Opening a community oriented brewery taproom barcade
Brewery owner Nick of Pixeled Brewing barcade taproom discusses how he built a community oriented arcade brewery in an historic building in Fargo, ND. He discusses why he wanted to open an arcade brewpub, how he branded it, the equipment he chose, what a typical brew day looks like, some of the ups and downs of owning a brewpub, and along the way he delivers several pieces of advice.
Planning & Concept: Combining Craft Beer, Gaming, and Community
...three-two-one...
My name is Nick Hill. I'm the self-proclaimed beer wizard of Pixeled Brewing Company in Fargo North Dakota. This place started as a dream of mine around seven or eight years ago, I was at a place in Denver called One Up -- it's an arcade bar and I walked in and I was immediately floored with 'I can drink beer, I can play games from my childhood' like how cool is this. I thought to myself it would be really cool if Fargo had a place like this.
Business Setup: Designing a Space that Welcomes Everyone
The atmosphere that we want at pixel is we want to have a social atmosphere where you can come play games with your friends and have fun without the toxicity of playing online games nowadays and I think you lose something when you don't have that face-to-face contact with with your buddies and stuff, right? And part of that is why we bought the Killer Queen Machine. Killer Queen is a 10 player game, there's two teams of five it's very hard to master but easy to learn and it is ridiculous amounts of fun. Every night I hear people whooping and hollering on that machine because it's so much fun.
Community Building: Creating Events That Bring People Together
So around Killer Queen we run league night every Monday. I turn the game on free to play and I want to get the scene built up with as many people as possible so that's why I put it on free to play and try to encourage an atmosphere of you can come and learn and and have a good time.
Hosting Tournaments and Special Events
Two weekends ago we had a tournament where players from Minneapolis from their Killer Queen scene, came up and we had a big tournament called the Berry Border Battle. It was super fun, we had trophies and everyone had a blast. If I can try to create that everyday that's that's what I want to do.
Selecting the Building Location
The building that we're in right now is the historic Union Building. It was the first building that I wanted, like I fell in love with it... the exposed brick. We wanted to have a feel of the foot clans hideout in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That's, that's what we were looking for and this building had it this building. It was an old cold storage unit I believe, this was part of the boiler room so that's 15 foot ceilings, I think we're looking at roughly 14 feet wide and it's 36 feet deep originally.
We're gonna do a lot of the work ourselves, to get in this building we I ended up using a general contractor to do most of the fit up, so they did all the permitting with the city as far as construction goes. It took about two and a half years from when John Paul and I greenlit to opening our doors.
You know one really unique thing that we did is we found a local street artist from Bismarck, North Dakota. He is very very skilled in street graffiti and he did the murals on our walls and that took about five months. So if you're looking at doing something unique like that you got to make sure that you have the proper time to get that accomplished.
We need to keep costs low so there wasn't any major structural changes, this building's also on the National Historic Register so there's not a lot of things that you can do structurally if there is something dilapidated and it needs to be fixed.
Brewery Equipment Selection
So we have four five barrel 4 in 1 BIACs that we bought from BREWHA. We try to brew twice a week. Sometimes that doesn't always happen, sometimes there's a delay, slow fermentation, whatever it is.
So why I chose to go with BREWHA is it closely mimicked the process I was doing home brewing. I felt for us it was the right cost, it has a low footprint so it saved us on having to rent more space, and for sanitation I don't like having to use dangerous chemicals after every single brew and when you're boiling in one vessel and the process takes place in all one vessel sanitation is less of a worry. Obviously you still want to make sure you're cleaning out your beer stone every couple brews but not having to do it after every brew is a huge benefit. I am anywhere from 45 to 50 batches, I've had zero spoiled batches, I've dumped zero batches. There was one I was gonna dump which was user error, I let fermentation temperature get away from me and I ended up having customers that liked it, it fit their taste profile. It didn't fit mine so that's, you know, a good thing as a brewer like if it's not up to your standard, always hold yourself to high standards, but give your customers a chance to review your product and if they don't like it then don't serve it but if people I like it, serve it. You know just because you don't like it doesn't mean other people don't.
Organizing your Brewery Space
I didn't really put a whole lot of thought into setting up because everything's on wheels. I'm more of a let's put things out there and let's see how it works and the fact that the BIACs came on wheels gave me that flexibility hey if I got to move this tank because the HVAC guys installed the drain, copper piping too low and it's encroaching on my ceiling I can do that because they have wheels I can move them.
What I'd really recommend anybody opening up a brewery is to go into a parking lot, grab some duct tape and make like a fake brewery with duct tape, where you're gonna have your tanks how big your space is, where your gantry's gonna be or your forklifts, whatever it is and then just do a fake brew. Walk and pretend like you're brewing and figure out like how many times are you gonna have to go into the other room that you have to walk 25 feet, or is there a way you can cut that 25 feet down to 5 feet. I know it seems like a lot of work but after 50 brews there's so many times where I wish my three compartment sink was in this room.
Steps to Brewing Beer
As far as our brewing process goes, I fill to 145 gallons I then heat up to strike temperature which can be anywhere from 158 degrees to 163 and then adjust to mash temperature slowly afterwards. I fill a grain bag procured from BREWHA full of anywhere from 300 to 450 pounds of grain. I use a forklift to then mash in and a grain paddle to ensure there's no dough balls.
While we're mashing I set up the pump and hosing to vorlauf. I usually do that 30 minutes into mash I do that for about 15 minutes or until the wort is clear, whichever comes first. I find this prevents from getting stuck mash and then you don't want these rice hulls. I have had a few stuck mashes. I think it was more along the lines I was vorlaufing too early in the mash and I wasn't putting my base melts on the bottom. Ever since I switched to vorlauf you know after 30 minutes into the mash and only for a short period of time and putting the base malts on the bottom I haven't had a stuck mash since then.
Then I mash out at 173 degrees, as soon as that's reached I slowly lift the colander out ensuring that the colander doesn't pull too much water out to expose the elements. So I sparge using the jacket of the four and one to heat the water up to sparge temperature which I sparge at 173. After I have reached a hundred anywhere from 175 to 180 gallons, I've kind of been experimenting with trying to find the right ratios, I then move up to boil.
I have been in the habit of... I have an alarm set at 200 degrees I then scoop all the protein off the top to prevent boil over, another technique because I've used is I've actually turned the heating elements off at 200 degrees and let it sit for about 20 minutes to let the protein break dissipate but then that's 20 more minutes that, you know if you want to cut down your brew day you can scoop the protein out to prevent boil over. I then use the hot spiders procured from BREWHA to hop on hop schedule. I stir the hops to ensure they don't float on top and I can get all the oils extracted for proper bitterness and aroma depending on when you hop.
Cool down then starts after your boil. I do a lot of flame out additions because I like hop aroma, who doesn't you know, cool-down starts... right now I am running water through the jacket anywhere from 45 degrees to 55 degrees depending on the weather. The cooldown can take anywhere from I think the coldest shorts I've had is an hour and a half to two hours. I haven't had any off flavors from dropping down to full temperature right away yet in the 40-45 plus batches I've done so I've just chosen to continue doing that even though it might not be you know the industry best practice. I also have a plate chiller that I don't fully utilize yet, I just haven't got a system properly set up for that, its still in development. I let temperature get down to about 75 degrees on the temperature controller and there's gonna be temperature stratification because the location of the probe so when I get that down to 70
I'll then dump some trub, usually this is where I dump most of the trub until it's, it gets, it's not clear but it starts getting light, then that's when I know that I should stop so I'm not wasting beer with little trub, then I blast it with oxygen, depending on the yeast strain that I'm pitching I will oxygenate it anywhere from 8 to 12 ppm, but if I'm making my New England IPA I'll oxygenate up to 20 ppm to help ensure that we get that hazy thing that everybody loves. Then I turn the oxygen off let it sit for another half hour or so and then finish dumping trub and then I pitch yeast.
I use Imperial yeast out of Portland Oregon, my experiences are the highest quality best customer service, they overnight yeast so you're always ensured fresh viable yeast for every batch. One thing to is I'm trying to start a yeast harvesting program it's very very infant stages right now.
I'm carbonating in the tanks right now I have a regulator setup for each vessel that regulates the co2 that's going into it and I just forced carbonate through the top I don't use a stone or anything at this time and that process can take, depending on the beer style I've noticed that some beers carbonate more quickly than others. I don't have any explanation for it it's just what I've noticed.
So I have a local farmer that comes and picks up my spent grain, they have a chicken and cattle farm. I actually run it through the hallway down through the parking garage. I've loaded out with a forklift and away they go, it takes two three minutes. Originally before I had found that relationship we had been going and dumping at the compost heap and you know that was 15 minutes out of our day and you know stuff adds up.
The kegging process for us is I bought a silicone hose with a beer not in a 1.5 try clamp from BREWHA and I bought the proline manual keg filler from Micromatic so I fill each keg individually directly from the fermenter. The fermenter is pressurized anywhere from 12 to 15 psi and I pressurize each of my kegs to 5 psi. Those kegs are taken to my cold storage, my tax determined beer cooler.
I then have a four tap system that I purchased for Micromatic that runs the FOBs so we can changing out the old kegs you don't get over foam. I'm running a 35' draw length to the tap room upstairs. I'm on the frame of mind that brewing is part science and part art, you should know the math behind things but you shouldn't dwell on it. If you're feeling one day hey I want to add some extra Citra in this or let me put some extra chocolate malt in this I think that's something that that you as a brewer should do, if you're able to and I mean. I used Beer Smith as a program to help design my recipes to get me in the ballpark and then I might be feeling funky that day and I might try something a little bit different. So I you know keep keeping a good balance between science and art I think is as partially what keeps me sane because you know I was told there be no math right.
Benefits of and Reasons for Opening your Own Community Brewery Taproom
So is it worth it to open up your own brewery? Yes and no, right, I would say yes if every day could be like the Berry Border Battle and everyone was having a good time and everything was great yeah absolutely is worth it. But you know not all of those days are gonna be like that. You're gonna have a day where you dump 400 pounds of grain on the floor and then spend two hours shoveling and cleaning it up and you needed to be somewhere two hours ago, those days are gonna happen and those are the days that will test your patience, is working through the things that go wrong and things are going to go wrong, you just have to know how to fix it.
Having good vendor partners in place to help you through that is crucial it's been crucial to my success. I love the here in the hootin and hollerin, I love when someone takes a drink and they're like [ __ ] that's good, like that makes me feel good.
If you're opening up a brewery to get rich you're... you know, don't do that. You do it because you love people and you want to bring happiness and enjoy other lives and help them, you know everyone has everyone has tough days everyone has their own problems and being able to have an outlet for people to help deal with that is kind of what is why I'm in it.
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