Dry Hopped Sour - Two Ways

With the popularity of both hop-forward IPAs and sour beers, it is surprising that so few brewers add aromatic hops to their mixed-fermentation beers. I suspect that many brewers are scared off of brewing a hoppy sour after hearing that hops can inhibit souring bacteria or that sourness and bitterness clash (both of which are true).

The key to success is the way in which the ingredients are brought together. In the case of the two beers I'm drinking tonight, Nathan and I allowed the base beer to sour in a wine barrel for more than three years (solera style) prior to dry hopping briefly right before bottling. This is the easiest way as it imparts a huge aroma, but minimal bitterness. As an added bonus, Brettanomyces scavenges oxygen as the beer ages in the bottle, protecting the hop character from “turning” as it does in so many IPAs.

Solera on Sterling

Appearance – Ever so faintly hazy vibrant yellow. The retention of the white head is rather brief, typical for a long-aged sour.

Smell – Subtly herbaceous compared to the straight bottling. Not enough to cover the underlying vinous/citrus or faint maltiness. Very clean, no big funky Brett character, considering the age and fermentation.

Taste – Firm acidity, that fades to a bit of the classic “Cheerios” character in the finish that I get in my young/pale sours. The winey notes from the barrel and the hay and lemon from the microbes get along nicely with the hops. Comes across very lambic-like, positively Hanssens-esque I’d say.

Mouthfeel – Dry, but not thin. Solid carbonation. Nothing I would change.

Drinkability & Notes – The lingering cereal note in the finish detracts from the drinkability slightly, but this is still an excellent beer. When the hops were a little fresher I didn’t pick up that toastiness, and hopefully it will clean itself up with a couple more months in the bottle.

Solera on Citra/Mosaic/Nelson

Appearance – Ditto, other than pouring with a slightly smaller head.

Smell – Wow. An aroma that doesn’t just leap, but explodes out of the glass. Huge juicy layers of peach and tropical fruit. When I shared this beer with a couple of the brewers at Modern Times, they doubted that there was no fruit added. At once both reminiscent of the hops used and completely unique. Considering the hops went in four months ago, they still come across fresh. The only shame is that the base beer smells excellent on its own, and the hops obscure most of it.

Taste – The acidity comes across as mellower than the Sterling’d portion. Rounder. Tangy certainly, but the less aggressive. The “Cheerios” character is nowhere to be found. The bright fruitiness lasts through into the finish, fresh squeezed orange juice especially.

Mouthfeel – Feels fuller, sticky, almost oily. Carbonation is similar.

Drinkability & Notes – It is remarkable how beer that spent three years together and then received identical treatment other than the hop varieties could diverge so wildly. This is one of my favorite sour beers I’ve ever brewed, complex, drinkable, and surprising.

Modern Times Pilot System Brew Day

I thought it would be fun to walk everyone through a typical batch on the small Modern Times system (if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you probably saw a lot of this already). During my two months working at the brewery, I brewed on the ~23.5 gallon pilot system about 15 times. Some of those batches were true recipe pilots intended for eventual scaling, while others were experiments, or food for our souring microbes.

This will probably be a bit more practical than the production batch brew day walk through! I know there are homebrewers out there with systems that are similar to this one, but there are a few neat things we are able to do at a brewery that no one has at home. It is much more advanced than my usual rig. The stand was built by a local homebrewer (John McKay), and he outfitted it primarily with components from Blichmann Engineering. He's built several similar systems, including one that Coronado Brewing uses for their pilot batches.

The mill is the same one I use at home, a drill powered Barley Crusher. It would certainly be nice to have a mounted and motorized mill, but this one gets the job done. Base malt is usually easy to come by, but I did my best to avoid taking sacks of malt that were earmarked for an upcoming production batch. If we had a specialty malt on hand for I'd take a few pounds, but for anything else a trip to the local homebrewing store (Home Brew Mart) was required.

The system came with a propane regulator and burners, but my first job was to switch it over to natural gas. Natural gas is much less expensive and doesn't run out or lose pressure like propane. The pressure is lower though, so it requires a larger diameter hose to produce the same amount of heat. After getting accustomed to how easy it was to deal with, I'll certainly be switching my homebrew system to natural gas when I get around to overhauling it.

 

Here is the empty 30 gallon mash tun with false bottom. Rather than the manifold I use, this is piece that separates the wort from the spent grain. Seemed very effective, no stuck sparges, even when using a high percentage of oats or wheat. Brewhouse efficiencies hover between 75-80%, pretty good considering how hoppy many of the beers we brew are.

Rather than starting with cold tap water and using the burner to heat it to the strike temperature, we can simply steal hot water from the brewery's hot liquor tank. It can be heated slightly more, or mixed with cold water as needed to achieve the target temperature (about 10 F above the intended mash temperature, with a 1.3 qrts/lb ratio). The large diameter hose helps speed things up too.

After mashing in, we insert a temperature probe into the thermowell and set the associated controller to the target mash temperature. When the temperature falls below the set point, the controller opens a valve that allows gas to flow to the burner (ignited by the pilot light). The march pump circulates the wort continuously from under the false bottom and back into the top to prevent the wort from scorching.

A second temperature probe measures the temperature of the wort flowing out from under the false bottom. The goal is to run the pump fast enough that this temperature closely matches that of the mash itself. The pump on the right is only for water, while the one on the left is for wort.

After a 45 minute rest (the wort has been recirculating this whole time, so there is no need for additional time spent vorlaufing), it is time to sparge. A few minutes before the rest is complete, the brewer fills the pilot's HLT with hot water from the brewery's HLT. The system is equipped with an AutoSparge, which operates with a float (similar to a toilet's tank). Rather than rely on it, I tended to match the flow in from the HLT with the flow out to the kettle, using the AutoSparge as a safety in case I got distracted and wandered off.

Here is the control panel with its two Love controllers and a bunch of switches (from top to bottom they control the main power, temperature readouts, gas valves, and pumps). While it was nice to have all this automation, it also makes life more complicated when something stops working. For my last couple brews the controller responsible for the mash tun stopped reading correctly, meaning I had no way to turn that burner on. Luckily with 20 gallon batches, you don't lose more than a couple degrees over the duration of the mash rest. The issue may have been the probe, with all the heat and water the risk of damage to them seems substantial.

Empty boil kettle with HopBlocker. No pouring the wort through a sieve like I do at home, this inverted metal cup prevents most of the hops (even pellets) from being transferred out of the kettle after the boil.

Here's a rolling boil with some good hot break. At most we aim for 23.5 gallons post-boil, which means starting with about 26 gallons (accounting for evaporation, and losses to trub). Hops came either from the commercial stock, homebrew odds-and-ends, samples, or were specifically purchased if we needed something we didn't have on hand. After the boil ends, we manually whirlpool the wort, and then allow it to settle for 20 minutes before running off.

 

Knocking out wort into one of the four insulated 27 gallon More Beer conical fermentor. Impossible to see in the photo, but chilling water comes through a pipe connected to the cold liquor tank, which always has water held in the high 40s F. The CLT pump really shoots water out through a 1/2" opening, so I needed to pin the hose carrying the spent water to prevent it from whipping around. Makes knocking out 20+ gallons of wort quick, usually15-20 minutes. There is a slot to insert one of the probes to monitor the temperature of the wort as it exits the chiller.

When it is available, we take a few cups of dense yeast slurry from one of the yeast brinks, or big fermentors. Barring that, we'll either make a starter, or when pressed for time... buy a whole bunch of White Labs vials.

The cold boxes are set to around 40 F to store kegged beer, which is too cold for fermentations. The solution was to attach a heat bands to each fermentor, then cover in adhesive-backed foam insulation. A Ranco temperature controller probe inserted through a thermowell turns the heat on when the temperature falls too low. We were actually having the opposite problem when I left, with a nearly full fermentor, and booming fermentation, the insulation was actually too effective, trapping so much heat that the temperature would climb into the mid-70 F. A cooler knock-out may be the solution, setting the temperature in the low 60s F initially, allowing it to climb to the high 60s F on its own before ramping up the setting on the temperature controller to hold it there.

I also learned the valuable lesson about the heat bands. The first batch fermented set to medium, which was enough heat to cook the krausen onto the inside of the conical. That was not a fun hour of scrubbing.

After emptying and scrubbing out the boil kettle and mash tun, we flush the plate chiller with a hose, and then run hot water plus caustic through it. While that was running for 15 minutes, there is just enough time to clean the floors (floor drains are another big help). On good days I went from milling grain to completely cleaned up in about five hours, not too bad for quadruple the volume I brew at home!

 

After fermentation is complete, we turn off the heat wrap and allow the beer to crash cool. When it is ready to keg, we attach a hose to the racking arm, rotate it up, and push with a couple PSI of carbon dioxide pumped in through a bayonet affixed to the top of the conical. Makes it easy to transfer wort, no pump to prime, and less exposure to potentially damaging oxygen. Then it's as easy as shake carbing and attaching the liquid out to one of the taps in the tasting room!

 

Working at a Startup Craft Brewery

I'm back from my summer in San Diego, two months working for Modern Times. Came back to my old desk and 6,900 emails earlier today at my real job. For the last few weeks in California I was having so much fun that I stopped posting on the blog, sorry about that. While I was out there I detailed a brew day on the brewery's "main" system. So to follow up on that, I thought I'd give an overview of what day-to-day life is like at a startup craft brewery when you aren't brewing. I think many homebrewers don't have a clear image of what goes into working at a new craft brewery.

Cleaning
A few years ago a brewer, although I can't remember who, told me that far from being a glamorous job, brewers are glorified janitors. After working at a brewery, I wouldn't dispute that characterization. There is of course cleaning the mash tun, fermentors, kegs (using a three keg washer), the random mess that comes from boxes constantly arriving (full of stuff from McMaster-Carr, brewery schwag, hops, microbes etc.), not to mention the floors. Sure there are days when the brewers get announced and a round of applause when they walk into Toronado, but that isn't most days.

We used six different products/methods in various combinations to clean and sanitize the brewing equipment:

Caustic (Shear 250) - Strongly base (the opposite of acid). Caustic is probably the most dangerous thing in a brewery to human skin (as anyone who has seen Fight Club is likely aware). This makes sense as organic compounds (like yeast residue) are the prime target of caustic. If you do get caustic on your skin, quick action and rinsing with something acidic (like beer) are essential. Its effectiveness increases as the water temperature rises, to a point (around 140 F was what Alex suggested). The caustic laced (2-4%) hot water is run in a CIP (clean in place) loop that sprays the kettle, mash tun, or fermentor. When cleaning is complete on one vessel, the caustic can be pumped over to another and reused. After rinsing with hot water, the pH of the tail-end of the final rinse is checked to ensure it is equal to that of tap water, ensuring that all traces of caustic have been removed (caustic tends to float).

Oxidizer (SB Brewery Cleaner) - Similar to the PBW (or OxiClean Free) that many homebrewers use. An oxidizer helps to boost the action of caustic, although it could be used on its own. Used where there are especially nasty deposits that even caustic would have trouble removing without assistance.

Phosphoric/Nitric Acid (Acid #14) - Diluted with cold water, this acid blend helps to remove inorganic calcium oxalate, commonly called beerstone. The low pH shines the stainless steel while removing places for unwanted microbes to hide. When dumping spent chemicals it is important to remember that bleach plus acid releases chlorine gas (which killed many people during the trench warfare of the first World War).

Peracetic Acid - The no-rinse sanitizer of choice for fermentors at Modern Times. It takes a surprisingly small amount mixed with cold water to effective kill microbes. When exposed to water or the atmosphere, peracetic acid breaks down into acetic acid (aka vinegar). Luckily such a small amount is not a concern for the flavor of the beer. Like homebrewing, sanitizer is not used on surfaces that contact wort prior to chilling. Surfaces that touch boiling or near-boiling wort are not a contamination risk. Remember to always dump any sanitizer that might be trapped in the racking arm of a fermentor before pumping the beer or yeast in. Unlike homebrew-sized fermentors, you can't really look into the sanitized conical or shake it to ensure it is empty.

Iodophor - I tended to use this for Corny kegs, carboys, and accessories on the Pilot system. It is relatively skin safe, so I tended to use it anytime I'd have to touch the sanitizer. It was also kept in spray bottles to sanitize sample ports, gaskets, clamps, and the tops of filled Sanke kegs.

Heat - As I mentioned in the brew-day post, water from the hot liquor tank is often used to pasteurize hoses and smaller vessels (e.g., yeast brink). Heat has the benefit of killing microbes down in small cracks and crevices where it is impossible to guarantee sanitizer would reach.

What You'll Do

If you are coming onto an established brewery that does several brews a day (our head brewer was overseeing more than 40 batches a week when he left Lost Coast), your experience of day-to-day life will be quite different from mine. When I left, there were only a couple big batches brewed each week. With sales steadily growing, the tasting room now open, and canning starting in the next couple weeks, brewing will become more frequent.

In addition to cleaning, most of my days were spent brewing 20 gallon batches on the pilot system (I'll walk you though one of those next week), helping to build out and paint the brewery, getting microbes started for the barrel program (30 wine barrels are arriving shortly), writing, organizing, and other miscellaneous projects. Luckily I was spared the sales work that the other brewers are doing, visiting local bars to give samples, working with our sales reps, and working the tasting room. The brewers also spend time monitoring fermentations, carbonating beers, filling out kegs, working on paperwork for taxes, ordering ingredients/equipment etc. Drinking and evaluating our beers was an important part of all our jobs, but not huge time-wise.

Gear

Just like any job, brewers have a set of gear that makes their job safer and more comfortable. There is no perfect wardrobe for every brewer, but here is what worked for me:

Boots - The single most essential item for any brewer. Everyone has their own tastes, but footwear need to be water- and chemical-proof at a minimum. You need protection from the near boiling liquids and caustic/acid that flow (sometimes unexpectedly) across the floor. Mine are 6" laceups, which served me well (and quite reasonable at about $30). Alex preferred tall slip-on rubber boots, while Matt wore low slip-on leather boots (when he wasn't walking around in flip-flops, the California brewer look as he called it).

Socks - Up through college I wore tube socks. I never really liked them (they tended to end up bunched around my ankles), but it's what my mother bought and I didn't realize there were options. Since then I've become a convert to shorter socks. Turns out they are an unsurprisingly poor pairing with over-the-ankle boots. After a couple days I bought socks tall enough to prevent the boots from rubbing against my calves. You'll be standing and walking around a lot, so the more comfortable your feet are, the better.

Pants - There are different schools of thought on pants, I wore shorts on days I wasn't going to be dealing with heavy-duty cleaning, but most days called for jeans/dungarees. Essentially whatever you're comfortable in accepting that you might bump against a hot piece of metal, or receive a brief spray of caustic...

Gloves - The brewery has a couple pairs of chemical resistant gloves floating around for measuring out the dangerous cleaning products. You need a combination of safety and dexterity, gloves aren't much help if they protect your skin, but prevent you from moving dangerous liquids carefully. Some brewers also have more maneuverable gloves to make handling scalding hot hoses easier.

Safety Glasses - Always good to have some eye protection when working with dangerous chemicals. It only takes a single drop to the eye to cause serious problems (luckily the emergency eyewash station hasn't needed to be deployed yet).

T-shirts - As a brewer you are generally required to wear t-shirts from the brewery, or breweries you've previously worked at, bars where your beer is served, or obscure industry-specific suppliers. Luckily you acquire these for free at a relatively brisk pace. Really dress-code depends on the place and who you interact with.

I learned a lot this summer thanks to Matt, Alex, and Derek. I really appreciate the time they took to answer my questions, and help me when I had no idea what I was doing (aka most of the time). Hopefully some information on sours and Brett flowed the other way as well. I'll be writing another, more philosophical post here about what I learned, and probably some sort of wrap-up post for the Modern Times blog about what I accomplished.

Modern Times Sour Beer Update

With only three weeks to go before I leave San Diego, we're really kicking the sour beer program into first gear. I've got 15 cultures growing, and another 20 waiting in he cold box. The newest delivery was from Jeff of Bootleg Biology. While some of his cultures are from the usual place (bottle dregs) he also sent microbes he isolated from kombucha, wild honey, and his backyard in Arlington, Virginia. They should add some nice biodiversity to our microbial holdings.

We're talking to a couple wineries and brokers about buying barrels, but haven't actually purchased any yet (that should be coming shortly). Ideally we'd prefer the place to be within driving distance so we could go, inspect the barrels, and drive back with them. Buying only as many as we need at a time for only one batch. We'll see if that happens. We've also got barrel racks on order (pretty reasonable at $36 each, including shipping).

Over on the Modern Times blog I have a post about the four initial base beers we'll be brewing, including complete recipes for each (although the Halltertau hops are just a placeholder for whatever we end up using). The post includes some basic thoughts on the sorts of strains we'll pitch into each, and how we might go about flavoring them once they are soured. Luckily getting all my hard work out of the way this trip, can't wait for subsequent trips to San Diego that will focus on the fun stuff: blending and adding fruit etc.

While the barrel-aged beers won't be ready for at least a year, we're considering a few stainless fermented sours that should be ready sooner. I have a couple cultures growing from the microbes living on malt (Lactobacillus mostly). These will go into a "quick" sour ala my sour-worted brown. We'll split the 20 gallon test batch of reddish wort to see which culture produces the best results (including a Wyeast Lactobacillus as the control). When the target sourness is reached, as determined by tasting and pH readings, we'll use heat to kill the bacteria before doing a 100% Brett fermentation. Should produce an interesting, tart, complex beer in not much more than a month.

How to Brew on a 30 bbl Premier Stainless Brewhouse

Three years ago I did a post on my basic homebrewing process. Since then it has been of the most popular pages on the blog. Several people have told me that it really helped them to see an example of a complete process, rather than reading a book that can be overwhelming with several options for each step.

In a similar vein, I thought I'd walk through a brew day at Modern Times. This won't be enough specificity for you to brew a batch on our Premier Stainless Systems 30 bbl brewhouse, but hopefully it is enough to give you a flavor of what a batch on a two vessel craft system is like. This particular batch was the third of Lomaland saison.

Alex "Captain Kunindra" Tweet walked me through the first half of the brew, before our head brewer Matt Walsh arrived to finish things up. Ironically Alex's first all grain batch a few years ago was a recipe posted on my blog (shortly before he swept the Ballast Point competition that earned him his nickname). Matt has been a brewer for years, starting at Alesmith before stints as head brewer at Karl Strauss, Speakeasy, and most recently Lost Coast.

Excuse the photo quality, I brought along my DSLR, but left the memory card in my computer. As a result I had to shoot with my phone.

This big red box is our hot liquor tank (HLT). Purchased secondhand, it is automatically controlled to keep a supply of hot water ready to use for the mash, sparge, and cleaning.

We waited until the water in the HLT reached 170 F before mashing in because while water is being sent to the brewhouse, the HLT stops heating.

The night before Alex milled in nearly all of the malt (pale, Pilsner, and acid) followed by the flaked wheat and corn through the trap door in front of the mill. The grist is conveyed by an auger to the hopper in the center of the picture.

Here is the control board for the mash tun, there is a similar one for the boil kettle, and another for the fermentors. At the moment nothing has been switched on.

Here is the mash tun. The "rakes" on the right side are raised or lowered manually. They stir the mash, and are used to clean out the mash tun. Running the rakes down with the mash tun full of spent grain can cause serious damage.

Unlike homebrewing where the mash water is heated in its entirety to a specific temperature, here the water from the HLT is cut with cold water (via the black-handled valve) to reach the desired temperature as indicated by the thermometer at the top.

To get hot water to the brewhouse we hit the HLT to Brewhouse button. This stops additional water from being added to the HLT or heating.

The clean in place (CIP) is opened so that the hot water is sprayed over the interior of the mash tun to pre-heat it to the target mash temperature.

The valves below the mash tun are opened to allow this pre-heating water to drain. The door used to empty the spent grain is also cracked to allow the hot water to drain.

Here you can see the hot water spray on the manway of the mash tun.

The temperature slowly rises over about 15 minutes.

The hot water drains.

He dials in the speed of the pump that delivers water to the mash tun. The auger that carries the grain operates at a fixed speed, so we have to adjust the water delivery to reach the desired mash ratio. A slow flow rate can also cause the grist to jam up as it mixes with the water. The same readout also provides the total amount of water added.

And closes the valves, to begin trapping water in the mash tun.

About 100 gallons of water is allowed to enter the mash tun without any grain. This lays a foundation so that grain is not forced down onto the false bottom that serves to separate husks from wort during lautering.

Alex continues to dial in the temperature to reach the target, about 11 F above the mash temperature (149 F).

Our flow rate (gallons per minute).

 Right on target (after a minute or two of fiddling).

The rakes are turned on to stir the mash.

Once the temperature is on target, and the foundation water has been laid, the auger is switched on to deliver the crushed grain.

The door is slid out to allow the grain to mix with the hot water as it enters the mash tun.

He fiddled with the cold water to get the temperature just right as is seemed to be coming in a degree or two high.

When the grain is almost drained from the hopper, Alex ground a final bag of pale malt to ensure all of the specialty malts were "chased" out. This is especially important when brewing a darker beer, as it doesn't take much dark malt trapped in an auger to affect the color and flavor of the following beer.

Crushed grain passing out of the storage hopper and into the auger that carries it to the mash tun.

The mash tun as it fills with hot water and grain.

When all of the grain is in the mash tun, we continue to run the water until we hit the target volume.

The hop extract used for bittering is put onto the boil kettle in advance so it warm up and liquefies (it is very thick and syrupy right out of the cold box).

 

The valves are opened to allow wort to flow via gravity from under the plates of the false bottom and into the grant.

More valves are manipulated to allow wort to be pumped from the grant back into the top of the mash tun, preparing to vorlauf.

After the 20 minute mash rest, here is what the wort looks like.

The mash tun has two sight glasses to allow us to gauge how the wort is flowing through the grain bed. The one on the left shows the pressure above the plates, and the one on the right is below (it would much easier to see with a stout). If the one on the right is just a few inches below the one on the left, then things are running smoothly. In the difference is greater, then the wort isn't flowing well and you may be in for a stuck vorlauf/sparge.

The valves and pump speed are adjusted so that the wort flows into the grant at the same rate it is pumped out. This is the easiest time to get the flows equal so it does not need to be adjusted later.

After 20 minutes of vorlaufing the wort is flowing much clearer.

 

Here is the empty boil kettle. The hole at the bottom is for cleaning, wort headed to the chiller will exit the hole at 1 o'clock.

He moves the valves to pump the wort from the grant to the kettle instead of back into the mash tun.

He takes the gravity of the first runnings.

Our final mash temp is only .4 F below our target. It is easy to over-correct. Initially the temperature appeared low, then high. Trusting the water temperature calculations are key, any adjustments need to be slow and subtle.

As enough wort flows into the boil kettle to cover the bottom we turn on the kettle's bottom steam jacket. Unlike many smaller breweries (and 99.99% of homebrewers), steam from a boiler heats the kettle rather than a direct flame or electric element

When the wort drops to level of the grain bed, we begin to sparge with 170 F water. The goal is the keep the sparge water flowing at a rate the keeps it just an inch or so above the grain bed.

As the sparge continues, and the kettle fills, we turn on the other jackets to speed the heating.

When the sparge is complete (signaled not by volume, but by the runnings reaching 2P, 1.008), the spent grain is allowed to drain. When it is reasonably dry, a hopper is positioned under the door.

The door is opened and the spent grain is allowed to spill out (and then encouraged to do so with the rakes).

Once the wort reaches a rolling boil we pull a sample to test the gravity.

We were slightly under volume, but over-gravity, so we added one barrel of hot water. Then a few pumps of foam control followed by 30 IBUs of hop extract (the tins are rinsed to get every drop of extract out).

With 20 minutes left in the boil yeast nutrient and Whirlfloc are added.

A solid rolling boil.

After 60 minutes the steam jackets are turned off and 22 lbs of Saaz hop pellets are added.

There is no hanging out while we're brewing, any downtime (mash rest, sparge, boil etc.) are taken up by other chores like kegging.

After a five minute whirlpool and 20 minutes of settling, the wort is still at 210 F. This is the reason we were getting significantly more bitterness from our recipes on the big system than we ever did in test batches.

The valves are moved, and the connections are made to send wort to the sanitized fermentor.

With the wort ready to run off the oxygen in turned on to be shot into the wort in-line after chilling.

 

The water from the cold liquor tank (which is chilled to around 40 F) is running full blast to the plate chiller, so the pump speed for the wort is adjusted to achieve the target pitching temperature of 75F.

The oxygenated wort flowing through a sight-glass.

A sample of the wort, just a few tenths above our target OG of 12P.

With the fermentor filled, the line is pasteurized with water from the HLT (which was mostly refilled with "waste" water sent there from the heat exchanger) to prepare it to pitch the yeast.

The 100 L of yeast slurry harvested from Lomaland batch #2 is forced into the fermentor using CO2 pressure.

The now empty 100 L keg is then flushed with hot water to remove any residue.

A local farmer arrived to pick up the spent grain for animal feed.

The fermentor control board, showing we are a single degree under our target for fermentor #3.

Not too bad for six hours of work, especially because most of my time consisted of snapping photos while Alex and Matt did the actual work. When everything runs right brewing on a system like this is less physically taxing than brewing on a homebrew system (or it will be once we get a grain silo). Water and grain are conveyed by pumps and motors, but it's more mentally taxing. If things go wrong (valves in the wrong position, mechanical failure, stuck sparge...) it is a much bigger challenge to deal with. Not to mention the pressure that if you you ruin a batch it isn't $20 and a wasted Saturday, but thousands of dollars or the reputation of your brand.

Hopefully this gave you a taste of "the dream." I'll have a walk through of a day on the pilot system for anyone interested in a few weeks.