Opening a Microbrewery Coffee Shop

Track 3 Microbrewery and Coffee House in Dresher, PA, is a unique concept by Joe and Mike, combining three of their passions—beer, coffee, and rock and roll.  They describe how they selected the site to open their microbrewery and coffee house, their marketing concept and implementation, the 7BBL brewing equipment they chose, how they built out their brewery and several other useful tips they learned along the way.

Market Research and Business Planning

Hi, my name is Joe Burdo, I'm one of the partners here at Track Three Microbrewery and Coffeehouse. Hi, I'm Mike Paisley, I'm one of the partners with Track Three Microbrewery and Coffeehouse here in Dresher town plaza, Dresher, Pennsylvania. I've always had the dream of opening up a shared micro brewery and coffee house. I started home brewing about 15 years ago and obviously home roasting coffee at the same time. So a good friend of mine out in San Diego, his name is Dan Scheibe, he and I got into the home brewing game together and he now is a commercial coffee roaster. He brought the coffee side into what he's doing right now and I've always wanted to have this stream of shared coffee and beer together. A couple years ago we had this dream together of making beer in more volume and getting into business and you know some of my background, I've got a business background, Joe's got a very scientific background and has a home brewing background seem to seemed to work. I was running a science education company and I enjoyed it but I wanted something more social to do. As my science education company kind of got up and running on its own I was able to step away and do something that I really had a passion to do which was to open up this micro brewery and coffee house.

Marketing and Brand Development

Three three of us huge music fans and love Pink Floyd one of the songs that we like is set the controls for the heart of the Sun we said if we ever get into the business together we're gonna name our first beer ‘Set the controls’. ‘Set the controls’ is the third track on the Saucerful of Secrets album by Pink Floyd. And it turned out that a lot of the songs that we really enjoyed were track threes from some particular album. Mike put this idea forth and we thought about it a little bit and took a look at some of the songs that fit the bill, came up with a list of names of songs that would really work well and ran with the idea.

Since we've opened we've had people participating in naming and they've had a lot of fun with it too. We've integrated the concept of track three into multiple areas of the business. You know when you walk through the door and coming into our business we've got pictures of different artists, and for our taster trays, we went to a customized taster tray that's made out of a vinyl record, and has five locations for sampling.  People love you know getting the their record and as you watch people they're looking at ‘I wonder what record I'm gonna get this time’.

Equipment and Setup Requirements

We built up our knowledge on the brewhouse system first with a barrel and half system we purchased about a year and a half ago. It worked really well because it was small enough actually to fit into our pilot brewery which turned out to be our garage, and we quickly realized that we could produce excellent beer on that system. The low chance of contamination you have but being able to boil right in the, what's gonna be the fermenter, lack of cleaning chemicals that are necessary to be able to clean that out from batch to batch and chance of chemical contamination between the two, not having to worry about that really reduced a lot of the risk in producing excellent beer. So we made I think five or six different beers in that pilot system within the first two months and all of them came out really well, so that led Mike and I to believe that yeah this is something we can certainly do on a larger scale system.

We started to look into it a little bit more seriously, talked to Nathan about the 7BBL system and what was available to be able to scale up if we did go into a full size brew pub. We brewed with Scott Kelly out of three dogs to see his system and how he was doing it at a limited amount of space as well in a brew pub setting and that really kind of solidified it for us that we can we can do something similar in a tight space.

Location Selection and Lease Considerations

So when we're looking for a site for the brew pub we wanted to find something local. I live in the local community here in Upper Dublin and it was really important to us to help build that local community so it's not about just producing good beer and good coffee, it's about having a place where the community can gather and enjoy themselves with their friends their family.

So our location, we are in a retail plaza ,we have about 2,500 square feet so it's a long rectangular box. We've got our customer space up front which is about 1400 square feet and our brewing space in the rear.

This used to be a diner, this was their kitchen space in the rear that we've converted over to the brew pub. We don't do any cooking here currently but we have a lot of the services needed that we need for the brewery; the water, the HVAC, the electrical service. We managed to fit five 7BBL fermenters in the back end of the brew pub and there's two walk-in coolers behind me that we use to keg all of our beer and we have the shanks that run right through the wall of the cold room that go right back bar, so we can make the beer in the back of the house kit it and put it in the coolers and then serve it right in the front of the box.

Brewing Beer

So our brew day starts usually the night before, even several days before we make sure that the vessel’s been cleaned out properly. So my assistant brewer Nick is responsible and a great help to the kegging of beer, you know the cleaning of the kegs, to cleaning the vessels, to prep us for the next brew day. So we will fill the vessel of water the night before. We insert our mash tun, we bring it up to strike temp, so everything is ready basically for the next morning. So we try to do that the night before so when we're here first thing in the morning it's a 6:00 or 6:30 in the morning we're ready to mash in basically at that time.

So we'll have our grains ready to go and wait out for that morning. Nick will usually be the one to start the mashing process. Shortly after that point I'll come in help him out finish the mash. To make sure everything is proper the way that we've hit our temperature. The five six batches we've done so far we've hit our mash temp.

We mash for an hour, we check for our conversion and then record our numbers and then start to sparge. So we'll bring our mash tun a little bit out at a time, so we can see the top of that grain bed and start to sparge using the jacket of the 7BBL  system. So we've found that that mash out temperature about 168 degrees, if you've got a full jacket worth of water, using that jacket water, works out quite well for us to be able to sparge. So we do a continuous sparging with that as we're lifting the mash tun out of the vessel. After that we get our mash tun out of there and start the boil right in the vessel itself.

So the nice thing about our setup here is we've got a couple wide doors right next to the brewing vessel so as we tip the mash tun over and emptied it out into our wheelbarrow, we can just wheel it right out the back door so it fits exactly right next to the room space where we're gonna remove those grains, and then we take them off for compost usually second day. We've got a facility just on the road that will take our grains.

We continue the boil right inside of that vessel and we've made some modifications to our system towards the end of the process. So we have a large hop canister that we use for hop recirculation. So if we're doing some of our hoppy IPA for instance the New England IPAs, we can load it up - I mean dozens of pounds basically inside of this hop canister if necessary and we'll put it inside of the a vessel with a pulley and a hoist. So we can drop that down into the vessel. We put it right near one of the ports and we recirculate from the inside to the outside of the vessel using our pump and our hose and kind of move the wort through the area where this hop canister is located at. So we're agitating the hops that are inside of there pulling out the maximal amount of oil flavor as we can. And we'll let that run for some period of time after the boil so we usually do that after the boil is cooled down at 170 degrees to kind of maximize the hop oil extraction without pulling out any extra bitterness at that point.

With our dry hopping process we actually use the same 1.5BBL vessel we use for our pilot scale system. So we have the hop cannister inserted right inside of it. We load that up with hops, we purge it with CO2 and then we recirculate the beer from our large vessel through that 1.5 BBL system that contains the hop canister to extract the maximum amount of hot oil and hop flavor out of that.

After the dry hop we'll pump all of that the beer that's in there back into the main vessel and then we just clean it out. It's pretty easy we can pull the lid right off the 1.5BBL system. We have a hook on that hop canister that's in there and we can simply remove it, scoop out the hops that are in there and then remove that right from the barrel and a half system, take it right outside, clean it out and we're good to go. Everything all the beer’s back now into the main seven barrel system.

After we ferment the beer we're not able to run bright tanks or serving tanks here directly because our space limitations but what we can do because of the cold rooms that were on site here, is keg all the beer served directly from there. So after fermentation is complete and the beer is rested and we're ready to keg, we keg it and we move it directly to our cold room. We've got space in there for pretty much all of our beer. One of the little dances that we have to do out here, is if we do five seven barrel batches, we have a little bit more beer than we have keg space. So again, one of the nice benefits about the system is with the jacket and the Lindr chillers that we use is that we can continue to cool the beer down in the fermenter for an extended period of time if we don't have the opportunity to move it into the cold room.

Unique Method for Beer Carbonation

We are carbonating our beer using essentially the carbonation panel. So we don't carbonate directly in the fermenters. When we keg the beer, we will let it sit in our 30 degree cold room for day or two to get as cold as possible and then we have a recirculation carbonation panel. So once the kegs are cold we bring them out, we hook them up to this carbonation panel, it's essentially a pump that will recirculate the beer from the keg, through this carbonation panel, inject carbonation through a combination stone, similar to what you would have if you did it right inside of a break tank and fermenter, but it does it in line in this pump. So it's circulating and over and over as the beer is moving out of the kegs and moving back in and we just use a normal Sankey connector, so it's coming out one connector through the carbonation panel back into the dome in the keg and it circulates. And actually within about six minutes with ten liters of co2 pressure you can carbonate the keg fully.

Legal Requirements and Licensing

One of the lessons we've learned is to make sure you understand what size build-out you're going to be able to use in your space. We had planned on the equipment and the layout we were going to purchase before we had finalized all the details for the township. They kind of came back and threw us a little bit of a curveball on what we had to change up in here. So we lost about 200 square feet that we thought initially we'd be able to use for more brewing space back here, fermenting space. It was still able to work because of a mobile nature of the brewhouse systems and the way we can move them around wherever necessary.

With the brewing process itself I think one of the other important things is dialing in the system. So we're using grains from a third-party supplier, from a commercial supplier, and the grain size…one of the unique things about the mash tun and the BREWHA system works very well for mashing and sparging but it takes a little bit to dial in, I would say the grain size that you are using compared to what something other larger commercial Brewers may use. Our first batch we didn't specify the crush that we needed for the grain and the medium crush that they sent us was a little bit too fine so we're having some problems with slow mashes and stuck mashes. Once we kind of explained to them the system were working on and they sent him some samples we could test out, everything was fine we just had to make sure that they understood kind of our needs specifically with the system and we're able to move forward from there and start producing excellent beer again. [Music]

Community Coffeehouse and Microbrewery

Incorporating both a coffeehouse and a microbrewery I think that's something that's unique to the area. We knew that the local community was behind us. It's something that's not present in this area, there isn't really any good craft coffee even within maybe a 15-minute radius there are no craft breweries. So the concept I think is good, we've got a lot of good feedback about that. We're paying rent on the facility throughout the day so it only makes sense to be able to offer service during the morning and service during the evening if it's products that fit well together. And we think that there are a lot of similarities between the craft coffee and the craft beer and those two products actually do work really well together. So we have some of our drinks that have both coffee and beer in them as evidence of that, and those are usually some of our more popular drinks that we're serving to our patrons.

So we're excited about the concept and we think it's only going to improve going forward. The important thing we've really learned is that we would not be able to produce this most excellent beer and a small space if it wasn't for the BREWHA system and the unique vertical arrangement of the system. If we had a traditional horizontal brewing system in here maybe we get one 7BBL fermenter in here and that's about it but now with this BREWHA system we can actually get five seven barrel capacity in here and make a lot of excellent beer.

The beauty of going into business I guess is that there are challenges that you have to be willing to run into and overcome because they will come. What I'm excited about with the business is the fact that we've got patrons that come in and they are craft beer lovers, they are craft coffee lovers and they try the products we have and they love it. The feedback that we get from that, that's fulfilling for us.

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