Irondale Brewing

My attempt to solve my condensation issues by gutting and reworking my existing range hood.

The condensation on the range hood in the brewing space is the one major issue with the space that I'd like to resolve, but before replacing the range hood with a condensation hood, I wanted to do a test batch in the kitchen in the house to see if the behavior was similar.

From first breaking ground on the new garage in 2020 to finishing out the dedicated brewing space as my wife and I had time, the day finally arrived!

The last piece is finally in!

I'd never tiled anything other than a pretty simple kitchen floor job a million years ago, but thankfully my wife is super experienced with this kind of work and provided not only guidance but a ton of hands-on assistance, not to mention the rallying cry of, "Let's go do your tile!" at just the right time.

Quick update on the brewing space buildout progress -- the sink is in! My wife and I cut the hole in the countertop to drop in the sink, and then we could finally call the plumbers to come out and hook up everything including the Waterdrop RO filter and the under-sink hose bib for the wort chiller.

I finally got the time to make a big push on assembling and hanging the Ikea cabinets. Overall this went pretty smoothly, again thanks to the experience and know-how of my wife, and probably also because we had just assembled a ton of Ikea cabinets as part of our house remodel.

More random brewery build-out photos!

Acid staining the concrete floor in the brewing space proved to be a very time-consuming process, but it's finally done and I love the results.

Building out the brewing space is turning into a series of things I've never done before which is both fun because I like learning new things, but also means it's a time-consuming process and there's a bit of a risk of catastrophic failure.