You Load Sixteen Tons...

I will be the first to admit that I am no fan of the gym. I don't like lifting weights. I don't like running on a treadmill. It's just not part of who I am.

This isn't to say that I am averse to moving heavy things. One of my first jobs in high school was working for a furniture store as a delivery person. Me and another guy would go dig furniture out of the storage locations, take it to people's homes, and haul away their unwanted items. If the old furniture was nice we could trade it to a used store for a few bucks or a couple bottles of beer. If it wasn't, we took it to the dump.

And yes, I did just admit to underage drinking in that last paragraph, but it was the 90's and we all made poor choices back then. Do you remember Hammer Pants? I rest my case.

I spent many years working in the performing arts, and I know with certainty what the heaviest piece of scenery I ever moved was. I subbed in for a friend at the Ogunquit Playhouse up in Maine. They were doing a production of The Music Man, which for those that know starts with a scene on a train. We preset the train with ease hours before the show began, but after that first scene, we had approximately 15 seconds to get 3500lbs of wooden train set that had hinges in the middle off stage and out the back door onto the loading dock - without killing anyone between the train and the wall. 

I still have nightmares about that, but the show starred Peter Scolari and he was very nice. 

Today Rob and I unloaded the two pallets of things we ordered from our biggest supplier. If memory serves it was almost 3200 lbs. In the picture, the pallet behind me is only fifty and fifty-five pound bags of malt. The other pallet I'm resting my hand on is everything else - all our hops, dry yeasts, smaller bags of malt, recipe kits, equipment kits, finings, sugars, extracts... We now have a stocked home brewing store that is also overflowing with cardboard to be recycled. 

Tomorrow I will finish checking products in and set them to 'active' in our online store. It'll finally be real, and not just a room in a building that's full of shelving and empty vittles vaults. We started talking about this in August. Tomorrow it's a reality.

Can't wait to see you all in the shop! 

- Matt