Archive for December, 2010

You can only imagine our excitement ramping up to the first brew day.  It was epic.  Having spent the last three years building steadily to this point, I would be lying if I didn’t say that we were nervous as hell.  All-in-all, it was a great day, albeit a very long one.  It was rocky at times, but we came through it alive and with 30 BBLs of Envy Amber fermenting away in the tank.  If that isn’t success, I don’t know what is.

Whenever we could, we were snapping pictures and taking videos(I’ll upload those later).  I’ll try to walk you through the day, so the pictures will make a little more sense.  We started late, around noon(we’d been testing and tweaking the system until after 5 am the night before).  We had milled the grain, about 1700 lbs or so, the night before.  The milled grain was stored in our grist case, ready and waiting.  We began by heating up the brew water in the kettle, to get it to the proper temperature to mix with the grain, aka Mashing-in.  When that was complete, the grain was pushed through our auger and mixed with the hot water at the right temp.  It’s a little trickier than it sounds, as you need to mix hot and cold the water through the U to get to the right temp that mixes with the grain through the hydrator, which will then lower the temp even further to the perfect mash temp as it falls into and mixes in the Mash Tun.  It took some getting used to, with various flow rates of the hot and cold water and the grain speed, but we got it dialed in fairly quickly.

As we mashed in, our brewery rake mixed the grain slowly, and we adjusted the temp and quantity of water to again ensure the right temp as well as mash consistency.  This process took us about an hour.  After all the grain is in the Mash Tun, we allowed it to sit for an hour and a half, extracting all the sugars and flavors from the grain.  When this Mash Rest was complete, we began a process called Vorlaufing, which essentially cycles the concentrated sugar water, or wort, back through its own grain bed.  After about 20 minutes of Vorlaufing, the wort cleared up significantly(which you can see through the sight glass), as much of the particulates were filtered through the grain bed.  At this stage, everything had gone quite smoothly and we were beginning to relax a bit.

After Vorlaufing, we begain pulling off the wort into the kettle.  During this time we began sparging more hot water through the grain to extract as much of the sugars as we could until we had the volume of wort we needed to start the boil(around 37 BBLs).  We went slowly, so as not to pull a suction and suck particulates from the grain bed into the kettle.  Our steam boiler surprised us by being able to bring the wort to a boil faster than we could pull it off, which is always nice.

After we hit the target volume and the boil was dialed in, we began adding our hops at the appropriate increments throughout the 90 minute boil to impart bittering, flavors, and aromas.  It’s definitely fun to throw pounds and pounds of hops into 30 BBLS of boiling beer.

With the boil complete, we began whirlpooling the brew in the kettle, spinning it around to let the remaining particulates and hops settle in the middle.  We then started pulling off the beer and pumping it through our heat exchanger to cool it down to fermentation temps, aka Knockout.  From there, it was sent to the fermenter, where it mixed with the yeast.  This part was the one minor hiccup, as our two-stage heat exchanger slowed the knockout down a bit.  We found the cause, one of our stages, the cold water side, kept forming air pockets inside the heat exchanger and wasn’t transferring heat properly enough.  We ended up going very slowly, but got that Envy in the tank!

At this point, it was about 2 in the morning.  We had yet to take the spent grain out of the Mash Tun, aka Mashing Out.  The grain had solidified, so our rake motor couldn’t push it out through the chute.  So, we had to jump into the steamy Mash Tun and push out 1700 lbs of hot, wet grain by hand.  Who says brewing isn’t fun?  All that was left after that was cleaning up the brewhouse, running cleaning loops and squeegeeing up the floor.  We were done at 5am and that was the end of the beginning of Circle Brewing.

The big delivery arrived!  We’ve got just under a hundred pounds of hops and about 8,000 lbs of grain.  Look at all that soon-to-be beer!  That’s a pretty sweet brew beard, too.  Countdown to first brew continues…

The grain handling process started months ago, with the construction of the mill room.  In order to brew, we need to crack the malt(that’s where the mill comes in), store/hold the milled grain in a grist case, and finally move the grain from the mill to the grist case and eventually the Mash Tun, where the process really begins.

So, first things’ first.  We needed a grist case.  We had built the larger mill room months ago(remember?), and with some planning and a hell of a lot of geometry we proceeded to build our grist case inside it.  Essentially a silo, the grist case needs an angled bottom, so that the grain will flow toward the center and be taken away by the auger.  At the center, we have the auger boot mount, which guides the grain into the auger line, which carries it to the Mash Tun.  Measure twice, cut once was the rule of the day.  Check out those sexy angles.  We also put in a sight window, to see the level, and plenty of support for all that grain.

After that was complete, running the two lines(mill to grist case, grist case to mash tun) was next.  Measuring and cutting the auger lines and the holes through the ceiling of the mill room came first.  Once we had those lines laid out, we slide the auger(basically a long corkscrew that twists and pushes the grain along the interior of the line) into the line.  We set up and hung the Auger motors and attached the auger bearing assembly to the opposite sides of the auger line, which holds the auger in place as it turns.

And now it’s all done.  We can move the grain all over that brewery now.  Grain comes in tomorrow and we have a ton of updates to follow.  The brewery is almost ready for the first brew!  Soon, very soon.