Despite The Portable Generator, Port City Brewing Remains Closed (And It’s Costly)
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MyBeer Buzz
With over 2-million customers without power from the recent storms, Alexandria, VA’s Port City Brewing has ben shut down. The good news is the generator they are showing off in the photo, allowed them to save over 13,000 gallons of beer by firing up the glycol-chiller. The bad news is that as of a few hours ago they are still closed, and have wires down behind their building with no sign of pending repair.
Update on Costs form the Seattle Times:
Not at the Port City Brewing Co. in Alexandria, Va., where owner Bill Butcher and head brewer Jonathan Reeves paced nervously, fretting about thousands of gallons of craft brew — especially an ever-warming tank of seasonal pilsner more than two days into the fermentation process.
"It should be around 50 degrees," Butcher said Monday morning after a long weekend without power in the midst of a relentless heat wave.
"It’s around 62 right now," Reeves said.
The two men were racing against the thermometer to preserve the contents of the 1,860-gallon stainless steel tank, which (they hope) will be bottled as Downright Pilsner.
"If we have to drop the tank, it’s about $20,000," Butcher said. "As a start-up business, every dollar in sales is critical. We don’t have any margin for error. This is a crisis situation."
Already, he said, Port City had lost an estimated $15,000 in tasting-room business during the weekend.
The company was falling behind on bottling, too: 576 cases of Belgian-style ale were to have been bottled Monday morning, and more than a third were scheduled to go out on a distributor’s truck that same day.
The beer wasn’t ready during one of the most important sales periods of the year. "July 4 is a big, big beer holiday," Butcher sighed.
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