Quick Sips: His boss told him the work was drying up, so he built a brewery instead. | JR Heaps | South County Brewery

The 2008 housing crash didn't end JR Heaps' career - it started one.

JR was doing historic restoration and timber frame design-build work when his boss pulled him aside and basically said: the projects are drying up, you might want to chase that beer thing.

So he did.

He built his own version of the Brutus 10 homebrew system - pumps, temperature controllers, a 10-gallon setup he'd been dialing in for years. Then he went hunting for affordable commercial equipment and found four Grundy tanks from an old pub in Virginia, originally imported from England. Cut two of them apart to build his own mash tun and kettle. Welded the whole thing together himself.

That Frankenstein brewhouse? It's still making beer today - Kyle Neuheimer at Oakbrook Brewing in Reading, PA picked it up and it's still running. That's not just a cool origin story. That's a testament to what happens when a builder puts his hands on a problem.

JR Heaps is the founder of South County Brewery in Pennsylvania.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So let's uh go to that homebrewing time and printing the commercial and everything like that. What you know, it was a patching project. What were the situations that kind of aligned to you when you're like, I want to step up from homebrewing to really start scaling this out?

SPEAKER_00 0:13

It mainly went I I think the biggest catalyst was is I was working in um I guess you would call it rest restoration or historic design build. It was a company called South Ben uh down in Maryland. You know, I'd gotten my um associate's degree at York Technical Institute over here for drafting and technology, had been building my whole life as a kid, you know, working with my dad for construction. So I'd gotten a job uh with for a landscape design build company as well as a um a really nice company that did historic design building timber frame, much like you see here. And, you know, loved it. Um, but in 08, you know, housing crash, market crash, there's a lot of stuff going on. And, you know, my boss at the time looked at me and goes like, hey man, he goes, you know, these projects just aren't happening like they used to. I know you're into this beer thing. You might want to check it out. You know, almost like a, I don't know if we're gonna be in business. You know, it was it was a stark contrast working on multi-million dollar projects to hear like all of a sudden the business might not be there or was getting put on hold or whatever. So that kind of was a push or a nudge in that direction. Um, and you know, me being the person that I am, I always wanted my own thing, you know what I mean, or or kind of you know, be at be at the helm, so to speak. And I'm also the type of personality that once I latch onto something, you know what I mean, you just see it through to the end, good, bad, or indifferent. So that was that was kind of the kickoff for Catalyst into that. And I had built, you know, the the the typical I it back in the day they called it the Brutus 10, but it was three 15-gallon tegles, much like Sam Pelagoni, that system that you know he references, but it was I I built my own version of pumps and you know um temperature controllers and stuff like that, and you know, was doing pretty good beer in a little 10-gallon system, you know. And uh, of course, you get the encouragement from friends and families and fools and all this other stuff, and you know, that's where I kind of made that jump off and um then then went scrambling just because of the bootstrap nature of it, trying to find equipment that was affordable uh and ended up building my own equipment essentially. You know, I've always kind of fabricated and welded and did different stuff. So I found um some old uh grundy tanks from a guy named Scott, who in the brewing industry they referred to as the dude. Uh anybody who anyway, so long story short, you know you'd go and you'd see three brew houses and three Pratt Whitney aircraft motors sitting in a warehouse, and he Scott just dealt in it all, you know. And so I picked up these four Grundy tanks out of an old pub in Virginia. They were originally from England, came to Virginia, and then somehow ended up with them, used uh two as like fermentation combo tanks, and then cut the other two up as a mash turn in the kettle and kind of fabricated my thing. And um, to the best of my knowledge, that brew house is still making beer, crazy enough. That Frankenstein, uh Kyle Newheimer at Oakbrook in Reading, he had purchased it and one is last I know he's still actually making beer on it, which is wild. That's still in existence. Which is pretty rad. I mean, that it's it's awesome that it helps somebody out with it.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

True testament to your crash.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah.