This Week On Tap: Brew Link’s Insert Hop Reference, A Hopped-up American Pale Ale

“The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – “The Waiting”

Waiting can suck. Ask pretty much every brewery owner the worst part about opening up a brewery, and more often than not they’ll say it’s the waiting. Approval by town council boards, a convoluted permit process that doesn’t offer much in the way of checking where you are in the process, searching for the right equipment, buildouts, all of it seems to make opening day that much further off.

For that, brewer’s have to be some of the most patient people around. Chris Weeks’ of Wasser Brewing Company detailed to our own Donovan Wheeler the struggles of getting his brewery up and running. It all just sounds like such a pain in the ass, and for that I think that makes craft beer better.

Ask the team at Brew Link how much setbacks and waiting hurt. Originally dubbed Cartel Brewing, owners Ruari Crabbe and Adam Burk thought they had everything in the right place and were aiming for a spring 2014 opening. Everything was good to go, until a trademarking issue with an Arizona-based tea company set the business back.

“We tried to contact them directly…tried to reason with them, but they just sent us back to their lawyers,” Crabbe told Wheeler in August 2015. “[The trademark episode] set us back because we had to physically rebrand, then get our name out all over again.”

More waiting. More time until people would be able to buy the beer they’d spent years refining.