Commissioning the new brewery

I thought I’d drop a blog on here outlining our first brew in the new brewery – thanks to Barry for advice on the use of hot water cylinders – we’re stoked with the results! The brew went really well on Sunday, considering that the brewery has been completely reworked so we were starting with a brand new (to us) setup that hadn’t yet been calibrated! I’ll be adding sight-glasses to the vessels before the next brew, so hopefully that will make things a bit easier. For the sake of explanation, we've (a three-man brewing cooperative) gone from a two-vessel setup capable of about 40L max, to a three-vessel setup based on hot water cylinders which looks like being able to handle a finished batch size of about 80L. We've got (in the photo down the page a bit) a 100L HLT, 80L mash tun and 100L kettle. Not in the picture is the recirculating pump and the chiller - just a coil of copper that the wort runs though, inside a chillybin filled with iced water (with a couple of changes of ice on the way through). I'm sure there's a better solution than this, but for big volumes it's looking like being difficult to do. Disclaimer: one of my brewing partners (Rowan) did all the actual building of this - my contribution was an hour with a drill making lots of holes in the false bottom for the mash tun! For our first big batch we’d decided on an all-Sauvin pale ale, recipe as follows (for a 60L batch): 12.5kg Maris Otter 1.25kg Cara-pils 0.25kg Dark crystal 40g of Nelson Sauvin at each of 60min, 20min, 10min and FO. Ferment with 2x US-05. Having gone for a bulk grain purchase (thanks Brewers Coop) we had to crush the grain, using Rowan’s home-built mill. It hasn’t been sorted out for machine drive yet, so took about 20min to do three passes with 12.5kg of grain. The other 1.5kg was pre-crushed, so saved us a little bit of time.

The mash was started at 8.30 with an intial volume of about 37L (we think – about 2L under the false bottom, plus 35L on top of that) for 14kg of grain. The HLT had taken longer than planned to get up to temp, so next time we’ll just have to switch it on earlier. Because we needed to calibrate for volume we had to transfer via a fermenter to get that right, so lost a bit of temp in the transfer. In the end we had a nice consistent mash temp of 62C, and only lost 0.2degrees over a 80min mash. Gotta love the insulation on those HWCs.

The pump got hooked up and we started recirculating, using DG’s trick of a plastic plate on top to soften the impact on the grain bed of all that liquor coming back in the top. Got it running clear after a minute or two, so switched the runoff into a fermenter (again, to get volume in the kettle calibrated).

The pre-boil vol was planned to be 80L, and we hit that no worries, with bre-boil gravity of 1.045. We still had another 8L of wort to add, but in the interests of calibration, decided not to. A 3kw element struggled to get 80L up to the boil, and after an hour we had something going – not exactly as vigorous as we’d have liked, but still… In went the first hops, but it was another 20min before we saw a proper ‘rolling boil’. With that in mind we extended the boil by 20min, so the bitterness from those first hops will have upped the IBUs a bit. Next addition to the brewery (along with sight-glasses) will therefore be a ‘dunkable’ 2kw element we can chuck in the top to speed things up a bit.

After an 80min boil, it was time to chill – this time through our old immersion chiller, now placed inside a chillibin filled with ice and water. It’s not enough to get the full volume of wort down to pitching temp, but we got to about 35 and just chucked it all in the fridge to pull the temp down further before pitching yeast. Pre-chill we killed the heat and left it to sit for 10min to settle, having cranked a bit of a whirlpool in it with the big paddle. The first couple of litres were pulled off into a bucket to get rid of trub, and then put the rest through the chiller. There was still some other trub and crap in the bottom at the end, so that was ditched as well, but final volumes were above expectations anyway – 65L split across two fermenters (50L and 15L respectively) but below our target gravity. We hit 1.047 in the end, instead of the planned 1.052 – but should still be a nice quaffer at around 5%. Looking forward to tasting it! Overall a pretty good day, now looking forward to the next batch which I think is an APA.