Thursday, February 23, 2012

Fish tanks

Guiding in a new tank
Flying Fish Brewing takes some more steps toward setting up its new home.

Three 150-barrel fermenters, plus a hot liquor tank, rolled in from Missouri on flatbed tractor-trailers to the brewery's new Somerdale site Wednesday and Thursday. (A pair of white grain silos, pictured at bottom, also arrived this week. Two more silos, for handling spent grain, are due soon.)

The 21-foot-tall tanks were hoisted via a crane through a 10-foot-square opening recently cut into the building's roof specifically for installation of the new tanks (and future tanks for that matter).

More tanks (fermenters and brights) are coming next week, as the shift in operations continues from the brewery's long-ago outgrown original home in Cherry Hill to the bigger digs of a former LP record pressing plant in Somerdale, about 7 miles to the south.

Crane begins to hoist fermenter
 The brewhouse arrived last month, and there's packing equipment inside, too. But make no mistake, there's still a lot left to be done before the 16-year-old South Jersey craft brewery will begin making beer in the new location.

The move is a juggling act, too, since production of FF's Farmhouse Summer Ale, a beer annually released in April for the warm weather months, needs to begin soon. That will happen at the Cherry Hill location, making it perhaps the final seasonal beer to be made at the brewery's founding location. Also, Exit 8, the newest brew in the specialty series, still needs to be bottled.

As they say, stay tuned.