Construction: Day 1

Construction began in earnest on Tuesday at the Jester King Craft Brewery site. The Roto Trimmer, a.k.a. The Mill (incidentally the most intimidating piece of equipment I’ve ever seen in person), began its work leveling the ground for Jester King’s foundation. The Mill wields a 600-tooth rotating drum which is powered by a 21,000 psi hydraulic motor to rotate at 1,100 r.p.m. all to pulverize the rock ledges that cross the building envelope. Here’s The Mill in action.

The Mill crushed about 600 cubic yards of limestone and Caliche (deposited calcium carbonate) to be used as fill material to support our slab and, ultimately, brewery equipment. A nice thing about using The Mill to crush several tons of limestone and Caliche is that we won’t have to truck in any dirt for the foundation. You wouldn’t know it watching a giant truck with a 600-tooth rotating drum that burns 300 gallons of diesel fuel a day, but this was Jester King’s first step toward becoming sustainable.

While The Mill was doing its thing, the crew started constructing the forms for the foundation.

It was a pretty exciting seeing things start to take shape. Instead of just looking at designs on paper as we have the past several months, it was cool to be able to see the outline of the cold room and fermentation space. We were pretty impressed how much work had been finished at the end of the day.