Casey's Beer

After much stuffing around the two containers are here, have cleared customs and quarantine, and have been unloaded.

It took just over a week to go through the formalities for the first container to become available for delivery. It was due to be picked up on the morning of Thursday April 8. The plan was to have it delivered to the Johnstons Transport depot at Smithfield, with delivery time somewhere between 1 and 2 pm.

Of course that is nothing like what happened. Everything had been pulled out of the container for quarantine inspection, so it would just be loaded straight on to the truck and there would be no mucking about getting the empty container back. Wrong. I get a phone call late Wednesday afternoon from the customs broker, the gear was is on 14 CHEP pallets and I will need to have 14 CHEP pallets to send back. A phone call to Johnstons, they have not CHEP pallets to spare. So the driver will just have to wait while the gear is taken off of the pallets so they can be returned.

Thursday comes and before leaving for Johnstons I call the customs broker to check the delivery time. The transport is running late, it should arrive at Smithfield between 2 and 2:30. So I head off to Smithfield arriving just after 2. At quarter to three no truck, so another phone call to the customs broker. He rings the transport company and then rings me back. The truck is still at the bonded warehouse at Botany with three trucks in front to be loaded. There is no way that truck will make Smithfield before 5 pm, besides Johnstons yard staff finish at 3:30pm and after that it’s overtime rates.

So the new arrangement is for the delivery truck, with the gear, to go back to its depot at Chipping Norton and deliver it in the morning at a time to be arranged. Johnstons don’t have staff available to unload until after 11 am, but the delivery company wants to be there first thing.

The arrangement is that on Friday morning a time will be arranged for later in the day depending on how everyone is going. Of course Friday morning the truck shows up at 8:15 – but no can do, all the fork lift drivers are out on jobs. Come back at 11. The truck is back at 11. I get there shortly after. There are six conditioning tanks, one fermenter, a glycol chiller and not a bloody CHEP pallet to be seen – I couldn’t work out how they were going to get the tanks on to pallets anyway.

So here are all the conditioning tanks and the first fermenter:

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.