About the Client
Founded in 2018 by husband and wife Patrick and Adriane Hodges, Bold Republic Brewing was the first craft brewery in Belton, Texas. Because of its success, Patrick and Adriane outgrew their original location, which they fondly refer to as “Old Republic.”
Last year, they opened their second location, now in Temple, TX, which is incredible. John and Alyssa had the pleasure of visiting a few times. The new location includes indoor and patio seating, a full kitchen serving pub food with a coastal southern flair, a playground, an axe-throwing venue, and more to come!
For more info, check out their website!
Bold Republic and Bespoke History
John and Patrick first met through Kinnek.com, a website for sourcing brewing equipment. Patrick was looking for equipment for “Old Republic” and submitted an RFQ. John was luckily in the US at that time and was able to call Patrick shortly after submitting a bid. Patrick remembers them hitting it off because although John is based in China, he was born and raised in Austin.
When Patrick was developing Old Republic, he was a home brewer and approached his initial order with a home-brewing mindset. Initially, Patrick wanted to use plastic Fermentation Vessels (FVs), but we suggested he order stainless steel with glycol cooling instead to ensure his success.
BBS helped bridge the home brewer mentality to ‘this is what you’re going to need to be successful on the commercial side’. We changed quite a bit of our order through those talks.
Even though the order cost considerably more than expected, Patrick’s faith in the BBS team altered the plans for the Old Republic and helped support their rapid growth and eventual step up to the New Bold Republic.
This was the second system we designed and manufactured for Bold Republic. We love getting to work with their team. We say it a lot, but the people in the industry and building relationships are truly the best parts of what we do.
The Challenges
Consulting and Guidance
We worked closely with the Bold Republic team again to bring their new brewery to life, making sure we understood and met Bold Republics’ needs accurately. This was a greenfield project, so we also worked alongside the local designers and general contractor to ensure we covered all the aspects of the brewery area.
Balancing the Brewery and Hospitality
When designing the layout of the new brewery, you first need to allocate the space required. This leads to compromises between brewery and hospitality, with the latter carrying more weight. Rightfully so, as more butts in seats, more revenue can be generated. Patrick wanted to create a delicate balance between the two.
Scalability
After quickly outgrowing Old Republic, Patrick and Adriane prioritized scalability with the new system, especially as they started planning for self-distribution.
The Solutions
Consulting and Guidance
We consulted on the layout, services, and general flow of the brewing area to utilize the space allocated.
Our team strives to live up to our name with each order, so we tailored their equipment design based on their unique goals and requirements. This culminated in a very Bespoke system that is built to utilize as much space both horizontally and vertically as possible with an efficient flow.
We even made a suggestion based on developments in the brewing industry that Patrick appreciated:
They were really flexible with the design process and let us do a custom order - like custom-sized and additions, and the fact that they keep up with current trends. For example, we have this tubular heat-exchanger that he had piloted a little bit with some of his Australian clients where there's an intermediate step between the end of your boil and passing through your HEX that's been added to bring the wort down to a lower isomerization temperature, like 170 (degrees F) to where we can have hop additions that are at the end of the boil at a cooler temperature that some systems that I’ve brewed on just don’t have the capability to do. He understood our desires and needs, as far as this is something that is important to us, and incorporated it into the design.
Balancing the Brew Room and Tap Room
We understood Patrick’s desire to maximize the taproom space, as more seats lead to more sales. We aimed to create a brewing area that took up minimal space while remaining functional. The brewing area has a lot of vertical space, which our team utilized in designing the Brite Beer Tanks (BBTs) and FVs to be taller and skinnier, maximizing the area’s efficiency.
Scalability
Working with the Bold Republic team, along with our very powerful Brewery Scope Calculator (shown below), the realization came that a 7BBL brewery was probably not going to be enough. The brewery size was increased to a 15BBL and they have not looked back!
Results
The most important result is another happy client. Patrick and Matt Benavidez, their head brewer, love the system we provided.
I’ve worked on a lot of brewing systems and this is probably one of the easiest ones I've had to work on so far. Granted, it's brand new. No real complaints on my end. I told John the same thing. From day one I’ve had pretty good success.
We value our partnership with the Bold Republic team and would like to congratulate them on their impressive new brewery!
Overall, we did it a second time and we would do it all over again. He’s been a really great connection in the industry.
Get in touch!
Read about the other projects we’ve done or get in touch for a quote.
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