Tim: So you settled on this property you have here at Western near North Avenue. Did you recruit any help in finding it and how did you pick this spot?

Beejay: After our Kickstarter, we thought we were going to find just beautiful warehouses everywhere. I was like, “Oh! There’s got to be. You know, it’s a renter’s market. There are spaces everywhere.” And man, we scoured the city and we did it all on our own. We just drove around and looked up listings. In fact, I live right in the neighborhood. I’m three or four blocks from here.

So I’d seen this building ever since the onset and it had always been unoccupied since I’ve lived in the neighborhood but there was no listings on it, no clear ownership of the building and we’re like, “Damn! That sucks!” and we were actually driving back from looking at another space when we saw they finally had a “FOR LEASE” sign in here and we called. We looked into the very next day and immediately fell in love with it. We were like, “This is perfect.” It’s the perfect neighborhood, it’s the right amount of space; it has a huge basement that’s perfect for doing barrel-aged beers. It was a little dilapidated when we moved in. We pretty much hoofed it on our own.

Tim: So there’s a ton of permitting required to open a brewery. Where did you run into the biggest challenges: federal, state, local level, all three?

Beejay: Yeah, everything. Federal was a big pain in the ass because it took a really long time. I think it took us about four months to get our federal permit and in the state of Illinois, you can’t apply for your brewery’s permit on the state level until you receive your federal approval. So that means we couldn’t even have our application into the state until after that four months.

So you’re sitting here with this property and you’re watching your bank account just like, “pffffffff!” You’re spending money on build-out, you’re buying equipment, you’re paying rent on a property that’s not making money and it was terrifying waiting for those licenses to come through. And then by the time we got through on our federal permit and it was right around Christmas time then the State of Illinois kept telling us, they’re like, “Oh, it’ll be a week.” It was six weeks until we got our state license. I mean those were the two, waiting on the brewers permits was the biggest strain was because it took forever. It was terrifying.

Tim: So obviously there’s no restaurant component here. Was it ever considered and if so, why did you decide against it?

Beejay: It was definitely considered but neither Gerrit nor myself or Scott or our other partner has any knowledge about running a restaurant and the turnover rate of restaurants is terrible. It’s also incredibly expensive. If you think starting a brewery is expensive, start looking at restaurant equipment, in conjunction with the brewing equipment. So we pretty quickly decided that that wasn’t going to be something we were going to do, at least not right away. We have definitely talked about expanding and possibly opening a brew pub in the future because it’s something I would love to do. I love good food and beer and good food go great together. So it’d be awesome to have your own bar and to be able to come eat my own food.

Tim: Is there one thing that stands out for you as far as the biggest obstacle in the entire planning process?

Beejay: Biggest obstacle in the planning process? For us it was hard. We had a clear lack of experience; none of us had worked to the commercial brewery outside of our apprenticeship at De Struise and the way small-little- mom and -pop Belgian brewery runs compared to what we expect to see in the US is much different and this whole-almost-nano thing or we’re a little past nano but it’s a new thing. Its risky ground, everyone says it’s going to fail; you can’t do it. There’s been a lot of stress in that sense; we were kind of treading new waters but it’s been good. We’ve succeeded.

Tim: Definitely. Is there any one thing that you would do differently then, in the planning process?

Beejay: Given where we were at the time, no. It would have been nice to have a bigger brew house at the onset because we’ve definitely already outgrown our system. It would have been nice to start out with the 10-barrel system but given what we were able to do with what we had, I wouldn’t have changed it. I don’t think.

Tim: What percent of your customers do you think are from Chicago or venturing from other parts of the state to try your beers?

Beejay: I would say 90% are from Chicago. I mean we’re definitely tapping the suburban market a little bit. I’m sure a small percentage of people are coming in from out of town, I’ve definitely had e-mail. They’d be like, “I’m visiting Chicago, I want to try your beer.” I don’t know if we’re quite a destination brewery just yet. We’re kind of tiny; we’re averaging about 90 cases per batch.

Tim: How many days a week are you guys brewing now and how many hours when you say you personally work each week?

Beejay: We brew three days a week and we bottle three days a week, often with it overlapping in the middle. I personally work between fifty and seventy hours on average a week. I’d say the same is true for Gerrit. I’d say I’d do about fifty to fifty-five hours of actual manual labor in the brewery and then the rest would be TTB paperwork, doing label design and just keeping general records.