Rotary Burl July 14 2014

July 14, 2014




This was the first meeting of Gregg Gardiner’s year as president, and also the first time we met off-site in at least a year.



No chairs unless you brought one.

 The location was Lost Coast’s new brewery, under construction just off Broadway next to Tetrault Tire. Gregg did not attend because he was in Tahiti with his wife on a trip she had planned a year ago. (Happy wife=happy life). No chairs were provided, no toilets and no water. It was like camping indoors.

President Elect Jay Bahner

Jay Bahner was asked to fill in. We met in the soon to be completed meeting room upstairs. It was BYOC – bring your own chair. Lunch was catered sandwiches in black Styrofoam. No drinks. Chuck Ellsworth led the salute to the flag and Dan Price gave the invocation, asking special prayers for Wayne Wilson, who is in ICU.

Barbara Groom and Jay

Our speaker was Barbara Groom, owner of Lost Coast Brewery. She came to the north coast in 1977. 10 years ago she began looking for property to build a new brewery.
Several deals fell through before she found a piece with industrial zoning, and then it took three years to get the plans through the city planning department. She hired an architect from Portland, but he designed a fancy brick palace for her. She fired him and got a designer builder to give her the look that she wanted –that of an old warehouse on the waterfront. She took us on a brief tour.

Fermentation tanks

First stop, the mash tuns, where the mashed grain is steeped in water to extract the sugars. . The tanks were huge, and had to be shipped by truck from Stockton through Richardson’s Grove. Apparently there is a video on Youtube. Then we went to the fermenter where yeast consume the sugars and produce alcohol - making beer.

Finally

The club goes off site

beer goes into another tank to be carbonated, and pumped to the bottling line or the keg filling line. In the center is a big cooler where the cases of beer and kegs are stored until they are ready to be shipped out. A lot of the construction was done by O & M industries and Mercer Frasier. The plant is about a month away from completion. When it’s done it will produce 300,000 barrels of beer a year. The old brewery had a capacity of 70,000 barrels. A barrel = 30 gallons. Tragically, no beer samples were available.

Submitted by Hank Ingham