Pipes, wires and tremendous vats for brewing beer.

It’s a checklist that’s been going through Chris Walsh’s head lately.

The owner of River Horse Brewing Co. is under a tight schedule for setting up a production system on Graphics Drive in Ewing to replace his former brewery in Lambertville, where there was not enough space to accommodate his growing business.

Walsh has a target completion date of April 30. That’s a date he cannot miss.

It’s the latest River Horse can re-open and still hit key dates on its production schedule, particularly for its seasonal brew Summer Blonde and year-round favorite Brewers Reserve.

“It’s a do-able time frame,” he said.

The first step in transforming the 25,000-square-foot Ewing building into a room full of beer fermenting tubs was completed last week, said Walsh.

To make the best use of a space that will be more than twice the size of his Lambertville brewery, Walsh said he first had to demolish pre-existing structures, install brick firewalls to shield vital mechanical equipment and slant the floors toward a drain system.

By this week, plumbing contractors will arrive to set up the piping network necessary for the complex process of brewing beer.

That work will provide the fermenting vats with channels necessary to infuse various ingredients — water, compressed air, carbon dioxide and glycol, an industrial coolant used to regulate fermentation temperatures. Prodigious quantities will be used.

“The joke in brewing is that, for every gallon of beer you produce, you use five or six gallons of water,” said Walsh. “It’s like we’re a cleaning company that makes beer.”

Electrical contractors will then set up critical circuit systems.

Finally, in the move that will make a building into a brewery, River Horse will transfer all of its current beer-making equipment from Lambertville, including several 40-barrel fermenters to accompany a 150-barrel fermenter the company will purchase.

Then, in a phased process that within the next 12-18 months will increase production capacity 30 to 40 percent — up from 9,000 barrels per year — River Horse will buy a few more 150-barrel fermenters to replace all of its pre-existing 40-barrel fermenters.

“Then you flip a switch and it all works perfectly,” joked Walsh. “Everybody laughs at that, especially the contractors.”

With the understanding that surprises often accompany construction projects, Walsh has factored ample recovery time into his completion date, making being early much more of a possibility than being late.

“We’d like to be done early, to test some things out,“ he said.

PRODUCING MORE VARIETY

When everything is ready, the new brewery will afford Walsh the opportunity to produce a greater variety of beers than he has been able to.

Now possible, Walsh said, is reintroducing lagers to River Horse’s currently nine-deep all-ale catalogue of beers. As a craft brewery, Walsh said, River Horse once prided itself on including lagers in its selection, especially unfiltered ones.

But because it takes lagers twice as long to ferment as ales, Walsh said, it was not efficient to continue producing them, especially because River Horse was struggling when Walsh bought it in 2007.

Now, after a recovery and a move to a bigger facility, adding lagers to the River Horse family is once again practical. And there’s more to expect than the reintroduction of lagers, Walsh said.

“We can do things we couldn’t before now, too,“ he said. “Pilsners, German-style beers, dunkels — this opens up a lot.”

To make the move, two summers ago Walsh began raising capital to “aggressively pursue a building” that “River Horse will never grow out of.”

To pay for it, he said, his background in financial banking — he worked for seven years at Access GE, General Electric’s consulting subsidiary — gave him an advantage over his competitors.

“I had a Rolodex,” he joked.

A few calls later, it was done — on very favorable terms, he said. While sometimes companies have to sell an ownership share in order to raise funds, Walsh said he didn’t have to do that. He’s just going to pay back the money he received, with interest.

Walsh said River Horse will work hard to increase bar sales, which previously accounted for just 20 percent of revenues, with the rest coming from retail locations like liquor and grocery stores.

To do it, Walsh said he’s already made buying more kegs a top target.

“However we can get our beer out there,” he said.

CREATING A TASTING ROOM

River Horse also will create a tasting room at its Ewing location, and will continue to host other on-site events such as beer fests, something it used to do in Lambertville but chose to stop because of quality concerns.

“It wasn’t the most pleasant experience,” he said of the long lines and cramped conditions.

River Horse also may explore the possibility of sponsoring huge, county fair-like gatherings in Ewing.

Corporate and educational events also figure to make River Horse money, a revenue driver made possible with the 4,000 square feet of on-site office space the Lambertville facility didn’t have.

“We don’t have it yet, but I guarantee you we’ll have a strong relationship with The College of New Jersey eventually,” he said.

While the marginal revenue from those streams won’t be River Horse’s primary business, Walsh said it’ll all pay off in brand exposure.

“It’s like people will be paying us for our marketing,” he jokes.

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