March 20, 22, 29

As you can probably tell, there are a lot of jobs that are fairly repetitive in the brewery.  The basics are either brewing, filling kegs or bottling, and cleaning tanks or the brewery.  That is pretty much the most basic description of working at a brewery.  Sure there are plenty of other things that need to be done, but those are the basics.

3/20 and 3/29

Both of thee days were basically the same.  I spent the bulk of my time cleaning and filling kegs.  It's a task that has to be done.  It's also nice that I can be told to do this and I don't have to be watched over to make sure that I do things right.  I know how to properly sanitize the lines and hook things up.  That is a good feeling.  While I know I'm no where near knowing everything I need to work at the brewery, I can definitely contribute and help out.  And that feels good.

One the 29th since it was the end of the week we cleaned the brewery pretty thoroughly.  This meant that we sprayed everything down with our foaming bleach and then rinsed that off.  Once we had cleaned with foaming bleach, we then sprayed the floor down with a mold inhibitor solution.

3/22

Today I spent the day cleaning and sanitizing tanks.  It's the same set of procedures that I described before.  We did get to use the CIP unit.  The CIP unit stands for Clean In Place.  It holds chemicals so that we can clean and sanitize things.  We cleaned and sanitized 4 bright tanks and a 30 barrel fermenter.  Cleaning each tank takes about an hour.  Once we cleaned the tanks and pressurized them, we also checked the emergency pressure release valve.  To do that you hook the emergency pressure valve to the CO₂ tank and crank up the pressure until the release goes off.  Pretty simple but also an important safety measure to ensure that the tank won't build too much pressure and become a flying missile or shrapnel.

Spending Spring Break at the Brewery- March 5-7, 2013

Traditionally most college students spend spring break getting drunk and swigging down beers.  Instead of drinking them I got to help brew them.  It's a pretty great way to spend a spring break.

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3/5

Today we were sending out our biggest order ever.  Over 100 kegs!  That's a lotta beer.  And those 100 kegs were 50L.  We also were filling 1/6 kegs too.  Overall I think we filled over 130 kegs.  It felt great to be a part of that.  However, it did mean that my day was pretty much just spent cleaning and filling kegs.  As mentioned previously we can only clean 3 kegs at a time.  Filling is a different matter entirely.  We have a setup that allows us to fill 8 kegs at a time.  That meant that I'd spent several hours cleaning kegs and in a matter of maybe 1/2 hour we had filled all of those clean kegs.

3/6

Fridays if we are getting a grain delivery, that's when we get them.  It's quiet the job.  The pallets of grain must be fork lifted upstairs where they are put into our grain room.  It's a lot of weight to be dealing with.  It's a good workout.  Most bags weight at least 50 pounds.  Today we received four pallets.  Thankfully not all of those had to be stacked by hand.  However, probably 2 out of the 4 pallets did have to be stacked by hand.  It feels good to have a neat, tidy grain room.

Every brewery is unique and different.  Since we are a smaller craft brewery we do things differently than many other breweries.  We have a small bottling line.  After each bottle is filled and ready to go we store them in wooden crates until we can package them which also is done by hand.  Unfortunately because of moisture and such these wooden crates had started to grow mold and were looking bad, so we decided to clean them.  We have a foaming bleach cleaner that we use to clean most of the brewery.  It's heavy duty stuff.

Clean wooden crates

Unfortunately we made a somewhat common, but rather nasty mistake that people make when using chemicals.  Never mix bleach and ammonia!  You create chlorine gas which can be fatal!  The glue that we use to glue on labels to the bottles contains ammonia.  Mixing bleach and ammonia can be deadly.  There was some glue that had dripped down and stuck to the bottom of these crates.  When we sprayed them with bleach it released chlorine gas.  Thankfully the space was well ventilated.  However, I did realize that something was up because the vapor coming from the crates was burning my eyes and throat.  Thankfully nothing bad happened other than a nagging sore throat.  Could have been a lot worse.

Tomorrow we will be filtering beer so in order to prepare for that I got to setup the filter.  This involves setting filter pads between the filter plates on our filter.  It's a rather simple process but one that you need to pay close attention to.  Each pad has a smooth side and a rough side.  Every other pad has to be rotated the opposite way.  So you set one with the smooth side facing towards you and the next pad you set with the smooth side facing away from you.  Also you have to get the pads lined up uniformly or when you compress the filter plates together you will have gaps that leak.  I got the complement from Devon who normally sets up the filter, that I set it up as good or better than he does.  And they consider him the master at our brewery.  Yay me!

Our filter with a few filter pads

Our filter setup and ready to go.  The filter pads are white and the filter plates are black.

3/7

Today we filtered beer.  We don't filter most of our beer.  However, we do filter some of our beer.  Today we were filtering Bear Naked Ale. Most commercial beers are filtered.  It makes sure that they are super clear and clean looking.

I don't know a ton about how the filter works but the basic premise is that the filter plates and the filter pads are compressed tightly together and the beer is pulled through these.  Apparently the pads have diatomaceous earth in them.  This is a miracle of nature and is often used to kill various insects and little bugs.  However, in these pads it helps to  capture pieces of yeast or proteins and such that are still in the beer.

This filtering run went surprisingly quickly or so I was told.  I think we filter about 30 barrels in around 3 hours. While we were filtering we were also playing with a new toy: an in-line carbonator.  This little attachment allows us to carbonate the beer as it's going into the bright tank. If we didn't have this device we would have to carbon our beer by forcing CO₂ into the tank.  However, with this device we can carbonate the beer as it goes into the tank and cut down on the amount of time it takes to carbonate our beer.

Filter pads after  we had filtered beer.  Note that they were white and now are tan.  Much of that is yeast.

It was a brew day and I got to help clean out the brew kettle and whirlpool.  After brewing for a while, these get a lot of gunk and stuff on the inside and need to be cleaned.  It's basically done the same way as cleaning other tanks that I described in my other post.  First I just sprayed the brew kettle and whirlpool out with the hose.  Once I got most of the gunk off the inside of the tank, we then added caustic and let that cycle through the tank.  After running caustic through the tank, we then upped the chemical strength and added chlorinated caustic to the tank.  This stuff is nasty.  It can actually corrode the tank if the mixture is too strong.  But it does a heck of a job.  Once we cycled that through we rinsed out the tank and whirlpool, they were all sparkly clean for the next time we brew.

Cleaning the brew kettle

Another shot of me cleaning the brew kettle

In order to check the carbonation on our beer and make sure that it is ready to be bottled or kegged, we us a device called a Zahm & Agel DT Piercing Device.  The way this device works is you fill the bottle with ice water and cap it.  You then attach it to the tank and it forces the water out of the bottle and fills with beer.  Then you take the bottle and put it under the piercing part of the device.  You then pierce the cap and shake the heck out of the bottle until the pressure stops going up.  You then take the temperature of the beer and based on this info you can figure out what amount of carbonation is in the beer.

This is the Zahm & Agel except we are check the carbonation of a bottle of beer rather than check it from a bright tan

Getting to Help Brew! March 4, 2013

Most mornings if we have orders begin with making sure those orders are filled and ready to go.  Orders are usually picked up in the morning so often mornings are a bit chaotic and then things calm down as the day goes on.

Today I finally learned how to use the keg washer.  It's rather easy especially since it's basically all automated.  The only manual things that are needed are loading and unloading kegs onto the washer and resetting the cycle so it can run again.  The keg washer cleans, sanitizes, and pressurizes kegs.  The miracles of technology.  We can clean 3 kegs at a time and the whole cycle takes about 5 minutes.

Keg washer!

 Every 15 cycles we have to check the caustic levels to make sure that we have the proper concentration of chemicals to properly clean out the kegs.  This process involves removing a bit of caustic solution from the tank.  We then add phenolethalein indicator to the caustic.  This is a pH indicator and turns the solution a bright pink.  We then titrate this solution with hydrochloric acid until the solution turns from bright pink to clear.  We then take the # of drops that we had to add to the solution to turn it clear and divide that by 0.07 to get the percentage of caustic we have in solution.  If necessary we add more caustic to the tank on the keg washer.

The color the caustic turns when we add the phenolethalein indicator

In between washing kegs I filled kegs for an order.  However, the most exciting part of the day was being able to get up on the brew deck and help out with a brew.  The first part of this was to go upstairs to the grain room and help with getting the grain into the mill, which dumps directly into the mash tun.  Since we use a lot of 2-row malt we actually have a silo that has 2-row.  There is a pump which pulls 2-row into the mill.  We can set a counter for how many dumps of 2-row we need.  When around 2/3s of the 2-row has been milled and dumped into the mash tun, we stop that so we can add the specialty malts.  This is done so that we have a good bed for the liquid to filter through.  Some of the specialty malts and grains we use don't have good husk material and won't filter well.  Once these bags of grain have been dumped into the mill, we turn back on the counter and finish with the 2-row.

2-row malt being dumped into our grain mill

Grain waiting to be milled

Bags of specialty grains

Our hot liquor/mash lauter tun.  The bottom part holds hot water while the top part is where the mashing takes place

The top of the mash lauter tun were the grains mix with water to start the brewing process. Note the white pipe which is where the grains come down after being milled.

Me making sure that the grain bed is smooth and even

 It is also important to establish a level bed of grain in the mash tun.  If it isn't level there may be places where water won't have good contact with the grains.  This can lead to inefficient conversions.  Basically it's a waste of grain, so you want to ensure that the bed of grains is level and smooth, and make sure that there are no pockets where you clumps of grain.  This is done with a big paddle that looks like something for kayaking or canoeing.

A smooth, level grain bed in the mash tun

Once we have our mash, we do a mash-out which means we recirculate the wort back on top of the grains.  This is also called a vorlauf.  Then the grains are sparged or rinsed with hot water to ensure that we capture as much of the sugars from the grains.  After the sparge, the wort is transferred to the brew kettle where the temperature is raised to boiling and we add hops and anything else, such as yeast nutrients.  With our setup once the boil is complete, we transfer the wort to a whirlpool.  This tank spins the wort so that any little pieces of husk or grain material and other stuff that we don't want in the beer fall to the bottom of the whirlpool.  From there we transfer the beer to a fermentation tank, thoroughly oxygenate the wort and add our yeast.  And the fermentation begins!

The brew deck.  The panel has all the controls so we can control temperature, speed that water or wort moves from one vessel to another.  Pretty much everything can be preciously controlled.

The brew kettle is on the left and the whirlpool is on the right

It gets steamy on the brew deck

Me adding hops to the boil

Hop pellets

Once we are done with the mash, we actually take the spent grains from the mash tun and a local farmer picks them up to feed to his cattle.  It's nice to see that these "spent" grains still have some use.  They make delicious beer, cattle feed, and eventually manure for fertilizing more crops.

February 13, 2013

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Today I got to do some things that I had already done as well as some new things.  I got a chance to do the counting of yeast cells on my own which was really cool.  It's actually not a complicated procedure.  It seems like it should be, but it's really pretty simple.  I did the count and we had really good viable yeast.

I also got a chance to observe how we prep a tank for the next batch of beer.  Tanks are interesting equipment that must be dealt with rather delicately.  While it is true that they are super strong, they are vulnerable because they are pressurized.  It is possible to over-pressurize the tank, and the emergency release valve isn't working you could cause a tank to explode.  On the flip side, if you pull too much pressure out of a tank too quickly, you could cause a tank to implode on itself.  Some thing to consider when dealing with a tank.

These are the type of tanks we were cleaning.  They hold 15 barrels of beer.

In order to clean a tank, the first thing that must be done is to drain off whatever beer or trub or yeast is left in the tank.  Once that is drained, we slowly released the pressure of the tank.  Once the pressure has been released, the first thing to do is to run some water through it to clean off the sides and top.  After just a simple rinse, we then use a caustic blend of chemicals that will pretty much burn off whatever stuff won't come off with water.  We then rinse the caustic out of the tank, and finish the cleaning process with Perasan, which is a chemical that sanitizes on contact.  We use it for sanitizing clamps and gaskets, and lots of things.  It's a very useful chemical.

The inside of a tank.  You can see the spray ball which allows us to spray water or chemicals in order to clean the sides and top of the tank

After the chemical cleaning process, the tank needs to be purged of all oxygen.  In order to do this we fill the tank with CO₂ three times and then bleed it out.  Each time what this does, because CO₂ is heavier than oxygen, is it pushes the oxygen out while the CO₂ settles to the bottom of the tank.  After the third bleed, the tank is filled with CO₂ and the cleaning is complete.  Overall the process takes about an hour or so.

In between cleaning tanks, I helped fill kegs.  It's a constant task in the brewery.