Escuela de Cerveza Casera

I've been very busy the last couple of weeks getting ready to return to San Miguel de Allende. This year I'm feeling enthusiastic about my new mission to create a homebrewing school and hopefully brew a lot of tasty beer. I am not discouraged by my recently unsuccessful Kickstarter promotion but recognize my financial limitations. Consequently, I'm attempting to bring down a lot more brewing equipment than I'd planned before but will still have to find the needed larger pieces of brewing equipment in or near San Miguel. I'll return to the same welder I used last year to fabricate my brew sculpture and I've located a resourse in SMA for gas, a place called Oxigenos San Miguel. I'll need to lease or buy co2 and o2 tanks from them.



Brewing gear for the trip

Another step is applying for residence status or an FM3 and then a business license to open the school and I will relay the process here for any that want to try this same thing in the future. The legalities in Mexico are similar to those in The States regarding starting a business and brewing beer but I think I have a better chance in Mexico of bending the rules a little in terms of quantities of beer brewed and under-the-table sales. (Let's keep this to ourselves o.k.?) Another task is finding an affordable place to rent that will make it possible to teach classes with a dozen or so students at a time and enough additional room to ferment, store and bottle beer.

The space will need to have smaller rooms equipped with air conditioners to keep temperatures down for fermentation and another room with lower temps. for storage. Of course I'll also have to purchase some kind of freezer and convert it in order to dispense and bottle. A large kegerator of sorts.
Friend and fellow homebrewer Francisco who lives part time in San Miguel brought down with him on a previous trip 8 corney kegs for me and will take an additional 8 in the next couple of weeks not to mention a bunch of miscellaneous brewery pieces. This amount of kegs should allow me to condition my ales for several weeks before bottling at which point the kegs can them be rotated back to receive freshly fermented beer to age.

Packing for SMA again

In the mean time while I search for this perfect or not so perfect space, the brew sculpture will be fabricated and I'll either find stock pots large enough to use as brew kettles or have some made. You don't see to many kegs laying around so converting some of those are out of the question besides I may decide to brew 20 gallon batches (80 ltrs.)

Finally, I'm looking into using the Rotoplas water tanks as fermentors and will investigate that possibility when I get down there.

Anyway, as you can tell there is much to do and I'm chomping at the bit to get started. If anyone reading this has suggestions for saving money or getting this done in Mexico please leave a comment and like I said before, I'll keep you posted on my progress and how I achieve my goal of brewing beer in Mexico. Cheers!