Building anticipation: Pieces coming together at Peak Drift.

Right now, it might be easy to mistake Ashley Kinart-Short for a contractor, not a brewmaster.

With the opening of the 64,000-square-foot production facility, brewpub and entertainment venue she'll preside over on North Main Street anticipated next spring, Kinart-Short is most likely to be found these days roaming Peak Drift Brewing Co. in a brightly colored hard hat festooned with brewery logos.

"You can't manage what you don't measure," Kinart-Short, announced last August as Peak Drift's brewmaster and the second woman to hold that position in the state of South Carolina, said during a recent tour.

While excited to begin producing up to 25,000 barrels a year of IPAs, sours and other styles of beer in addition to the hard seltzers and ciders Peak Drift also plans to offer Kinart-Short is currently a hands-on participant in design details still being hammered out. Apart from the sheer scale of the project in the former Stone Manufacturing building, ongoing supply chain challenges and labor shortages have thrown wrenches into Peak Drift's schedule.

"Number one, you can't plan to get things when you don't know which things are going to be those next things that you can't get in time," said Brian Johnston, vice president of operations at project contractor Mashburn Construction. "Number two, it's hard to lock in a price, because by the time you figure out what you can get when, the cost has gone up again. Those things have made everything else a lot more challenging. Something as simple as the overhead door or the dock levelers had extremely long lead times. Or some oddball things like the epoxy in the paint for the flooring, the resins, we couldn't get those."

The building also presented some internal obstacles, namely in the form of its distinctive barrel roof that is key to both the design and the historic tax credits helping to fund it but unable to support the heavy process piping necessary to move liquid throughout the facility. Johnston said steel supports had to be engineered to provide additional support.

The bank of windows that will allow taproom visitors to view the brewery's huge steel fermentation tanks proved to be another challenge. First, their design had to be approved by the myriad regulators who oversee historic restoration projects, including the State Historic Preservation Office and the National Parks Service. As intricate as that process can be, it may, in this case, have been the easy part.

"The lead time is massive to...