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In September, 2005, I spent a day at Laughing Dog Brewing, a small brewery located in Ponderay, Idaho. Fred Colby, the owner of the brewery, invited me to be "assistant brewer for a day." This is the story of the excellent time I had while I was there.
I arrived at a little before 7:00 am. Fred showed me around a couple of brewing software programs. One is called ProMash and the other is BeerSmith. Both have pros and cons. I'm a software developer, so he imparted some ideas for what could be done to make a better brewing program. (I'll be thinking about that one.)
Fred printed out the recipe for the batch of the day, which was going to be American Amber Ale. I asked Fred what batch number this would be for the brewery, and he told me that this would be number 12. That figure might sound low, but the brewery had only been operating for about eight weeks, and the support Fred's gotten from the local business community and residents in that time has been phenomenal.
Crushing the Grain
The brewery has a loft where they keep all the brewing grains and the grain mill/crusher. I went upstairs to the loft to help Randy, one of Fred's employees, move the 50-lb bags of malt and specialty grains over to the crusher. The crusher is up in the loft so the grain can easily flow through its auger-driven pipe over to the top of the brewing unit on the main floor below.
While Randy and I got the grain ready, Fred and Jerry (Jerry is a friend of Fred's who comes by to help about once a week) pumped water from the hot liquor tank to the mash tun. The hot liquor tank is really just a large tank of pre-heated hot water (not surprisingly, cold water is called cold liquor).
Fred wanted to experiment with a different mashing technique on this batch. They normally load the grain into the mash tun first and then add hot liquor, but Fred has not been happy with the sugar extraction efficiency using that approach. Instead, he wanted to try adding the grain into an existing pool of hot liquor.
The next step was to start crushing grain into the mash tun. Unfortunately, Randy forgot to turn on the crusher before he put in the first bag of grain, so the crusher got stuck. The grains go between two rollers to get crushed, but those rollers have to already be moving when the grain hits them. If you put grain in first, it jams up the rollers and prevents the motor from starting. After about 10 minutes of messing around with access panels, the breaker box (because the jammed motor kept throwing the breaker) and adjustments on the crusher, we finally cleared the grain from the jammed rollers and started crushing.
All this knocking around in the crusher shook loose a bunch of grain powder, which Fred grabbed as it came out of the chute and threw away. Grain powder is an enemy of the mashing process because it can clog up the screens at the bottom of the masher and cause a "stuck mash." A stuck mash is a mash you can't transfer over to the brewing kettle because water won't flow through it properly. I guess they did have one of those in an earlier batch, and it can take quite a while to get the mash unstuck.
Filling the Mash Tun
Once we got rolling, everything went pretty smoothly. The grain flowed down the chute into the mashing tun. Fred used a big scraper (which looks like a large pooper scooper – sorry for that image) to distribute the grain evenly across the bottom of the tun. Fred commented that the process was a bit messier than his previous method for adding grain, but it seemed to be working well. We added all the barley malt and then the specialty grains. Fred continued to add water as the grain came in, to be sure that he had a good layer of water on top of the grain bed at all times. Once all the grain was in the mash tun, we let it steep for about an hour.
I learned that I like the taste of the roasted grains. They still have husks, so they aren't like breakfast cereal, but you can chew on them a couple at a time. Crystal malt is particularly tasty because it is naturally much sweeter.
The brewery equipment itself is fun and interesting, if you are into complex arrangements of valves, hoses, pipes, switches, and pumps. By pressing the right buttons and turning the right valves, Fred can fill the hot liquor tank and heat it, transfer hot liquor into the mash tun, and sparge the wort into the brew kettle. Sparging is the process of rinsing the wort out of the mashed grain and transferring it from the mash tun to the brew kettle where it will be cooked. A boiler feeds steam into the hot liquor tank and brew kettle for heating the hot liquor and boiling down the wort. The water in the hot liquor tank is used for mashing, sparging, and cleaning the brew kettle. The remarkable thing is that Fred had to assemble the whole thing himself, with no instructions. That's where his engineering background came in handy!
Sparging the Mash
After the grain had steeped, it was time to begin the sparge. The way it works is you slowly let the liquid from the bottom of the mash tun flow into the brew kettle while adding more hot water to the top of the mash. You want to keep a layer of water (a couple of inches) on top of the mash as you drain off the bottom. In the end, you put all of the steeped liquid from the mash tun plus many additional barrels of water from the hot liquor tank through the mash and into the kettle.
The sparging process took a total of about two hours. It requires constant monitoring and adjusting the inflow of water to match the outflow of wort. Once in a while, the valve to the kettle would block up a bit with wort solids and we'd have to open it all the way briefly to clear it, but generally speaking, the process was slow and steady. By the time we were done, we had almost 16 barrels of wort in the kettle. A barrel is 31 gallons, so that means we were brewing almost 500 gallons of beer!
As the wort flowed into the brew kettle, we were able to monitor its color through a glass section of the transfer pipe. The wort started off light in color and grew darker as the sparge progressed. Fred watched the color closely because it is one indicator of how well we were getting the sugars out of the grain. Once the wort darkened, it stayed dark almost to the end of the sparge, which means we did a good job of getting the most out of the grain.
Boiling the Wort
The next step was to start the boil down. The wort usually boils for about an hour, but that can vary due to a number of factors. A brewer can control the initial gravity of the wort before fermenting by boiling off water, effectively concentrating the sugars in the wort. The initial gravity of the wort is the main factor in the alcohol content and body of the finished beer, so a brewer can consistently control the final product by adjusting the boil time. Fred has software that helps him determine the boil down time. He uses a hydrometer to measure the specific gravity of the sparged wort and enters that figure along with the evaporation rate of his equipment to find out how long it will take to boil down to a target specific gravity.
Fred needed about an hour and a quarter boil down, so we cranked up the boiler to get things rolling. One handy thing about his equipment is that he can heat the top half and bottom half of the kettle independently. During the sparge, we were able to start heating the wort using just the steam jacket on the bottom half of the kettle. That gave us a head start on bringing the wort up to a full boil after the sparge completed.
Hot Break!
As the wort came up to a boil, Fred stirred it with a large metal paddle and kept a close watch on it for "hot break." Hot break is a point where the proteins in the wort suddenly precipitate and foam up to the surface. As the surface foam forms, it creates an insulating blanket which causes more foam. This situation can get out of control and cause a boil over, even if you are careful. As he stirred, Fred pointed out the indicators of hot break and carefully broke up the surface foam. Eventually, the heat of the wort consumes the foam, but you have to watch the wort carefully until it reaches that stage.
Suddenly, the foam went wild. Fred was stirring like mad, but it got ahead of him. He yelled for someone to shut off the kettle's top steam jacket, so I high-tailed it behind the kettle to close the appropriate valve. But it was too late. Foam boiled out of the kettle and down the outside to the floor. We didn't lose much though. The boil over lasted only a few seconds, and then we were back under control.
In general, most people find that brewing is a relaxing exercise, but it does have its moments of excitement.
Adding Hops to the Wort
After the wort had boiled for about fifteen minutes, we added the bittering hops to it. We waited to add the hops because we wanted to boil them for an even hour, and the total boil-off time was one hour and fifteen minutes. Fred uses hops pellets rather than whole flowers because it is very difficult to work with flowers in a large-scale brewing kettle.
Hops perform two main functions in beer, at least from a drinker's perspective. The hops you boil for an extended period of time (generally 30 minutes or more) add bitterness to the brew, which offsets the sweetness of the malt. Near the end of the boil you add "aroma" hops, which provide the hoppy aroma/flavor that most beer enthusiasts love. Hops also help preserve the beer and can influence head retention.
As I've learned more about brewing, I've discovered that I'm a bit of a hop-head, which is someone who loves the bitter flavor and pungent aroma of hops. Fred took out several bags of the different varieties he has on hand and let me sniff them. Yum!
Fred carefully measured the hops pellets and poured them into the kettle. The green hops pellets caused the wort to foam up again briefly and then settle back down again. The hops-generated foam was noticeably green in color and emitted a wonderfully strong hops aroma. Fred had me stand by on the kettle's top-jacket steam valve again in case the foam got out of hand, and I did have to kick it down once, but we avoided another boil-over.
Now we were really cooking. With an hour to go before the next activity, we broke for lunch.
From Homebrewer to Pro
During a short break while the wort boiled, Fred had showed me some of the equipment that is available to the home brewer for doing whole-grain brewing. You can buy a kit that is essentially the same thing as his 500-gallon setup, just on a much smaller scale.
Fred's 10-gallon home brew arrangement is on display in the brewery as well, and he still uses it for piloting new recipes. He used that equipment to earn several awards at the most recent national home brewing competition. His pepper beer won first place in the specialty beer class, which includes beers made with spices, fruits, and vegetables.
When Fred went into the brewing business, he did a tremendous amount of research to learn what others had done before him, what worked, and what didn't. A brewer can take many approaches to his business. He can set up a restaurant and pub with a small brewery in back, or he can set up a large-scale, wholesale-only commercial operation. Fred chose a path between the two extremes: He set up a mid-sized brewery that has a tasting room, but he does not serve food. This approach lets him sell to area restaurants without competing with them, and he has the capacity to sell wholesale to distributors. Meanwhile, visitors to the brewery can buy any number of Laughing Dog logo products, such as t-shirts and hats.
We spent our lunch time in the tasting room, eating take-out food and enjoying the fruits of Fred's previous labors on tap. Behind the bar, you can see the awards that Fred won at a recent national homebrewing competition. It's impressive that he has seven awards on the wall (three bronze, three silver, and one gold), yet it was his first time competing. Those awards contributed to the confidence he needed to start his own brewery. It is one thing to have your friends tell you make great beer; it's another to have third-party experts do so.
Transferring the Wort to the Fermenter
After lunch, the wort was nearing the end of its boil time. It was time to add the aroma hops. Once again, Fred carefully measured out some hop pellets and mixed them in. The wort was now complete and ready to transfer to the fermenter.
Up to this point, the entire operation was contained within a single brew unit that includes the hot liquor tank, mash tun, and kettle. We could transfer the brew from one stage to the next just by opening valves and turning on the pump. The fermenters, on the other hand, are not directly connected to the brewing unit. For that transfer, we had to run special hoses between the kettle and the fermenter for that transfer. The hoses are designed to handle high temperature and high pressure, although temperature is all we were really concerned with.
This arrangement with the fermenters is actually desirable. By separating the brewing unit from the fermenters, Fred can add as many fermenters as necessary to brew 7 days a week, multiple times per day. It would be exhausting, but it could be done. His current complement of 4 fermenters gives him the ability to brew an average of two to three batches per week.
Using a Whirlpool to Filter the Wort
Before starting the transfer of the wort to the fermenter, we had to start a whirlpool in the kettle. The equipment is designed with a whirlpool jet that shoots into the kettle at an angle along the side, and an outlet port at the bottom of the kettle just below the whirlpool jet. By setting the valves properly, Fred can pull wort out of the kettle through the outlet port and shoot it back in through the whirlpool port, which spins the wort.
Why the whirlpool? Well, when we heated the mash in the kettle, protein solids in the grain precipitated into small flakes that float in the wort. As I described earlier, the hot break is the beginning stage of this process. You want to leave those solids in the kettle if you can. Likewise, the dissolved hop pellets we added to flavor the beer should be removed from the wort before it goes into the fermenter to avoid making it overly bitter or adding off-flavors. Collectively, these wort solids are called trub (pronounced "troob"). The spinning action of the whirlpool causes the trub to collect at the center of the kettle. Because the kettle's outlet port is at the bottom on the outside edge of the tank, you can draw off wort and leave the solids behind. There's also a baffle at the bottom of the kettle just in front of the outlet port that helps keep the solids away from the exit.
Chilling the Wort
We were finally ready to transfer the wort to the fermenter where we would add the yeast and begin the one to two week fermentation period.
However, you can't add yeast to hot wort because you'll kill the organism. Home brewers normally solve this problem by adding the hot wort mixture to some amount of cold water, and then waiting a little while to add the yeast if it is still too warm. The wort should cool to below 75 degrees (F) before you add (or "pitch") the yeast. However, with nearly 500 gallons of boiling hot wort, that would be a long wait.
Fortunately, the folks who engineered the brewing unit had a nifty solution for that problem. One of the valve-controlled paths through the system flows through a heat exchanger. The exchanger draws the heat out of the wort as it passes through and transfers that heat to an incoming flow of cool water. The cooling water then flows into the hot liquor tank. The heat exchanger is astoundingly effective at cooling the wort. The wort that flowed into the fermenter was about 75 degrees, and the water that went into the hot liquor tank was about 130 degrees. That transferred warmth gave Fred a big head start on heating up the hot liquor tank the rest of the way for the next day's batch.
Pitching the Yeast
After the wort transfer completed, Fred checked the temperature of the wort and took another gravity reading. The brew was sufficiently cool to add yeast, so he climbed up onto a ladder and poured yeast into the top of the fermenter. There's no way to stir in the yeast as you would normally do at home, but the wort was most likely still swirling from the transfer anyway.
Clean Up Time
The last step is to clean up. The floor is designed such that all liquid flows into two drains at the center, which makes cleanup with a hose relatively easy. And, it turns out that the waste products of beer production are actually beneficial for the water treatment plant.
Fred started with the kettle. The boil-over made a sticky mess of the floor and the side of the kettle, so a thorough hose-down was necessary. He also still had to clean the trub out of the bottom of the kettle. We slowly hosed the trub out of the kettle through the bottom port and down the nearest floor drain.
The mash tun is a different challenge to clean. It has two access points: a sealable porthole on the side and a hatch at the top. Both openings are pretty small, and because the mash tun sits directly above the hot liquor tank, it can get pretty toasty inside. But somehow, you've got to get several hundred pounds of wet grain out of the tun and rinse it for the next batch.
Before they removed the mashed grain from the tun, Fred dug into it with his scraper to see how well the sugars were converted. At various levels in the mash, he'd taste the grain and consider its sweetness. If the grain still tasted sweet, then we'd have left fermentable sugars behind, which would be a waste. This time, however, the mashing was a smashing success. The grain mostly just tasted like grain, with very little residual sweetness.
Fred also checked for places where some of the grain failed to mash. A brewer tries to avoid the following problems: dough balls, which are grains that have stuck together and have not allowed water to flow through them; pockets, which are areas in the mash where water can flow through without going through much grain; and striations, where the grain forms a layer (something like a spread-out dough ball) that resists water penetration.
Finally, the spent grain was shoved out of the mash tun, through the porthole, and into a waiting waste bin. The bins are sent over to local farms, where the cattle are happy to receive the rich barley loam.
Winding Down with a Brew
Everything was finished up by around 4:00 p.m., which made it a full day for the lot of us. We settled back into the tasting room for another sample of prior efforts. Fred seemed very happy about the efficiency of the mashing experiment. I was still enjoying the aromas floating around the brewery from the freshly-cooked batch of ale.
Fred had told me at one time that one of the reasons he got into home brewing is that he finds it to be very relaxing. When I found out that he was starting a brewery, I wondered if that would change. After all, many people regret turning their avocation into their vocation. That doesn't seem to be the case with Fred, who was happy to share the brewing experience with me and seems to still really enjoy the process. As far as I'm concerned, that is how it should be when you do what you love for a living.
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