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.
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| 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!
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| Our filter with a few filter pads |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Cleaning the brew kettle |
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| 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.
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| This is the Zahm & Agel except we are check the carbonation of a bottle of beer rather than check it from a bright tan |
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