Brewery Intern: Day 12 (I Wanna Mount U)

It was another brew day today, so we started early at 9.  I started to hook up hoses, but the burner was being ornery again.  Bryan had already been trying to reset it for 20 minutes or so and passed it off to me to watch the lights on the box and walk around to hit the reset every few minutes.  Not really long enough to accomplish much of anything else.  After about half an hour of tapping the igniter tube, adjusting the flue venting and blower fan, and resetting the box, it finally fired up and got the water heating.

The hoses and pump were set up and then we dragged the grain sacks into position.  It was an early morning and the coffee hadn’t kicked in yet, so some of the hoses needed to be moved around.  The sacks were opened up and the grain augur lowered.  The water wasn’t nearly up to temp, so some time was spent moving kegs around, straightening up the Grundy Room, and preparing some backup kegs (the smaller 5 gallon logs to fit into the kegerators out in the bar) of the Chocolate Stout and the Crabby Apple Ale (which includes some apple cider).

Once the water was close to strike temperature, the input hose was attached to the side of the hydrator and the flow was turned on.  As in the past, we preheated the mash tun and filled it up to just a bit above the false bottom before was started sending the grain up the augur.  The augur chute dropped into the top of the hydrator and the wetted grains fell down into the mash tun.  The oar was constantly moving to avoid any doughballs in the mash.

After the water was shut off, the mash was let to rest.  Then recirculated by pump through the sparge head to set the grain bed.  Once the sight glass ran clear and clean, the sparge water was turned back on and the pump started to move mash to the kettle.

The Mt. U (short for Mount Uncanooc) beer is a cream ale. It has a fairly light grain bill and hop schedule, so it is correspondingly light in colour and intensity.  It is a pleasant introductory beer with a bit of flavor that is good for wooing macro beer drinkers into craft beer.

With the light recipe, the boil, chill, and transfer went very smoothly without any memorable complications.  This time, Karen ended up cleaning out the mash tun while I clambered into the boil kettle to clean it out.

The kettle is much more awkward to get in and out of than the mash tun for a few reasons.  The manway hole is much smaller – and much closer to the ceiling.  Although there are lots of pipes and such around, nothing is strong enough to use to brace yourself, which makes it awfully hard to get your feet and legs up through the hole without becoming unbalance and tipping over.  This effect is significantly magnified by being tall, as I can attest.

For an extra bonus, there are no handholds or footholds inside the kettle, and the opening is above your head.  The one safe brace is a bolt through one of the old mill ceiling beams.  Attached to it is a length of plastic-coated steel cable that is clamped in a loop at the end to drop through the kettle hole and use as a step to get high enough to pull yourself out.

That awkwardness of getting in and out aside, I much prefer cleaning the kettle to the tun.  I can stand up inside, it’s much less claustrophobic, not nearly as hot, and much less messy.

Tired from a long day, we cleaned up everything else, paused for a few pints and went home to rally for the next day’s cleaning.

(Once again, catching up on posts – photos will be added soon.)

Brewery Intern: Day 11 (Russian Imperial Moves)

A busy day today, we started by firing up the kettle with some warm water left in it from yesterday.  Thankfully, the machine spirits of the burner flame were appeased to ignition by the application of sacred unguents and the sacred rubber mallet of correction, as the appropriate holy words were chanted over the box of indicator lights.

As soon as the ritual had concluded successfully, I set about getting the hoses down and hooking them up to brew kettle through the pump and to the Grundy Room access pipe (that goes through the walls and over the hallway).  I also ran the second pump into the Grundy Room and set up hoses for both transferring water from the kettle to fill the tank and to recirculate the cleaning solutions.  We ran through the cycles of caustic, acid, and iodine (with all of the appropriate rinses) as quickly as we could.

As soon as some CO2 pressure had blown out the last of the iodine, we moved the hoses in the Brewhouse to move the half batch of Russian Imperial Stout into the newly cleaned Grundy tank.  A few switches and levers and off she went.  It was a beautifully quick and complication-free transfer (although the fact that we don’t filter our stouts helps a lot).

The moment the FV was empty, we immediately swung things around again to use the tap water feed and the kettle water to alternately rinse and clean the FV through all of the caustic, acid, and iodine cycles.

After packing everything up and handling a couple of brewery tours, we sat down for a few pints….and swapped out an empty keg or two while we were there, talking with the customers.

Sorry I’m so behind on posts…I’m trying to catch up with some content – I’ll come back and add some photos soon.

Brewery Intern: Day 10 (Hosing Everything Down)

Back for Monday and the routine starts again.  Craig already had the kettle heating up when I got in and were out of sight, so I got to work clearing space in the Grundy Room, moving kegs around, and pulling out the keg washer.

As I was gathering up hoses and tri-clamps to hook up the pump and keg washer, the guys were busy in the office.  While finishing up rigging the pump (to pull the outflow of the kettle over the hallway into the Grundy Room for the washer’s basin), Karen showed up.

Being the detail-oriented person that I am, I’ve developed the habit of shutting off the gas and beer valves on each keg tap on the washer before connecting or disconnecting a keg.  Bryan and Craig don’t bother, happy to save a few seconds of effort in each cycle.  All three of us have a habit of draping the taps off the sides where they are easily located.  Today, they gave Karen a quick run-down of the washer and she and I got started washing kegs.

After disconnecting the first set, I did not notice that Karen had left one of the taps draped over the front of the keg washer….with the valves left open.  Not thinking about any cause for concern, I brought in the next set of kegs and hooked up the first one.  I opened the valves to what was theoretically a closed system (except for the drain) to have the keg empty its tepid, stale contents directly onto my denim-clad crotch from point-blank range.  As it was under pressure, it blasted right through the paltry protection of my jeans and soaked me to the skin – from hip to hip and down to my right knee.

By late afternoon, the liquid was finally maintaining my body temperature….and finally started to dry 7-8 hours later.  Thankfully, my jeans were dark and didn’t show much after the first hour or so (which of course had to be during the lunch rush)!

We finally got through cleaning all of the kegs and Karen had to take off.  Bryan and I stuck around to empty out the bright tank of John Stark Porter into the newly-washed kegs.

Had a few pints and headed for home….hopefully will add some photos soon.

Brewery Intern: Day 06 (Kegs, Casks, and Yeast)

Today started with doing some rearranging in the Grundy Room and restacking the full kegs, including moving a few into the cold storage in the back of the house.  We put a few feet of water in the kettle to heat, got the keg washer pulled out, and hand-trucked a pile of 14 kegs from the back door up to the Grundy Room.

During all the walking around, I said something to Bryan about noticing how much the brewery smelled like hops today, joking it must be leaking out of the fermentors with the fresh IPAs from Friday.  Turns out….yup, literally.  FV1 hasn’t been used in some time because the coolant coil in the top half isn’t working right.  We only put a half batch of HFR IPA in it, so the lower coil was just fine (as we found out, unfortunately, on Friday) – however, the heavy rubber gasket around the manway door had torn a bit on the side (and the fill level is currently well above the bottom of the manway door).  Bryan actually sounded relieved that a small amount of IPA was appearing in the edge of the seam around the gasket (which is why we could smell the hops so much).  He pointed that he first noticed the blowoff tube wasn’t bubbling and freaked out that the beer still wasn’t fermenting after nearly 3 days – after spotting the leak and pulling a sample to test gravity, he was much relieved to find it was fermenting just fine.

Once the water was up to temp in the kettle, I got to work running kegs through the keg washer cycles (something that continued through the early evening).  During waits for cycles to finish, Craig and I took the empty metal cask of Apple Cobbler offline, cleaned it, and pried the bungs out.  We took apart and cleaned the beer and gas lines, as well as the cask breather.

Cask Breather

Later on, we brought out a metal cask of Pumpkin Bread (a sour pumpkin ale blended with a portion of dark porter), set it up on the stand, and installed the saddle (a specially-designed cooling coil that drapes over the top of the cask under its jacket).  Craig hammered a soft spile (porous wooden peg) into the hole in the center of the plastic bung to allow some carbonation to escape through the pores of the wood.  After judging sufficient pressure had off-gassed, he pulled the spile out and screwed the attachment to the cask breather into the bung hole.  While the cask was allowed to rest, a line cleaner solution was mixed up and pulled through the hand pump for a bit before allowing to rest with flooded lines.  The hand pump was pulled periodically for an hour or two before clean water was pulled through to rise.  Craig hammered in the tap, installed the hop filter, and reconnected the line.  We pulled the hand pump until the water was replaced by beer, then poured a couple of samples.  It was lightly sour (but my palate might still be wrecked from judging the sour category at the Boston Homebrew Competition two days ago) and tasted like gingery pumpkin cookies.

Cask Breather Spigot on a Cask

We carbonated a keg of the house root beer (non-alcoholic) and put it on tap, kicked the last keg of oatmeal stout, and replaced a keg of American pale ale.  We taste-tested the Hopzilla from last Friday: still very yeasty, quite bitter, very piney hops up front (lots of Simcoe in this one) and took gravity readings of the oatmeal stout in the fv (which, of course, ended with tasting….quite roasty).  We took apart, cleaned, and pressure-tested 3 older 5-gallon corny kegs that are used for yeast – then dumped a bit of trub from the fv (fermentation vessel) full of stout and filled two of them with fresh yeast, leaving a fair amount of head space.  After settling, we will pull another 5-10 gallons tomorrow too.

After cleanup and putting the keg washer away, I did some more keg re-stacking in the Grundy Room and pulled most of the freshly-washed Sanke kegs back in.  It was getting late, so before I left, I helped Craig start filling kegs from one of the large holding tanks.  It was acting as a serving tank and had about 6.5 barrels left, so the first keg filled was stacked and tapped immediately to keep the barfront functional.  As I left, Craig was filling the rest of the kegs and planning to rinse out the tank before he left.

Tomorrow is planned to wash that holding tank, fill it with oatmeal stout from the fermentor, and clean out the FV once it’s empty.

Brewery Intern: Day 04 (Swap Them Hoses)

The slow filtration of the red ale last night meant that Craig and Bryan went home after the late-night staff meeting without cleaning the fermentor. The planned brew day for today was postponed until tomorrow. Today, we cleaned.

Today also marked the start of two new interns:  Ashley (a home kombucha fermenter) and Karen (a homebrewer and another member of the Brew Free or Die homebrewing club), both eager to get brewing.  The owner/brewmaster also left for a ten-day vacation today, leaving operations of the brewery in the hands of Bryan and Craig.

I hung back for a good portion of the morning, as Craig isn’t the loudest speaker.  He was doing a lot of the introductory explaining that I had already heard, so I was getting chemicals, putting away hoses, etc. while he was talking.  The burner for the boil kettle was extra ornery starting up this morning, requiring a couple of resets and some judicious *ahem* calibration with a mallet.

Ashley and Karen got some practice connecting and moving triclamp fittings as we cleaned the 14bbl fermentation vessel by:  draining it, rinsing it, adding cold water, recirculating the water, draining it, pumping in hot water, adding caustic, recirculating, draining, rinsing, pumping in more hot water, adding acids, recirculating, draining, rinsing, adding yet more water (this time, pumping in some iodine sanitizer), recirculating, then pumping the iodine into FV#1 (which has been on standby), recirculating that, and finally draining.

Fermentation Row

We also took apart and cleaned a Corny keg with short tubes that is used for yeast collection.  One of the quick-disconnects (QDs) had a persistent leak that we spent a little while troubleshooting before solving with an extra o-ring for better compression in the fitting.

We went over the plan for the brew day tomorrow before leaving for the day to let the brewers shop for parts to order.  The plan is to do a split batch:  mashing and using the first runnings for one beer, then adding more grain and mashing again to pull the second runnings for another beer (that might need to be boosted with a little sugar, depending on mash efficiency).  The brewers will be in early at 9am to start setup of hoses, measuring grain, etc. and the water should be mostly heated tonight.

A long double-brew day tomorrow, then off to Boston in the morning to judge at the Boston Homebrewing Competition on Saturday!