This post is a continuation of the last one, New Year’s Musings. In that post, we talked about our resolutions to practice better planning and better communication and training. We believe those resolutions will be crucial as we strive toward our new goals in 2019.
2019 marks the beginning of Year #2 for Dimes Brewhouse. In our first year, it often felt like we were barely keeping up with day-to-day operation of the brewery. That feeling was definitely strongest in the beginning, and has eased considerably as we all become better and more efficient at what we do. Now that we finally have some breathing room, it’s time for us to take on more. So here we have them, our top three goals for 2019:
Goal #3: Building Improvements
We are pretty proud of this little flower shop-turned-brewery, but there are some things we’d still like to update.
Outside, we want to replace the porch railing with something sturdier, and add some balusters that will make the wheelchair-accessible ramp blend in seamlessly with the porch, and paint them in our signature Dimes Brewhouse red! We plan to bring back a little bit of that old flower-shop flair with some flower boxes on the patio and porch this spring, and we need to seal our patio furniture and add feet to the benches and tables to eliminate wobble.
In the taproom, we are going to add a few more lights to brighten up the space, and we are brainstorming more ways to emphasize our science theme. (Suggestions? Let us have ‘em!) We also want to make better use of the tv this year, whether that means using it for presentations, or playing old and new science shows.
In the hidden underbelly of our brewery, we could use some better organization and decluttering. I’m sure there are a bunch of you out there who have heard of the KonMari method or seen the new Netflix show, “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” – that’s basically what we need to do in our basement!
Actual picture of how I dream our tools will be organized.
Goal #2: Events
We want to do a lot more big and small events at Dimes Brewhouse! This year, look forward to a big outdoor festival-type event in the summer. Think: roping off our alley and back parking lot, live music, multiple food trucks, beer tents and good vibes all around.
We are also going to try to plan seasonal beer releases ahead of time, and getting them out on time so that all can be enjoyed in the season they were brewed for. We are going to try making a bigger deal out of them by combining them with other fun stuff.
We want to do more recurring events, along with continuing our monthly Open Mic Night and Artist Meet and Greet events. We’ve been tossing around ideas for game nights, brewing and science presentations, cooking contests, and more music events.
What kind of events do you want to see us bring to Dimes Brewhouse? Send us your thoughts.
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This brings us to (drumroll please) our biggest goal of the year:
Goal #1: Food
To make sure Dimes is right here, serving our community for a long time, we think the next step is food.
This summer, we started bringing Got Smoke BBQ food truck to Dimondale on a regular basis. Toward the end of this summer, we started bringing in more food vendors. The food trucks definitely do a great job bringing more customers into the brewhouse. On the other hand, we’ve had many a slow night when there is no food truck present. It is unreasonable to try and schedule a food truck for every single night (and not going to be allowed under the Village’s new food truck ordinance). So that has us thinking that the next step is: food. Our own food. In our tiny, 1000-square-foot building that is already pretty packed with brewing equipment, we are going to make food.
We will have to get creative with our space and with our menu, but we are already making a plan. We will need to move our wine and soda kegerator downstairs, add some new taplines to our back bar, and figure out the best way to push even more products from the basement to the taproom. That will leave room to squeeze a small food-prep area into the same space as our brewing equipment. It’s going to be cramped. But we think it’s going to be worth it.
We will have a small menu, focusing on grilled sandwiches. There will be a build-your-own grilled cheese section, and a few appetizers. We’ll try to keep it fun and fresh with inspired sandwich specials that rotate in and out. We might try to fit in soup. It all depends on how much we can physically fit in the small space we have to work with, and how innovative we can be!
Will we get all this stuff done in 2019? We’re sure going to try!
If you want to watch our successes and failures as we attempt to do all this stuff (while sitting back, eating popcorn, and laughing at us), you can subscribe here to receive future blog posts like this one.
For monthly news about events & new beers, you can also try out the Dimes Periodical.