Downtown Microbrewery Closer To Opening

A downtown Salina microbrewery should be up and running in time for Oktoberfest. Monte Shadwick, owner of Blue Skye Brewery, says the brewery equipment showed up Tuesday morning.

“We spent the day unloading and that’s a little bit like Christmas for the brewers,” Shadwick said. “We’ve got their crew here setting up. They’ll be here for five days, kind of just making sure the whole process works, all the equipment works.

“What we’ll do on Saturday is called water brew, just to make sure everything works. Soon as that happens, then we’re just waiting on the federal and state permits, which we should get next week, and then we can go ahead and start brewing our first batches.”

Shadwick says the brewing process takes five weeks, meaning they could be open by the end of October.

It’s taken a little longer than expected. When we talked with Shadwick back in June, he said the hope was to open September 1st. But they are renovating a building that was severely damaged in a fire and that takes some time.

“We learned earlier this summer not to set deadlines, because we missed a couple of them, and that happens in a big construction project. We want to make sure we’re doing this right for Salina, doing this right for downtown, and that we got a great product on opening day.”

Blue Skye Brewery is located at 116 N. Santa Fe Ave. in Salina. It was previously a retail store, Anderson’s Leather, which was in business for 51 years, before it was shutdown after a fire four years ago.

Information from: http://www.wibwnewsnow.com/