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Homebrewer's bring your carboy's, some food and a get ready for a good time. Roughtail will be hosting the first annual Roughtail Wort Transformation event to celebrate the conclusion of craft beer week. We will be brewing up wort in the style of an American Pale Ale, and we will leave you to do the rest. The wort you will receive will be around 1.050 OG and will have approximately 35 IBU's of neutral bittering hops. You choose what to do with it after that. On July 21st we will reconvene to taste what everyone has come up with.

Oklahoma City, OK – Roughtail Brewing Company has announced they are hosting a launch party for their new brewing company on April 1st at Tapwerks, 121 E. Sheridan, Oklahoma City.

We have been doing a lot of repairs or have required contractors to perform some work for us be it plumbing, electrical, concrete or HVAC. Outside of plumbing, everything else has been very difficult to find good help. Concrete was the worst. We called six contractors and 3 showed up. 1 took a week longer to get us a quote and one was extremely expensive. The others that I talked to who didn’t even show up said they were weeks out. We did eventually find a reliable and affordable concrete guy through a referral, so it did eventually work out.

So quite a bit has happened in the formation of the craft brewery known as Roughtail to this point, so I want to fill you in on where we started and how we got to where we are now.  For me it started rather serendipitously. I was visiting Munich after a summer internship in Europe, and absolutely fell in love with the culture surrounding the beer.  Aventinus made by Schneider & Sons really made a large impact on me. I decided then that I wanted to make home brew.

Through my dealings with approximately 30 banks in the DFW metroplex and the SBA, I have come to realize that the SBA is pretty much worthless, and here’s why.

After the realization that an SBA loan was not going to happen we realized we started to rethink the way we planned on raising the money. Now knowing that we could probably raise somewhere in the neighborhood of $150,000 from the bank, and not the $575,000 like the SBA told us, we needed to find the rest of the money from investors. Now, as I have mentioned in a previous blog, we projected needing $720,000. This estimate was extremely pessimistic. It covered a year of getting setup and another year of expenses should we not sell any beer at all.

With the difficulty in raising enough money to cross the threshold into feasibility in Dallas we started to look into ways that we could make the brewery happen in OKC. The problem with going with anything less than a 15 barrel system is you really start to spin your wheels as it becomes very difficult to grow the business organically. You spend all your efforts trying to keep up with brewing and your net cash proceeds aren’t enough to make upgrading to a larger system possible.

With our roots firmly planted in the OKC market and investors on board, we needed to verify that we could receive a loan for the business. As I have already developed a good relationship with MidFirst Bank it was easy for us to approach them with our idea and see if it would be something they were interested in. I got the sense from my many conversations with the bank manager and business manager at a nearby branch that it would be.

Sorry for being a little slow to update the blog. We have been super busy trying to get our permits. There is so much to talk about since our last post, so I’ll try and put everything in the best order I know possible. The biggest news is our move from OKC to Midwest City, so I’ll go into the details surrounding that first. After we filed for our TTB license, which we thought was going to be the hardest one to get, we filed for our license with the Oklahoma Alcohol and Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission, or better known as the ABLE Commission.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Oklahoma City, OK. When Roughtail Brewery Co. begins crafting beer in Oklahoma City over the next few months, it will culminate a quest for owners, Blaine Stansel and Tony Tielli, to find good beers and will turn a home-brewing hobby into a profession.