Archive for October, 2010

The glycol piping is complete…just need to insulate.  Here’s a couple of pics to round out this post of the progress in putting it up.  That’s a lot of copper.  And if brewing doesn’t work out, I think there’s always a life of soldering.  We’re putting in the steam piping, so more pics to follow.

The cold room is also hooked up and cold, cold cold.  Turns out, showing temperature changes visually is pretty hard.  Take our word for it.  This is a busy week, but I hope to get the progress up as it happens.

The last month has been hectic to say the least.  We have been hooking up the glycol piping(the mechanism for keeping our beer at the appropriate temperatures during fermentation and conditioning) for our two 60 BBL Fermenters and our 60 BBL Bright Tank.  We’ve become quite good at soldering in the process, I might add.  While they aren’t the most interesting of pictures, we snapped a few of the piping work and soldering.  Special thanks to Justin Lillehei, who was in town for a week lending his time and skill.

After that was complete, we tested each of them for leaks and are now proceeding in putting up the headers, which connect the tanks to the main glycol unit.  You can see a cool pic of us posing in front of that bad boy.   Quite an impressive piece of equipment, our 10 HP unit from our friends at PRO Refrigeration has enough capacity to keep us super cool for the foreseeable future.

We’ve been overhauling our steam boiler, converting it to propane, and preparing it for hookup and testing.  All that is left is the actual steel piping, then can we test out that 1,000,000 BTU beast.  We also fenced in the boiler and propane to ensure no one got any ideas.

We have a ton left to do, but hopefully we’ll hit our target and be brewing by the end of the month.  Wish us luck and keep checking back for updates.