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.