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We have been invited to serve our beer at the Orlando Beer Festival in November, and have had regular requests to serve beer at church and community events. To accommodate these present and future needs, Castle Church is making a Draft Beer Trailer to take our brews and community mobile! All of the commercially available options were extremely cost prohibitive, so after some research we are doing a DIY build-out. It may not look pretty now, but with a some sweat equity and lot's of love, we will have a trailer you would be proud to have at your next event! In the part one video, we prepare the utility trailer, cut a hole and mount the A/C unit, and insulate all the sides to achieve a R-20 barrier. In this next video, we finished the inside, installed the beer draft system, and tested out the electronics. Our long terms plans are to cover the entire trailer with a graphics/logo wrap, and to hook up a battery bank and alternative energy source so we can serve and store beer off the grid. Stay Tuned! Thanks for your support and let us know what you think! Peace, Aaron Aaron Schmalzle is a mission developer in the Florida-Bahamas Synod of the ELCA and, along with Pastor Jared Witt, is a Founding Director of Castle Church Brewing Community and Castle Church Faith Community. We have been invited to serve our beer at the Orlando Beer Festival in November, and have had regular requests to serve beer at church and community events. To accommodate these present and future needs, Castle Church is making a Draft Beer Trailer to take our brews and community mobile! All of the commercially available options were extremely cost prohibitive, so after some research we are doing a DIY build-out. It may not look pretty now, but with a some sweat equity and lot's of love, we will have a trailer you would be proud to have at your next event! In this part one video, we prepare the utility trailer, cut a hole and mount the A/C unit, and insulate all the sides to achieve a R-20 barrier. In the next video, we will finish the inside, install the beer draft system, and test out the electronics. Our long terms plans are to cover the entire trailer with a graphics/logo wrap, and to hook up a battery bank and alternative energy source so we can serve and store beer off the grid. Stay Tuned! Thanks for your support and let us know what you think! Peace, Aaron Aaron Schmalzle is a mission developer in the Florida-Bahamas Synod of the ELCA and, along with Pastor Jared Witt, is a Founding Director of Castle Church Brewing Community and Castle Church Faith Community. Jared Witt l August 25, 2016 Last week, I wrote about Christianity’s angry cousin, who goes by the same name. The existence of an angry cousin makes it difficult both for people who identify as "Christian" and for people who don’t to define what exactly we’re talking about when we use that word.
I realize that I stand right on the edge of hypocrisy by suggesting that one version of Christianity might be more Christian than the other. But given the current state of our culture, it has become impossible not to acknowledge that there is an essential difference between the Christianity of Mother Theresa and that of, say, Pat Robertson. It’s complicated, because, as a Lutheran, I’m obliged to acknowledge that everyone is a mixed bag. I’m sure Mother Theresa had her bad days, and Pat Robertson has his good ones, and it's not really about us and how good we are in the first place. But at some point, it becomes unhelpful to try to deny, for the sake of Lutheran correctness, that there is a very real distinction between one sort of Christian whose main goal is to be loving, and another, whose main goal is to be pure. Jared Witt l August 18, 2016 My wife, Nikki, is absolutely in love with people. And I don’t just mean that she loves the people who feel most familiar and comfortable to her. We all love those people. My wife loves strange people, foreign people, difficult people specifically because they are strange, foreign, or difficult.
I first started noticing this about her while we were still in school, dating and barista-ing together at Starbucks (kind of a big no no except that everyone in the history of baristas has done it). The café where we worked is in an uncharacteristically diverse pocket of Columbus, Ohio, which has one of the highest Jewish population densities in the US and people from several different central African cultures. Watching her interact with the neighborhood, while I spilled cappuccino on the floor, was where I first learned that my wife was going to become my wife. I’d watch her face soften into pure, self-forgetful tenderness when our Eritrean and Ethiopian customers would come in and make an order through broken English. I’d watch her become as patient as a mother to one of our regulars, who was mentally ill, and several others who were just plain mean. Her short, tight crop of brown curly hair created more than a couple conversation in-roads with the African American women (I’m not sure if the term “white girl afro” is politically correct, but you get the idea). If you were well-traveled, she would ask you about it with the fascination of a two year old but would take equal interest in your story if you’d never even been out of the state. Jared Witt l August 11, 2016 A year ago, when Aaron and I were just beginning to introduce the Castle Church concept to people, we could never have guessed how many would immediately grasp the need for this kind of place at an intuitive level—no explanation needed. For others, a faith community that owns a brewery is a bit of a paradigm shift, which has led to more than a few conversations like this:
Person: I’m sorry, what did you say you were building? Me: A church and a brewery. Person: Ok, so you’re building a church? Me: And a brewery. Person: I see, so you’re actually building a brewery? Me: Yep. And also a church. Person: Is the church going to meet inside the brewery? How? Me: Well, I suppose a bunch of people will all go there at the same time. Person: Yes, but I mean, How is that going to work, with people all meeting at the same time…in a brewery? Me: Oh, you mean at a more theoretical level? Well, the time-space continuum is very complex, and I don’t pretend to understand all of it. But basically, what Einstein proposed is that… Person: No, but…I mean…so…what kind of church are you going to be? Jared Witt l August 4, 2016 Who ruined the world?
Was it the Republicans? Was it the Democrats? Was it the Christians? The Muslims? The black lives? The blue lives? Was it me?...Definitely not me, right? We’re not the first to ask that question. In the family and lineage-based cultures of Bible-y times they would put it this way: If your father eats sour grapes, will your teeth be set on edge? In other words, whose fault is it that there is so much wrong with the world? Our generation's? Or our parents'? Are we paying the consequences of our own bad decisions or someone else’s? Who deserves the blame? Don’t bother trying to figure out how a bad fruit might affect one’s grill. That’s not the point. |
Mashing in.On how Castle Church is stirring up a movement from a brewery in Florida. Archives
July 2018
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