After many long months, our plans were approved by the Health Department today! Hooray! It wasn’t just a matter of strolling in with our revised plan, and walking out with an approval though. The entire approval process took 8 (yes, eight) hours! I had an appointment with the plan checker at 8 am this morning, and didn’t get our plans stamped until 4 pm.
One of the trickier aspects of our project is that the Health Dept. classified the tasting-room/bar-area, as a “retail food establishment”, and the brewery-area as a “wholesale food establishment”. This translated to double the work for us, and instead of submitting the typical 3-sets of plans, we had to submit 6-sets (3 for each “side” of the operations).
As we looked over the new plans, the plan checker kept making notes about what we needed to change. I asked her about making those fixes, and luckily she let me just draw in the changes with a red pen, right then and there on the plans. This was great, except that I had to make all of those changes on each of the 6-sets of plans. Just the process of making all those changes on 6-sets of plans took three hours to complete. And somehow at the end of that process I ended up with little flecks of White-Out all over my face…no idea.
Anyway, that part is over for now, but we’ll have to deal with the Health Department once again for the final inspection before our doors open. Now it’s on to the Department of Building & Safety to get our building permits. I’ve already put in the phone calls, so hopefully we’ll have an appointment with them by early next week, and building permits soon after that.
I guess the celebrating will have to be short-lived for now…time to get back to work!
Eagle Rock Brewery 
whoohoo congrats!