Skint Chestnut Brewing Company in Powder Springs, Georgia is an amazing collaboration by brother-in-laws Doug and Mark. Their award-winning beer is incredibly delicious and they have created a fun and inviting space just outside of Atlanta. In this video they describe how they opened their brewery, and the steps they took to making it the success it is.
For more details about Skint Chestnut, visit skintchestnutbrewco.com
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:03 Why they started the brewery
01:12 The process of starting the brewery
01:29 Brewery equipment selection
02:50 Designing beer recipes
03:27 Building community
04:31 How Skint Chestnut got its name
I decided to do this when Doug suggested that we might be able to do this. I've always wanted to do it but I'm not a great organizer and if it weren't for my partner I would still be brewing in my driveway talking about opening a brewery one day.
Well, I am organized, and I am the co-owner and the operational manager for Skint Chestnut Brewing Company. It's kind of funny, Mark is a, you know he's a French teacher by trade and I'm a physical therapist by trade and so what business do we have trying to open up a brewery. Could we possibly do this thing you? It'll be a fun exercise at the very least, and a few years later here we are and actually have a brewery. Can you take it from the home-brew level to a professional level? I think Mark proved that you could–the product is exceptional.
The process of getting us to this point, it was challenging. I had to write a business plan identifying all of the different components of the business, you know for example, location, ownership which obviously was going to be Mark and myself. We had to add in what the equipment was.
I knew a lot about home brewing. I came across the BREWHA beer brewing system on the internet.
I immediately liked the simplicity of it and I suggested it to Doug and he immediately liked the price of it.
I really liked the idea of not having to move my beer from vessel to vessel. I like the idea of keeping my beer in one vessel from mash in to carbonation. When you're moving beer from one vessel to another, you're creating an opportunity for microorganisms to infect your beer or oxygen to oxidize your beer, so keeping the beer in one vessel the whole time from mash in, boil, fermentation, carbonation, it made perfect sense to me. It brews great beer in my opinion.
It's a little more complicated than the equipment I was using as a home Brewer but what BREWHA did for me is they sent a pilot system that I could practice on before the big equipment came. So I had a eight or nine months to brew on a 25 gallon system and it was much better making mistakes on that than making mistakes on the big ones. When the big ones came they were a lot less intimidating to me because I've been working on the little system up until that time.
I love brewing, everything about it, I like designing the recipes, I like thinking about ingredients, I like imagining what the final beer is going to taste like and it's always so satisfying when I finish a beer and it tastes exactly like I thought it would. And then there's times when it's even satisfying because I had an accident but it turned out to be a great beer still and it was a happy accident and I just hope I can reproduce that accident some of those times. I like the culture, I like that brewers really like to share stuff they do, and really like to help each other. In the brewing industry you definitely have a lot of friendly people that are willing to help, always.
It's been fantastic! I've lived in this community for 20 years and in the last year I've met and become friends with more people than in the previous 19, and it's been it's been so much fun. It's been a lot of work, but we we think we're doing well! We wanted to be the place to be for for our friends and neighbors to come and enjoy a high quality craft beverage. They really enjoy the vibe, they come in here and they're like, 'I love this place it's so cool it's comfortable it's got this rustic industrial kind of style' but in their next breath they're like 'this Sabravaspa is fantastic, it's one of the best beers I've ever had!', that's really nice to hear. We hope that we've created their neighborhood hangout, you know, someplace that people that are in this community can come and just spend some time with friends and family. It's just a bonus that we've got some really good beer that they can enjoy while they're here.
There was a Cherokee and Creek tradition, where they would actually carve the bark off of trees to use that tree as a landmark for certain things such as a market area, a place to gather, separation between different territories. We feel this is a place to gather, using good old southern vernacular so that's where the 'skint' comes from and we want to be the place to gather and we want the Skint Chestnut tree to be the landmark for people to know that this is the place.
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