I got in trouble this week. I stacked up the schedule at the ciderhouse. And as sometimes happens, one of the scheduled tasks got delayed. And consequently, the rest of the schedule got out of sync. A little bit of slack in the schedule would have been welcomed.
The ciderhouse was closed the weeks of Christmas and New Years, opening again on Monday, January 6, 2020. Cider was made and needed to be canned and kegged for orders. The canning was scheduled Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Thursday was planned for keg washing. And Thursday and Friday for keg filling.
Canning went as scheduled. However, the folks at Tinman (the canning outfit we use) had to pick up their equipment up on Thursday. This delayed the ability for me to clean up from the canning run and set-up for keg washing as was planned for Wednesday afternoon. The clean up from canning did not take place until Thursday afternoon.
After the set-up for keg was complete Thursday afternoon, I decided that I would go home for dinner and come back later at night to start keg washing. I came back and washed 48 1/2 bbl kegs. The rest of the kegs were planned to be washed on Friday morning.
On Friday morning, I got a late start. I spent needed time catching up on email. I also had to start to think about setting up the tasting room which was scheduled to open at 3 pm on Friday. McRae came down to the cidehouse to help clean up a bit while I washed kegs.
By Friday morning, I realized that I was not going to get to make any of the shipments that were scheduled for Friday. I had to move these shipments to Monday. There was no time on Friday for me to wash all the kegs I had to wash, to fill them and get all the orders organized to ship. Plus, I had to help run the tasting room.
I finished washing all the kegs on Friday at around 4:30 pm. In total, I wash 80 1/2 bbls and 70 1/6 bbls. After this, I moved to help run the tasting as people had shown up. Now I would have to fill kegs on Saturday.
On Saturday, I filled all the kegs. It took quite a while as I stopped in the middle to go to my son Elliot’s basketball games at night. I also needed to stop before leaving for the basketball games to attend to early patrons to the tasting room. I finished the final kegs at 10 pm on Saturday night. I left the kegging set-up for clean-up for either Sunday or Monday. And I also put the crossflow filter through a cleaning cycle.
I made one mistake over the course of the keg filling. I filled Anthem Pear 1/2 bbls for an order scheduled to leave in a few weeks. The use of the extra 1/2 bbl kegs shorted the number of clean kegs I had to finish off the Anthem Cherry tank as I had planned. The Anthem Cherry tank will have to wait for more clean kegs and the next keg run that is scheduled later int he month.
What I learned from this week is to plan only one priority task per day and to also allocate slack. This is especially true around canning runs. Canning runs need a day before and a day after of slack to insure time for set-up and breakdown. This will also allow for more detailed focused clean-up after a canning run. Clean-up directly after a canning run is hard when everyone is tired, wet and this time of year cold.