPE, or our friend Mike, and maybe even with the help of a real financial/bank funding advisor. We got no help from the WA SBDC advisor we were assigned. Instead, we got someone who doesn't drink, asked for statistics that are non-existent (even the librarian looked at us like he was insane), and we got the huge feeling that he really didn't read our business plan. Not only that, he didn't like that we were going to pay a living wage, didn't like the no-tipping system, and didn't like the pay rate! He even wanted to change our whole approach from a V2MOM-based analysis to a SWOT-based analysis. While I believed this was a huge problem and wanted to quit, Keith was still on the fence. He thinks we could possibly add in the SWOT and not rip-out all the work I did before.
To try and appease them, I added in some statistics, rewrote big chunks of the paper to update the data that I found by mining the library but did NOT yet incorporate the SWOT that Keith was supposed to work on. Keith didn't get to it… yet.
Just about the time we were doing all this, I was put in contact with a financial guy from Idaho. He gave us a template for the Profit and Loss that we could use, and explained that we won't really have much to show since we are a startup. Also, he said not to worry too much about it. And we also had a phone meeting with someone who was SUPPOSED to work with minorities on restaurant startups in our area… a contact from the WA SBDC advisor as well… she never got back to us…
I guess I am the wrong kind of minority.
Next WA SBDC contact in line: mid-October we met with the OneRedmond Foundation, Director of Business Expansion. She is a land-use realtor-type person affiliated with WA SBDC, or rather she works with them in the same office, for the City of Redmond. She said she could feed us property listings but couldn't show any property because she worked with the city and not with any brokerages. She gave us a ton of listings at the end of the month from just one complex and we took a weekend just before Thanksgiving to go look. It was not a good day.
It took us over twenty minutes to find the first place once we entered the complex! And it was over-grown and had broken glass in the parking lot (what parking that was there really), like the complex owner didn't care. The next two/three or so places were about the same and we couldn't tell where the power was to figure out how big the lines were. The last two spaces looked kind of promising with the last one directly across from one of our favorite breweries! We decided to go and have a pint and watch the rest of the Seahawks game, and “envision our name in lights” so to say…
There were only three of us for a while, then a regular came in and made a big deal about not recognizing us (we usually go in on Saturdays after we brew, and this was a Sunday). We got to talking about what the grand plans are and he went nuts! Turns out, he owns a business in that complex and told us that the owner refuses to upgrade the power. He can't keep his machinery running and they are all battling brownouts. He had to get a generator to keep the computers on! He says that people are LEAVING in droves. That is why there were six open spaces. He also said that they all think that the owner is going to bulldoze the place in three-to-four years and that they all have short-term leases now.
WOW… that was a kick in the head.
Then, within days of Thanksgiving, we found out that Keith's sister, all the way in Wisconsin, had pancreatic cancer. By December, he was made her medical power of attorney. Everything was put on hold… our stuff didn't matter now. We have not contacted the WA SBDC advisors about the properties and all this yet. Things were overwhelming, still kind of are.
Ah, CHRISTMAS… the worst Christmas we have ever had. You know all those horror stories that everyone tells on the internet about fights, and parents trying to break up their kids' relationships, and toxic gifts, and people leaving crying, and driving drunk? Well, this was one of those. It especially didn't help when our “best friends” spent a ton of time berating us for “wanting to give back to society” and told us that we “will never be successful at a brewery.”
Yeah.
His sister died February 9, 2024, in the worst way. And as far as we know, there was no funeral.
Now, the depression for both of us is getting really bad.
There was a time, a long time ago, when we had a great friend. From our first month here in Washington in 1999 until 2017, they were best friends. Somewhat inseparable. We were all together for many life events, including the death of his much-beloved and (my best friend), Linda on Thanksgiving Day, 2005.
Many girlfriends came and went, and most, if not all remain our friends. Then came a woman in 2015 (no she and Chuck never married, although they "had a promissory ceremony" done by our priest). She was not a friendly person. She could actually be the living rendition of a Succubus if you believed in such a thing. She was not at all like ANY of the others.
She made him stop seeing ALL of his friends: only hers mattered. She called us names and convinced him that we were the ones that “tossed him to the curb” and out of our lives. She made him quit the Cathedral Choir when they couldn't turn other members against me, and she had him write hate-mail to do it. She even tried to have him turn his ex-girlfriends against us!
We tried to tell him that these were all classic signs of an abuser, that he was in an abusive relationship and he needed to get out. That was the last time we heard from him. It was 2017.
I know, you are saying that this sounds like infected-beer, but what about this: the first time he got sepsis from his cancer port, you'd think that her being a “successful head nurse”, she would have caught it BEFORE it put him in the hospital, right? NO. How about the second time? NOPE. Then the kicker: while he was in hospice, recovering from the second bout, she SOLD ALL HIS THINGS and put him in a care home when he was released. Then she never looked back.
He was so poisoned by her, his so-called apology notes said he forgave us for all the troubles and he STILL decided to try and turn all the old Tuesday beer crowd against us. Luckily for us, a few of them were at the party where it all fell apart and witnessed the loving couple's meltdown. Those few are still our friends. The others, well… at least one asked to be blocked.
He died January 6, 2024, leaving both him and his daughter destitute. While that woman gave her nothing to remember her father, at least WE still have some of his things we can give her. We never got rid of them, in hopes that he would love us again. Her friend setup a gofundme me for the funeral expenses, and while we donated $250 to it… they are still $70 short. Out of all his vast group of friends he used to have in the “before times”, only 22 returned to help his daughter.
Yeah.
We have no idea when the funeral will be.
I want a do-over on this year.
SOOO!!! We decided to make a dark beer for my Mom, who is expected to arrive with Brad on March 16, 2024. They always drive out from Wisconsin to visit us and Diane and Julia.
Keith made the Pumpernickel, and as usual, we had a hard time NOT EATING IT before we used it in the mash! And added it in with our regular St. Chuck's Porter recipe. We had a huge problem finding our regular yeast and tried a dry Scotch this time. We will see…
We have been dumping the yeast as normal and boy, oh boy: it smells AMAZING!
I am really loving our bread beer series!
It's funny, in the movies when you are in a jam, Indy always comes to the rescue…
I don't want to jinx it, but… this new guy sounds like the dude that worked with us when we were looking to find our house. He is more encouraging and wants to work on a list of actual "requirements" together. Oh! And he is a beer enthusiast like us and also believes that Bellevue NEEDS a new brewery! I wonder if he wears a fedora too? I do!
Stay Tuned!
UPDATE: 5/6/24
Ghosted again…
I guess I did jinx it. I told Keith that it feels like the realtors are goats on Trevor's bridge and they keep knocking us out of our dream, back into the the "real world" of the search for property. So, I made a story-pic, illustrating just that! Freaking goat… poor Keith… knocked out of our fantasy again.
This year more of the neighbors showed up, and we are hoping that we can get even more next year. I would love it to be a kind-of annual block party of sorts, but who knows at this point. Could happen!
Take a look at some of the photos from our "official photographer of the day," Zee. She kindly posted them on Google and suggests that if anyone took others, to add them to the group. It was a fun day!
BIG BREW 2024 ALBUM
Many of you may know my story… my run in with the three old goats who wanted to get to the other side of the water to eat and fatten themselves up. I used to own that bridge they wanted to cross. They played dirty and one day, I found myself knocked into the water being carried away by the current.
It was then that I decided to do something that even they wouldn't take from me.
I decided to make beer.
Now, no one runs from me!
