As you may recall, your Co-op represented the co-operative beer movement at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver! Our co-workers Jeff, Karinne, and Chris left Austin in the early morning with fellow member-owner/our partner in crime from Austin Homebrew Supply, Jon, to drive 943 miles in 14 hours. They were really excited to be serving Vector, Vulcan, High Esteem, Cantankerous Dockhand, and Waterloo to craft beer lovers outside of Austin.
To hear more about Black Star Co-op’s participation in GABF, check out this video with Jeff and JB of Austin Homebrew Supply.
While at GABF, Chris took his Cicerone certification testing, then the crew picked up their badges and festival bags. Check out Karinne in her complimentary oversized t-shirt and nose hair trimmer:
Looking good, Girl!
After registration they set up the booth and ran into another member-owner, Bob:
Hey Bob! (And he pulled out his membership card to prove it!)
The first people to stop by our booth: Member-Owners Doug and Vicki:
While Karinne went to her Pink Boots Society Meeting, Jeff, Jon, and Chris went to New Belgium and met one of their idols, Peter Bouckaert.
The Black Star Army is vast! They ran into Member-Owner, Ted, who works at a Fort Collins brewery:
Here’s another Member-Owner:
Although we didn’t win any awards, they had an amazing time. Congratulations to NXNW, Austin Beerworks, and Uncle Billy’s!
Today, I’d like to share a project we are extremely excited to be working on incorporating into our construction and design: LEED certification!
For those of you who are unfamiliar with LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, it’s basically a set of standards put forth by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to implement environmentally sustainable design, construction, and operation of buildings and neighborhoods. Ok ok. What does that mean? Just think of LEED as a rating system and certification process for green building practices.
Back in December, we felt that we should at least review the LEED process, and quickly decided it was something we wanted to pursue. Shawn Lavin, a LEED AP who was also a member of the volunteer architectural design team, is heading our LEED endeavors. In addition to Shawn, our team consists of Matthew Nesbitt (our Architect), IE2 Construction (our general contractor), AYS Engineering (our MEP engineers), Jerry Van Norman (Enhanced LEED Commissioning Agent) and yours truly (representing the Black Star Workers’ Assembly). We are pursuing the LEED certification for Commercial Interiors, as we are finishing out a shell building.
The LEED process certainly has presented its challenges…allow this LEED joke from greenbuilding.com to demonstrate:
How many LEED credits does it take to change a light bulb?
One—but you need a writer, 18 committee members representing manufacturers, government, the environmental community, the social justice community, and the health and safety community, three draft versions, two public comment periods, one life-cycle analysis, one pilot period with 100 pilot light bulbs, one member ballot, and one competing system with completely different standards.
While this can be a tedious process at times, we are passionate about being to able to proudly represent the desires of our membership and the Austin community in supporting an environmentally conscious building process. This added facet of our project has impacted time in our design process and does have additional upfront construction costs associated. So we hope that with the upcoming Green Brewpub Investment Forum we can gain the financial support from the environmental community to achieve the highest level of certification we can!
Also in this post – construction document update!
The papers have circulated throughout the varying City of Austin departments for review and we’ve received a round of comments. We’re confident that our responses will fully address those comments and we’ll soon be cleared for a building permit! I truly hope to be able to announce in my next blog post that we have the permit in hand and that I am doing my last rollerskating dance routine with Steven in the empty space that eve.
The clock is ticking and we are eagerly and anxiously awaiting till we can officially break-ground, begin some demo and trot around in hard-hats.
Until next time!
:::Karinne