7 East Main Street Progress Update
View of the brewery production space from the Fishkill Creek
When we bought our building in August of last year, we inherited the fossils of all the projects the building had hosted before ours. Our brewery production floor was packed to the ceiling with lengths of old kitchen countertops, our barrel room was piled high with broken shower door glass, our taproom was a ghostly showroom of once modern kitchen designs, and our walls bore the marks of a hundred machine-shop rivet guns. But all in all, it was still a pretty beautiful sight.
Remnants of our building's long history as an industrial production space
Since then our focus has been on rebuilding the brewery productions space and preparing it to receive our equipment. First things first for us: we want to start making beer.
Our brewery is housed in a 7,000 square foot cinder block building that was added onto the existing brick building in the 1970’s. It is built upon a thick concrete slab and covered with 15 foot high metal truss roofing, and it’s wide open layout makes it a perfect home for our brewery.
Once we emptied the room of all its trash, including 23 tons of shattered glass, our first move was to clean and paint the walls and ceiling. We added a new roof on top of the existing metal one that had been rusted through at spots, so the remaining metal ceiling needed only to be sealed and painted. The rehabilitated ceiling is now free of rust and allows us to run all of the necessary electrical and plumbing through its open truss work.
Rusty metal gets a coat of paint and primer
After filling concrete into a few broken parts of our cinder block walls, we sealed and painted them white and grey. In just a few weeks and a few coats of paint, our abandoned warehouse looked like it was ready to hold a brewery.
Some of our barrels in front of the freshly painted wall
With the cosmetics out of the way, we needed to start to build the infrastructure of our brewery operations, including three 28 foot trench drains and a 4-inch sewer pipe that spanned the length of our brewery. Once the drains were set and leveled, we filled the trenches with new concrete.
This week we finished our floor with a concrete and polyurethane coating, which will make it completely washable and antimicrobial.
A fresh coat of epoxy completes our floors
Once that is fully dried, we’ll be ready to receive our brewhouse and fermentation tanks... What a day that will be!