We have an Etsy store!

Ok, no not really - but this post is about to get all crafty and DIY up in your face. 

A couple of weeks ago I decided to try and create a prototype of our tasting tray.  This is the kind of thing you'd order when you come in and see all of the tasty beers we have on tap and just can't decide on which one to get a pint of.  I took my inspiration from the cool tasting trays they have at Falling Sky brewing down in Eugene:

Now, these are quite fancy and plastic and clearly manufactured by professionals.  That's fine, ours may or may not be as well, but the idea was to just get something to give us an idea of what to expect.  Also, something for the blog.

So - the Falling Sky tray is kind of cool because it looks like their logo, a rain cloud (my picture is upside down).  Our logo is a thankfully much easier shape to replicate being a simple ellipse.  I figured I could cut a shape like that out of 1/4" think plywood pretty easy. 

I used the pins and string method to sketch out an ellipse which was 11 inches wide by 8 inches tall.  This animation came in handy.  This was a rough estimate for how big the tray would need to be to hold six 4 ounce tasting glasses.  I then centered six 2" holes and using a drill saw, the kind you normally use for door knobs, drilled out my glass holders.

Once that was done it was a matter of roughing out the ellipse with a jigsaw.  My skills with a jig aren't all that, so it took a couple of hours of sanding to smooth out the edges.  Eventually I had a deck which was looking pretty good.

As you can see above, the glasses fit nice and snug in the holes I drilled, so there's no need for a bottom layer to the holder.  The glasses fit in about one inch beneath the hole.  All that I needed next was some legs.  I went with 1 1/2" carriage bolts, threaded through plastic tubing which was 1 1/8th in long.  That left me enough room on the bolt to snug down the top with a nut and secure the legs onto the top deck.

Here's a couple of shots of the finished product, after some black paint:

Turned out pretty good I think.  It's roughly the same dimensions as our logo and should be pretty easy to clean and handle.

If you're curious, from left to right, that's our Old Ale, Saison, ESB, Best Bitter, IPA, and CDA.  Also a bunch of white flowers which fell off the tree in the back yard just to make me mad. 

So - a nice tasting tray flight.  Will these be in use come opening day?  Maybe.  There's a lot to do between now and then and noodling around in the garage is pretty low on the list.  It was a lot of fun to make though, and now I know how to do it.  I guess you'll just have to show up and find out...