The Brewery

As I was preparing a post that I will later put up, I realized that I have not yet explained our brewery.  That is, the equipment we use to brew.  Every homebrewer has a different, most likely, unique set of equipment that he or she uses to craft his or her precious recipes.  Ours is not terribly complex, but in order to get an idea of our brewing process, one must read on to gain an understanding.

The brewery consists of three main peices: the hot liquor tank(HLT)/brew kettle(keggle, if you will), the pump, and the mash lauter tun(MLT).  Due to monetary/situational forces, we have opted for a dual purpose water heating vessel.  Our HLT/brew kettle consists of an old, and when I say "old," I mean really old, 15.5 gallon half barrel keg.  Old refers to more than its age, but also the style of the keg.  It is an almost antique, "on the side" style more akin to a stainless steel barrel than traditional keg.  The keg has had one end plasma cut open and a fitting welded to what is now the "bottom" as a port for draining.  This vessel, as the name suggests, has many uses which mainly involve heating some kind of liquid.  The HLT use of the keg is for heating water for mashing in and sparging.  The kettle use is, well, for boiling the wort.  The pump is used, as the name suggests, for moving liquids from one vessel to another.  More on that later...  The final major piece of our brewery is the MLT, yet another vessel with multiple uses.  Those are, if you can't tell by the name, mashing and lautering.  The MLT is a marine sized cooler fitted with a custom copper manifold lining the bottom.  The manifold was manufactured by our own resident "equipment engineer," Jason.  He used 1 inch copper pipes to create a frame, roughly the size of the bottom of the cooler with multiple pipes running the length of the cooler.  These pipes have small cuts at intervals allowing the liquids to drain through them.  Connecting these pieces of the brewery are quick connect hoses which allow us to service each of the pieces without wasting valuable time.

These pieces come together on brew day in a delicately balanced and carefully choreographed symphony of brewing madness.  Generally our brew days start with simultaneous grinding of grain and heating of mash water.  Once proper volumes have been heated and grains appropriately ground, the two are combined in the MLT for approximately 60 minutes.  Towards the end (25 to 30 minutes remaining) of that 60 minutes, we start preparing the volume of water needed for sparging.  When time is up, we commence the vorlauf and begin mashing out into a spare cooler.  Since we don't have a dedicated kettle, we have to store the first runnings before the kettle has finished its turn as an HLT.  The discontinuation of liquid exiting the tun means we can start sparging.  Water is pumped from the HLT to the MLT and remains there until the grainbed has settled.  We vorlauf again and pump the remaining water into the kettle for boiling (along with the first runnings from the spare cooler).  The wort is then boiled for 60 to 90 minutes and hops are added.  At the end of the boil, fermenters, hoses, chillers, and the pump are all sanitized for the new beer.  We connect our pump to the kettle and pump the beer cooling it as it flows through our counterflow chiller directly into our fermenters.  Add yeast, and we're done!

The sequence hopefully yields beer at the end.  We have had a few mishaps; namely, stuck mash, 80 minute boil (instead of 120 minutes, sorry Mike), and missed vorlaufs.  Fortunately we have been doing this long enough to live the realization of our favorite saying: "Its easy to make good beer; its difficult to make great beer."  This keeps us sane during the hectic brewing process, knowing that our worst case scenario is that we will have beer.