Hello Founders!
It has been 6 months since the launch of our Founder’s Club and we are now at the half-way point to our projected opening! If all continues to go as planned we will be open for business in March, 2018. It has been a busy half-year, so we have lots of updates to share with the club.
At the end of June, we signed a lease for a space within the Hampden Center in Mechanicsburg, PA. We are very excited about our future home because its location, convenient parking, and nicely proportioned retail space will allow us to create the taproom experience that we have always wanted. Here are a few highlights:
- Our taproom should seat around 80 patrons with room for another 30 during busy times and events.
- We will offer 10 draft lines. We intend to rotate most of our draft lines with up to 3 beers eventually becoming year-round offerings.
- We will always have multiple sour and farmhouse beers on tap as well as a rotating offering of classic (non-sour/funky) styles.
- We will offer 3 pour sizes: 4 oz. 8 oz. and 16 oz.
- We will be offering growler fills for most beers.
- There are 7 restaurants that can be walked to within our plaza. For this and other reasons, we have decided to go with a BYOF model. While we will offer some limited food items in-house, we will also let our customers bring in any outside food they wish.
The other half of our brewery is of course the brewhouse itself. We have opted to go with a 5 BBL steam system. We feel that this sized brew plant will give us the versatility we desire to keep all of our draft offerings fresh and rotating while still being large enough to comfortably support our sour and farmhouse barrel aging program. Our aging program will be divided approximately 50/50 between oak barrels and stainless tanks and our bottling program will focus exclusively on sour and farmhouse beers.
We are presently in the process of finalizing our architectural and engineering plans for submission to our local, state, and federal agencies. We are looking forward to getting underway with construction, which we anticipate to begin in November and be finished by January.
We will be placing orders for all of the Founder’s Club merch about one month before our public opening. Between now and then, make sure that your profile contains the correct sizing for your hoodie, which will be a Gildan Medium Weight Zip Hoodie. These run a bit small, so if in-doubt, we suggest ordering a size up. If anyone is unsure of how to update or access their online profile, just drop us an email with your order size. For that matter, if you ever have questions, need to arrange a pickup, change trustee’s, etc.. just email us. We will make sure you’re taken care of.
Cheers!
Matt “Dr. Lambic” Miller
Co-Founder, Mellow Mink Brewing