Still Here

It is hard to believe the length of time since my last entry.  It has been a whirlwind of a year.  We finally "completed" the house remodeling project and moved off our construction loan onto permanent financing.  It truly was starting to seem like we might never actually finish the project and the threat of increasing interest rates loomed heavy.  Nonetheless, we finally finished the project, which has allowed us to focus effort on finishing the brewshop. 

Ah yes, the brewshop.  We are so thankful to our patient customers that have waiting so long for us to fully open.  We are fully stocked in most ingredients you can imagine and have a decent assortment of equipment in stock.  We have also made some significant advances with regard to suppliers and the equipment we can sell. We are more or less fully open now and our customers can start to count on limited, but regular hours.  We will be open Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings, until we feel the need to expand.

On to some generally exciting developments.

IL House Bill 0630
This is truly exciting news.  HB630 passed the House and Senate and became law as Public Act 098-0055 when the Governor signed the bill.  The primary goal of the bill was to legalize the sharing of homebrew.  While homebrewing has long been legal in Illinois, the previous version of the law restricted homebrew to the family and guest of the brewer in their home.  This was a potential fly in the beer for all kinds of things good, such as competitions, beer club meetings and festivals.   HB 630 fixed that problem.  Of particular interest to Windy Hill is a provision legalizing the manufacture and sampling of beer in homebrew shops, such as ours.  The bill seems to focus on providing samples and demonstrations in the store, both of which we plan to do.