Plumbing

This pub is in a building constructed, along with the two to the West, around 1945. They are block buildings and they butt up against each other. It has interesting plumbing we discovered during the renovation. Common sense would've suggested that the collection of big black pipes would converge somewhere under the slab and run out to the street and into the main sewer. When constructing the front sidewalk patio we enthusiastically had the crew dig out the entire front of the building. Carefully, of course. Wouldn't want to crush the pipes.

There were no pipes. After scrambling around outside, we found a pipe coming from the back of the second story of the green building that had a clean-out near the ground, and after banging on it with a pipe wrench and listening to the clean-out in the ladies room we discovered that they shared a common destiny. That destiny is presumably the side street, the long way around, where I would image it works its way downhill to East First.

Something in those pipes got stuck today, because the water started pouring out of the floor sink in the kitchen, right while we were happily serving customers and I was awaiting the boil of my batch of hoppy ale. This is a Bad Thing (tm), because I dispense a great deal of water into that system on a brew day. If I didn't get it fixed, then a) I would have to toss out an entire batch, or b) I would forge ahead, allowing a couple hundred gallons of dihydrogen monoxide to flood the kitchen and bar. Fortunately one of the locals had a 20' snake, and I managed to root out some fascinating biological compounds and spent sanitary products, thereby freeing up, at least temporarily, the efflux of pub matter and mitigating my Level 2 Whinge.

The Good Thing (tm) that we've learned here is the demonstration of why the plumbing code insists on floor sinks in commercial kitchens. Also, I have a Sewer Expert coming tomorrow to do a thorough cleaning so this doesn't happen again for a month or two.

I hope this episode doesn't scare away all you promising young aspiring publicans. This state needs more pubs, so get out there and purchase or lease your space, get your Brewers Notice and Brewpub License, hire some staff, and get that career rolling. (And this means you, Jon the Lompoc brewer, as well).

Oh, and any happy trails and so forth to the 15 or so euro-bikers that showed up right when we opened, ate food and drank hardly and beer, and then left a whopping $5 tip. Woot!