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.