Before I get into anything about cider, let me say a quick word on the marathon bombings. Everyone here is okay, as are our friends and family. We're fortunate to have come out of this clean, as many people weren't so lucky. To those people, we wish you the best in moving past this terrible thing to have happened to our city. Nothing we do or say can change anything that's happened, nor will our insight really add anything or help anyone, which is why we've been silent throughout this mess. Boston is a tough city, and doesn't need our validation.
On a related note, as someone who typically has nothing great to say to about the police (particularly state troopers hassling me at the car pick-up area at Logan), I have great respect for the way they took care of business. Very impressive. Shut down the city, catch the bad guys. It's a trying time for Boston, and as the public image of Boston over those few days rested on the police, first responders, and volunteers, they delivered in a huge way, and made everyone around here proud to be from Boston.
and now, back to cider...
If you haven't heard much from us lately, it's because we've been doing a lot of prep work for our upcoming expansion. Upgrades include bigger, better and badder tanks, support systems (glycol chiller, air compressor, boilers, etc), CIP, and the pièce de résistance, our new, automated canning line. It's a very exciting time, but all that excitement leads to frustration after frustration over the lack of speed. Everything happens so fast in our minds, and slowly in real life, it can be difficult to deal with. In my head, we've got all these new toys, and we're ready to ramp up and take over the world. But in real life, everything is still being built, shipped, or ignored (cough...contractors...cough), and we're running the same old operation, which has lost a lot of its luster now that I've mentally replaced everything. The good news is that our new canning line has arrived in Boston, and is only a few days away from arriving on our loading dock.
Due to our disposition regarding the spending of unnecessary money, we opted out of having the manufacturer send an engineer to install the thing. No worries though, if my math is correct, it took me 4 days to put together my $99 grill from Home Depot, so with the three of us working consecutive 20 hour shifts, we're looking at no more than a year or two before the canning line is operational.
As soon as that bad boy's installed, this is a rough interpretation of what's going to become of the old one.*
That's all I've got for today. I'll leave everyone with something that amused us a couple weeks ago. Say "beer can" in a British accent and it sounds like "bacon" in a Jamaican accent. Simple pleasures for simple minds I suppose.
*Definitely not going to smash it. Despite its inadequacies, our current canning "line" is not only worth about 100 times the amount of money in my personal bank account, it serves a very useful function for small canning operations
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