Mark your calendars and tell your friends.  We’ll be opening up the brewery for tours, brews, and some good times on March 12th.  The momentous occasion will commence at 2PM and the beer will flow until 6PM, giving all you movie buffs plenty of time to get back to the SXSW Film events.  We’ll be rocking the standard three free samples of our tasty brews, but if you buy a jazzy $10 pint glass, you can fill that bad boy to the brim instead.  We’ll be hooking up some local food trailers, so you’ll have something to munch on between brews.  See you then!

We got just under 10,000 more lbs of grain and we’re ready to do some serious brewing.  More batches of ENVY and BLUR are lined up, as thirsty Austinites are drinking it all up.  Brewing the NIGHTLIGHT Irish Stout today, so Paddy’s Day, get ready.

I know, I know.  I’ve been a little lax with the blog entries.  I’ll try to do better, promise.  But enough of that.  We are proud and excited beyond all belief to announce that we’ll be selling our first kegs of BLUR Texas Hefe today, Thursday, Jan 20th!   Oh yeah.  We’ve been waiting for this day for a long time now and it is finally here.  We hope you feel the same way…

We’ll only be on in a handful of choice establishments for this limited initial release for the weekend.  In the meantime, we’ll be preparing our ENVY Amber to rock the Austin Beer Scene starting next week.  So keep an eye out next week, as we will begin a wide release of our first two beers.

Now, by law, we can’t tell you where it is being sold, so you’ll have to either search it out on your own or do some digging.  I found this article on Liquid Austin to be enlightening.  Hopefully, this knowledge won’t stop all of you from going to all your favorite bars and demanding Circle Brews on tap IMMEDIATELY.

Well, get out there already and finally get your hands on a Circle Brew…

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.

Another major project completed.  Special thanks go to my father and brother, Bob and Nate Sabel, for their help over the holiday.  They aided in the completion of the steam piping and setup of the auger lines(almost done too!) that will move the grain throughout the brewery.

The boiler setup and piping was a major undertaking.  Our outdoor boiler, if you’ve been following, was a used system.  First, we converted to the unit to propane(unfortunately our building didn’t have natural gas).  Jud performed a substantial overhaul, preparing the system for pressure testing, repairing or replacing the electrical components, and repairing or replacing valves and gaskets as needed.  From there, we began piping the system.

The main steam header, which takes steam to the Kettle and Mash Tun allowing us to heat and boil our brews, was a large 3″ pipe.  It is much heavier than it looks.  We had a few long runs, and each had to be properly sized, threaded, and angled ever so slightly so that any condensation in the lines would run downhill towards our steam traps and to the condensate return tank.

From the header, we drop down into the main mainfold, which controls the direction of the steam from the main valves as well as displaying the temp/pressure in the line.  The header/manifold and each exit from the tank needed a steam trap, both heavy and expensive, which allows pressure to build up in the tanks, but lets condensation pass through to be gathered by the condensate return tank.  The condensate is recycled through the system from the condensate return tank and back to the boiler.

Each pipe was measured, cut, threaded, and fit by hand.  As you can see from that one picture, some of the larger diameter threading was a little difficult.  This was very time consuming and each threading job was handled with care so as to go slowly and not chew up the threads, which had the potential to waste an entire length of steel.

Various hookups and copper lines were soldered, as you can see in the pictures, to either fill the condensate return tank or the boiler as needed.  Electrical components measure levels and control solenoids which auto-fill and pump condensate as required by the boiler.

All-in-all, a large task.  Thankful that it is over, we can move on to finishing out the rest of the brewery and prepare for our first brew!  More to come and soon.

It’s true.  With everything going on at once in the ramp up to our first brew, we’ve been juggling a number of jobs.  As we prepare for that momentous day, we’ve paid special attention to getting the last few process requirements under our belt, primarily Insulating the Glycol lines, Piping the Steam, and Running the Grain Augers.

We’ve made significant headway in accomplishing all of these jobs over the last few weeks.  I dislike incomplete blog progress entries, so we’ve been holding off until we finished at least one of them.  It looked like they were going to be finished around the same time, but we knocked out the insulation first.

In a nutshell, the glycol system and our glycol lines are a vital part of brewing.  Each fermentation and bright tank have jacket through which glycol(a refrigerant) flows.  We control the flow rate of the gylcol to alter the temperature in the tanks.  This allows us to control precisely what temperature we ferment our beer, as well as adjusting temperatures for clarification and aging, amongst other things.  Proper insulation of these lines is essential not only to maintain efficiencies, saving electricity, but also to prevent constant condensation, which would lead to mold growth and poor sanitary conditions around the lines and throughout the brewery.

I’ve included some pictures of the progress and completion of the insulation.  Believe me when I say that it was very tedious work and quite time consuming.  The insulation came in three foot sections, but most had to be cut by hand and fit to each section, then lathered with sealant to form a vapor barrier to prevent condensation.  Each fitting and joint had to be properly hollowed out and sized appropriately.  Not the most fun job in the world, but look at that final product.  Isn’t it beautiful?

More to come, and very soon.  We’ll post things as the progress and we get ready to brew.  The big day is almost here…I can practically smell the mash-in.

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.