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Happy Camper Launch Party

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Two weeks ago I did the launch party for the Happy Camper Bar Car. My new business, the Happy Camper is basically a food truck for booze built into a 1972 Airstream.

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Backstory

Two years ago, growing dissatisfied with my day job, I was considering starting a food truck with my brother.  My real dream was to open a bar, but it seemed so mysterious and expensive at the time. I’d never worked at one. They needed all sorts of fancy equipment. My brother has been a chef for a long time so I wasn’t worried about the cost or knowledge involved in doing a food truck, but a bar? No way.

We never ended up doing it though because my brother was going to drop out of school to work on it, and I didn’t want that. I ended up taking a weeknight job at a bar, for just long enough that I felt comfortable owning one. Not that it’s rocket surgery, but just working at one for let’s say 25 to 50 shifts will save you a lot of headache. You’ll make a lot fewer mistakes than you would if you went cowboy and did it yourself, and someone will pay you for the education. It’s a no-brainer and I’m glad I did it.

I felt ready to start a bar. So I started looking at real estate. I found a spot I loved. It was owned by the county and they wanted the building do prop up the convention center next door. The door to my bar would be directly across from the door of the convention center, which meant a hundred thousand people a year would stumble out of a miserable work event looking for a drink and mine would be the only one in sight.

It was stripped down to brick and concrete. It had these beautiful cathedral ceilings because the building is built on a hill and it was at the bottom, with a gorgeous window above the high door. The perfect speakeasy. All it needed was a bar and some Edison bulbs hanging from a pipe.

The one small wrinkle was that they wanted to sell the building to make a hotel. They’ve been trying to make a deal for that for years and failing, but they didn’t want to do a lease longer than a year just in case. Which made it hard for me to justify putting much money into it, even though I think that hotel is about as likely to occur as a zombie outbreak.

But mysteriously, they were also getting a renovation budget from the county to turn it into usable space. They seemed like they might be amenable to letting me using said budget to build my bar instead of putting in generic carpet and white drop panel ceilings like the old UPS store next to it.

I was feeling optimistic. And that’s when they found asbestos. The cost for them to remove it would have been more than I paid in rent for six years, so understandably they decided to just wait for the zombie apocalypse. So the one spot I wanted was gone.

I could have looked for another. My city’s downtown has plenty of vacancy. But that’s when I saw a couple people online doing food trucks for booze.

Sure, I’d joked about that several times. But the inability to get a liquor license seemed like a deal breaker. Except, of course, if you do private events. Then you don’t even need one. What a great loophole.

It goes really well with what I love doing. I really like batching cocktails. There are so many advantages to them over made to order ones. You have more control over dilution and chilling when you can divorce the two. You can ensure a level of consistency far beyond even the best bartenders. You can make things bubbly. You can serve people the highest quality cocktails at beer speed. And most importantly, you can do it without ever washing dishes. The weight of the water it would require to be stirring and shaking on the Airstream wouldn’t fit on the axle.

So when I found the loophole that made it possible, I was talking to my good friend Heather and she wanted to jump into it with me. We went for it. We went from talking about it to owning a stripped-bare Airstream in under a month, and having a party three months later. Do that with a bar!

The Launch Party

Fast forward to four months later. The trials and tribulations involved in getting the Airstream ready would make a blog post, or maybe a book but we were past it and it was time for the launch party. The girl doing the interior woodwork was coming down to the wire. The party was on Sunday and I got a bar top installed Saturday afternoon. Ever built out a tap system in a couple hours? It ain’t easy! I knew I’d have to run to the homebrew store for something, and they were only open until 5, so I got started ASAP.

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Thankfully I’d done everything I could beforehand. I’d cut all of the beverage tubing and drilled holes in the side of the fridge to run it through. I’d made sure I could fit six kegs and two gas tanks (one CO2, one nitro) in the left-hand side of the fridge. I’d installed the shanks and valves, including four custom post-mix soda valves on beer-tower sized soda shanks made for me by CM Becker. All we had to do was screw the towers into place, run the lines, and connect the liquid disconnects.

It went off without too much trouble. I turned out to be one tap handle shy because we never had time to make our custom ones (next time) but that was all I really needed from the homebrew store. I built the system and ran each drink through its line.

On the far left was beer on draft. I’d simply gone to a growler fill and filled my 3 gallon Corny Keg and recarbonated. The next drink was one I made up featuring Rittenhouse Rye, lemon, apple cider, Aperol, and mulled simple syrup.

We had my homemade ginger beer on draft for mule variants, including my brown butter dark and stormy. We had Jack Rudy tonic force-carbonated in another keg.

The last two were cocktails. One is Chartreuse and root beer. It was an idea I’d gotten from Chris at A Bar Above (I think) and have been playing with for a long time. For this version, which is by far the best, by the way, I used:

1.5 oz. Chartreuse

1 oz. Monin Rootbeer Syrup

5 oz. Water

1 dash orange bitters

I scaled that up to a few gallons using my handy dandy cocktail calculator then force carbonated at 32 PSI at about 28F. Do yourself a favor and let this one rest a day. I made some to test and tried it day of, and it tasted like it needed more orange bitters and Chartreuse. Then I tossed the rest back in my fridge and forgot about it until Heather came over a couple days later. I tasted it again then and it was magically the greatest drink of all time.

The last tap was my carbonated serrano margarita. Maybe I’ll explain the recipe for that one some time in the future. It’s a blog post in and of itself.

Here’s the full menu:

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Lessons:

#1. Detach gas lines from kegs before driving down the road. Turns out liquid can back up into the gas lines, and from there up into your distributors and regulator from the sloshing. I spent the first half-hour trying to unjam the kegs as a result. One of them got halfway empty and never flowed again.

#2. Keep your tap lines accessible. Ours are hidden behind the bar and wrapped in insulation. It’s a bitch to get to them and if something jams, I’m screwed. (I don’t think I need glycol, the stuff never sits around enough to get cold, but if it starts foaming due to temp I might build an air-cooled system. I don’t anticipate having to do so though, insulation should be good enough.)

#3. Move the CO2 tanks outside of the refrigerator. I had not accounted for the fact that I’d have extra kegs that needed to stay cold, so room in there was at a premium. I’m going to drill holes in the right for two lines, and set up quick disconnects in the fridge so I can easily swap out distributors. That’ll make the whole thing much more organized and easy to troubleshoot if something goes wrong.

#4. Test the Airstream with a non-contact tester before every event. This didn’t happen at the party but later at my house, thankfully. My house is really old and my garage has a GFCI in it into which I plug the camper. You’d think that’d make it safe, and it probably would if whatever idiot wired it decades ago hadn’t had current coming out of the grounding wire. An Airstream isn’t grounded because it sits on big rubber tires. And the shell is highly conductive. So it zapped me. You just never know what you’re going to be plugging into, and if an electrical source is wired wrong a customer could get seriously injured!

#5. People really love home-made ginger beer. It was like half the drinks that walked out. I’ll account for that at future events. I was a little worried that my menu was a little too hardcore for casual cocktail fans. Not so. I think I sold one drink with tonic in it the whole time. I’ll probably repurpose the remaining case of Jack Rudy for a special drink, like an Elderflower G&T on draft, and use one more cocktail and one fewer mixer generally.

#6. I should have spent more time calculating the PSI needed before I ordered the parts. The lines were 12’ long, plus there’s a 2 foot rise, and that’s too much resistance for 3/16” ID line. I had to pump it out at about 35-40 PSI. Good thing I never had to use my personal remanufactured ball lock keg, it vents around there. (Note to self, fix that.) Our new ones don’t even seem to vent at 55, which is the highest I’ve taken them, but still. I couldn’t figure out why the beer wasn’t flowing well when the event started, turns out I was just way off on that.

The shaken drink on draft relies on a lot of pressure forcing it through the stout faucet. At home on my personal equipment, 30 PSI gets a great drink. That’s about 22 PSI more than I’d serve a carbonated drink at. I couldn’t even get the Fireside up near that, so it ended up with a texture I wasn’t 100% happy with. Still tasted good but wasn’t perfect. So I’m switching to 1/4” ID line. That’ll let me drop the pressure way down to about 8.

Anyway, I would say overall the party was a success. The drinks were really good. When the taps jammed I spent a half hour fixing them, but we got through it. I then spent two hours wanting to go behind a shed and cry! But I muscled through that too. And then it was over.

I’m pretty optimistic about our venture. We’ve now cleared most of the major hurdles that were worrying me. I’ve got another venture I’m working on to go right alongside it too. And I’m going to greatly improve the batching app. And I’m even working on a book about batching drinks too. So stay tuned.

The Happy Camper

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For years I’ve wanted to start a bar. My readers (all three of you) know that I even spent a good 8 months working at one just to get my feet wet. (Side note, the look on people’s faces when I told them my day job is owning a software company while washing their pint glasses was funny.)

So I started looking around for a bar space and funds. I didn’t feel comfortable spending 100% of the amount it would take to both build a bar and staff it, and weather the first year of trying to build a clientele. I also wasn’t sure the market I’m in could bear what I really wanted to do, but I was able to come up with a concept I thought could work. Basically, I was going to do well-crafted classic cocktails at a relatively affordable price by having a limited back bar selection and defaulting to good, cost-effective liquors like Old Overholt, Olmecca Altos, etc. Pretty much what I make at home most of the time. I was going to use batching to make service super efficient and fast, serving pre-bottled Manhattans, kegged carbonated drinks, etc.

I found an awesome spot. It was in a building from 1903. An old Masonic Temple. They had an unfinished basement space with cathedral ceilings and these beautiful high windows above the door. It was stripped down to bare cement floors, brick walls, exposed HVAC. Perfect.

Except it was owned by the city. The city wanted to sell the building so they didn’t want to do long-term leases. What they wanted to do was get a budget from the convention center (also owned by the city and across the road) to renovate it and get a few decent businesses in that would help promote downtown. What better than a wonderful cocktail bar, right? I couldn’t commit much in the way of renovations with only one year guaranteed of a lease, but if I could get their budget and fix it up, it might be worth it.

So I I started figuring out who to talk to to get them to give me that budget. They were just going to waste it on a nondescript, white drop-panel ceiling and some standard office carpeting anyway. They’d probably drywall over all that beautiful brick. Ugh. Instead I’d just take the budget, put in a beautiful reclaimed wood floor and paint all the HVAC black. I’d run some copper pipes along the ceiling, drop them down and put Edison bulbs in the end. (Yes I know Edison bulbs are played out, but literally nobody around here has them.)

Then the city found out what it’d cost to remove the asbestos they hadn’t mentioned to me. Let’s just say it’s about what I would have paid in rent over the first 6 years. They decided to just let whoever buys the building deal with it and I was a free agent again.

A few friends told me about people doing mobile bars they’d seen online. While not cheap, it was less onerous than starting one in a fixed location. There’s no real estate to worry about. There are no liquor licenses to acquire. The process is streamlined in every way but one: building a bar in an Airstream ain’t easy. There are lots of people who will turn your retail space into a bar, very few who will do so for a trailer and even fewer an Airstream.

But we found a place near Toledo called P&S Trailer Services that does Airstream refurbishing. They sell some to commercial operations, like food trucks. There are very few places in the country capable of that, so it seemed like a stroke of good fortune. We talked to the owner online and then drove a couple hours out to meet him and it seemed like he was a good guy. He told us he could do pretty much whatever we wanted with the Airstream in terms of buildout.

Turns out, not so much. Maybe he could do it. But he had a multiple month backlog of orders. So when we wanted a little bit of work done, despite repeated insistence that he could do whatever we wanted, he stopped responding. When I finally got a hold of him on the phone, same story. “Just tell me what you want and I’ll make it happen.” Again we wanted some minimal work done and again, no response. Finally he told my partner something about selling it to someone who just wanted it as-is.

I think in the end, he had more orders than he could fulfill, and instead of just explaining that to us became a little disingenuous. It’s unfortunate, and what should have been a pleasant transaction became a huge pain in the ass.  We ended up taking it stripped down and in less-than-perfect condition (in fact over time we came to see just how less-than-perfect it was) and decided to find another RV/Camper service department to do the work for us. After all of the trouble with Steve we were just happy to get the bad boy home.

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Home it is though, so we’re now in the process of turning it into a bar. We found a guy in Cleveland who does food trucks who did what we need in terms of plumbing and electrical. That was another headache, because while the guy actually did great work, he wasn’t a great businessman/communicator. But he did do good work at a reasonable price. I’ve spent spare time over the last two weeks diving into the world of restaurant auctions and picked up some baller bar equipment.

Being in an Airstream, we’re under a few limitations. For one, running water isn’t easy to pull off. Loading this bad boy with enough water to wash dishes all night is basically impossible. You also couldn’t put that kind of weight on an axle. Even if we could, propane-powered water tanks won’t give us the volume of hot water needed. So basically cocktails have to be either built or pre-batched because I can’t count on being able to wash shakers.

That’s not a big deal. I’m quite good at both batching (i.e.kegging, bottling, and punches) and building drinks. Some of my favorite drinks are built. Old fashioned, mojito, Dark and Stormy (or a mule if you must), caiprinha, Paloma, etc. Any stirred drink can easily be translated into a bottle. Shaken drinks can be kegged on nitrous and blasted out under pressure. An egg white drink will come out ridiculously foamy.

Which takes me to the killer feature that will set me above the rest of what you’d find in the wedding bartending game: a big tap system. I’m planning on building a homebrew system with 6 taps and using Corny kegs. I can do awesome carbonate cocktails like a Tom Collins or mojito on draft.

I will make my own ginger beer. I did a blind taste test and everyone agreed it was far better than Fever Tree and Fentimans, my two previous favorites. I’ll probably buy Jack Rudy Tonic and force carbonate that by the keg, since acquiring my own quinine seems to be a huge pain in the ass and the Jack Rudy stuff is pretty great anyway. When you buy it wholesale and carbonate it in keg volume it’s easy to make and about the same price as grocery store tonic but considerably better-tasting.

If they want cola, I can do the same thing with Monin cola syrup, which is far, far better than Coke. Same with root beer. I also make a few mean homemade sodas, like grapefruit, strawberry, and cucumber mint that could be used for cocktails or just for those who aren’t drinking.

I’m also going to get all the local breweries to fill kegs of beer so customers can have a couple craft brews on tap. Since I can control carbonation levels, I can simply fill up my kegs with any beer that’s available by the growler and fix the CO2 levels if needed, so if a customer has a favorite beer I should be able to have it on draft.

So I’m excited. We’re aiming for a mid-October launch party to get our service down. We’ve already got interest from a couple places for events, and I’m excited that after nailing down a few from bridal expos and the like, we can expand. I feel like in two years I’ll be booked solid.

But mostly what I’m excited for is making the cocktails. I love making batched drinks. It’s the perfect mix of art and science for me.  I learned a lot at Tales of the Cocktail, and figured out some great stuff on my own about it, and I’m excited to put it all together and keep pushing the limits of what cocktails can do. You’ll see a lot from me about this in the coming year. Stay tuned.

The Future

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Long time, no blog. Life has been busy. I was working a couple nights at a bar by my house to get used to bartending, since I want to own a bar one day. I’m glad for the experience. I feel like it’ll save me from a lot of potential mistakes when I go to open my own. It’ll make it easier for me to both hire and train bartenders. There are a lot of little concerns I hadn’t thought of, things as silly as which distributors sell what, that I now know.

But I’m ready to move on. Between my day job and that, it was getting to be too much. It’s not that I couldn’t fit it into my schedule. But after a few months, I felt like I wasn’t learning anymore, and at that point I was just doing it for money. At the end of the day, I don’t want to be a bartender. I want to be a bar owner. It better suits my skills. There are some soft skills that good bartenders excel at that I probably never would. I’ve been called the Human Grumpy Cat on several occasions, but that’s really just how I am when I’m working for someone else.

Todd, the owner of the bar I worked at, is about the best someone else you could work for. Really he’s a great guy. And intelligent. He’s a math teacher by day, which makes him fucking Einstein for a bar owner. I’m not surprised he’s succeeding.

My main contribution to the operation was the cocktail list. I taught a couple of the other bartenders how to properly make some drinks. I added a bunch of classics to the menu. I’d get people who used to drink vodka-soda switched over to a Tom Collins or a French 75, which adds a few bucks a drink to the top line. I got beer drinkers to try cocktails. I had customers raving that it was the only bar in town where they’d order a whiskey sour. I got them infusing liquor, and we made some good strawberry margaritas and blackberry daquiris.

Like all good things, though, it came to an end. I’m leaving after June and starting my own thing.

My good friend, Heather, and I found a guy a couple hours away who refurbishes Airstreams for a living. We went and saw his lot. He had 30 or 40 of them laying around. His dad started the business almost 50 years ago. He worked with his dad, until pop retired, and now works with his son.

We’re planning to buy one and make a mobile bar out of it to cater wedding receptions, etc. I’ll have lots of pics and videos as we move along. Hopefully we’ll be signing on it this week.

Right now I’m working on our competitive advantage. One thing I want to do, that you can’t find anywhere else, is have a great tap system. I plan to make homemade ginger beer on draft for Moscow Mules/Dark and Stormies, etc. I want to do tonic on tap, either our own or Jack Rudy or something. I also want to partner with a few local breweries to have good beer on draft as well.

We’ll do awesome batched cocktails. We’ll have a couple punches. Maybe Manhattans on draft if I can get a nitro system going, which seems easy. Maybe even a rapid barrel aged cocktail served from a barrel for aesthetics.