Chalk it up to experience

Feb 15

Building a brewery and taproom is daunting. There are thousands of decisions to be made on design, workflow, customer experience, and safety. For months the only representation of our vision has been bird’s-eye view renderings on the computer screen. Even though the space, equipment, and furniture are perfectly to scale, getting a feel for how the brewery will materialize is very difficult.

Enter: sidewalk chalk. The tool children use to bring imagination and dreams to life. We spent more than a week measuring and marking the entire brewery and taproom out on the floor to do just that, and the results were amazing. We learned things that an 8.5x11” scale drawing couldn’t teach us, including that some things that looked good on paper were not great in the real world. We did “test drives” with an empty pallet on a pallet jack to see if the spacing of equipment worked for humans moving through space. Then we repositioned and did it again. We asked our bottling line manufacturer to change the layout of the line to match our workflow.

Even before a contractor lifts a hammer, we know this will come together as planned, thanks to the chalk.