Dear Santa - I want a brewery like Steve Wellington

Dear Santa,

I have been a really good boy this year, honest. I only got very drunk once, and I blame the Ola Dubh, surely you can forgive me that? I've worked really very hard indeed to build my brewery up and get good beer out to more people. My pressie list isn't really that long at all.

My friend Steve Wellington has been given a really nice shiny new £1 million brewery to take over from his splendidly and romantically old fashioned but ageing White Shield brewery. He's really very excited about it and I'm happy for him, after all he is a shining example of how major brewing corporations can be persuaded to invest in tasty and interesting beer.

I'd like to pretend not to be jealous of Steve, but I can't. Actually, I'm completely green. Is that wrong? Probably, but I still want one too.

I haven't got a big multinational brewery to fund my little project. I'd love to have a 22.5 barrel brew length, but I can't afford it yet. I'd like to have an external calandria a on my copper, a separate hop-back and a mash tun that digs itself.

It is also very pretty. I'll admit that all that gleaming stainless stirs physical reactions that should be reserved for the sight of bare flesh, but I'm a brewer and every brewer understands that reaction.

Please can I have a shiny new brewery too? I promise not to get drunk again next year, well, not too often, really, honest, and if I do, it's the beers fault.

If I can't have one then I suppose I'll just have to go and brew with Steve again in the New Year, he said he'd let me play with his new toy. See, that's what mates are for.

Lots of Christmas Love

HardKnott Dave

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I nearly forgot, thanks to Reluctant Scooper for the idea for this post. He talks about the opening do for the brewery here.

Brewers' Objects of Beauty No 4 - draining floor

Every brewer worth his salt knows that cleanliness is vital for good beer. Our current Heath Robinson set-up gives me great cause for concern in this respect, the biggest issue being the lack of any drain in the floor. Washing out the plant is very hard work when one can't just let the washings run out onto the floor and away down the drain.

Stringers has a neat solution to the problem of leasing a building and having the difficulty of getting the landlord to agree to fundamental below-ground drains being installed. I'm not to proud to copy other peoples great ideas, so I did. Yesterday we poured about 20 tonnes of concrete. The brewkit will be installed on this in the coming month.

Thanks to Jeff and Ben for considerable efforts during this activity.

The floor consists of around 850 solid concrete blocks laid dry on their side, a single block retaining wall and then filled with a 90 - 130 mm thick concrete slab. The drainage channel is made with heavy duty Osma channel. Hopefully the very slight fall will prevent puddling.

Brewers objects of beauty No3.5 - spray head detail

Seeing as I've been asked; here is a couple of detailed pictures of the mash wetter from the previous Brewers objects of beauty.

The spray head is made from a carefully flattened piece of 15mm copper pipe. Yes, I know I've talked about not using copper in the brewery, but it's only hot liquor at this point and not particularly reactive. I suspect I could improve the design here as the coanda effect causes less of a spread of the spray than I expected. Still, it works.

The idea is that the angle of the main shoot is arranged to allow the grist to fall past the spray head on the opposite side of the shoot. The water spray and the grist stream both hit the turn in the pipe and mix at this point.

Brewers objects of beauty no3 - grist case and mash wetter

I don't know if readers of this blog are particularly interested in my excitement over the improvements I'm making to my brewery, but then, should I care? This is my blog and if I want to wax lyrical about the things that I think are good, then I'm going to.

Today we are brewing. The demand for our beer is increasing as we push into new markets. I'm trying hard to ensure that every brewday makes as much beer as possible, which involves mashing in as much grist as possible. The maximum my current mash tun can hold is about 110kg of grist, quite a lot to mash in by hand, although many brewers do. I have help today in the form of my nearly-14-year-old son, Alfie. You can see him in the background of the picture weighing out the grist. Despite his help I think the whole job of making the mash is so much easier with a grist case and mash wetter or mash hydrator if you want to be posh.

I have talked to brewers who are happy to mash 250kg by hand and they can't see the point of changing what they do. Sure, it's a good work out but there are bound to be temperature and consistency variations throughout the mash. I find, after mashing in even 100kg by hand, I'm getting to the point of thinking the mix is good enough, even though I know it isn't. It is quite hard work and the resultant mash often has sticky lumps when dug out, which is a sign of reduction in extract.

With the very Heath Robinson affair I have created, once I set the slide that controls the grist flow, and with the strike water at full flow, the mash tun fills almost without my intervention. Just a few turns with the mash paddle and a top up with hot water if required, and a mash at 65.5^OC with homogeneous consistency is achieved.

If you brew beer commercially and you have the head room for it, get a grist case and mash hydrator, trust me on this one.

My grist case will hold about 100kg of grist and is made from one sheet of 18mm water proof board. It could do with being extended a little. The hydrator is made from standard 110mm drainage pipe fittings and a copper spray head inside. The hot strike water simple sprays on the falling grain as it travels down the pipe.

Warning, do not make a grist case out of MDF, it will swell with the humidity.

Brewers objects of beauty no2 - pipe fittings

I'm afraid that it might be Freudian, but I have a fetish for pipe fittings. I could try and convince myself that it's due to my time as an Instrument Technician working with pneumatic based systems on a nuclear plant, but I'm certain that it's Freudian. I used to work in a place where they took nuclear fuel out of reactors and dissolved it in boiling nitric acid. The resultant liquid was then put through various treatment plants to recover any useful material from nasty stuff. My job was to look after various pressure measuring instrumentation, which by the nature of the place, tended to consist of much stainless steel piping. High grade stainless steel pipe, and the fittings used to join it together, gets me all excited.

It has bothered me for sometime that there were bits of ordinary copper and brass plumbing in my brewery. I know that there is a widely held belief that such things are not only harmless but positively helpful to a brewery. Copper reacts with sulphur and so removes this snatch producing element from the beer. That is true in a brewery where the water used contains sulphur, but in Cumbria sulphur is not a problem.

Copper is a pain if the brewer uses peracetic acid as it corrodes the metal at an alarming rate producing a green liquid. For that matter beer itself is quite acidic and will attack copper and take it into solution. The levels of copper, if the brewer is not very careful, might very well exceed maximum permitted levels in the finished product. I also worry about the fact that copper can become pitted due to the corrosion and so create infection traps.

Recently I bought a whole load of stainless steel and plastic pipe fittings. I don't like plastic as much, but it's easier to work with and a lot cheaper. BSP and RJT, John Guest and Hepworth, the box arrived, which was much too small for the amount of money. Still, it was fun getting the nice shiny smooth fittings out of the box, feeling the nice tight insertion tolerance and the sure knowledge that the fluid can now be directed exactly where I want it to go with a level of satisfaction. Like I say, Freudian.

Brewers objects of beauty No1 - Shives

Dave's beer and stuff blog is getting neglected, it's just not good enough. I have little in the way of excuses other than I'm having great fun setting up our new brewery, which appears to be going quite well. However, as with all these things, there are little snaggettes along the way.

The first problem I had was that I brewed beer, got it out into the trade and then found I had no more empty casks. It takes time to get empties back to the brewery, a blog subject all by itself. We ordered some more casks which have now arrived. Today I'm brewing so I can get some more beer out into pubs.

I also realised a few weeks ago that I was going to run out of shives¹. I use CypherCo plastic casks, which although not as robust as stainless, but I estimate that in the first 5 years of life they offer significant financial advantages. Again, the relative merits of plastic verses stainless steel is yet another subject. It is the shives I wish to discuss today.

The biggest downside of CypherCo casks, in my view, is the fact that only one type of shive works, one that was made by a company called TE plastics. To my horror, when we tried to order more, we found that TE plastics had gone into liquidation. Several weeks of frantic searching for a suitable alternative eventually brought me to the conclusion that really, the only design that worked was the TE plastics' design.

I'll be honest, at this point I was ready to cancel the order for the CypherCo casks as there appeared to be no short term solution. The lack of a suitable shive eliminated the financial benefits of plastic casks.

After some badgering of CypherCo they eventually managed to secure the tooling from TE plastics. We picked up our new casks the other day and while we were there the very first run of new shives were literally hot off the press.

On Monday I racked into new plastic casks and sealed them with new shives. I am a happy brewer.

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¹Pete Brown notes in one of his excellent books about the number of brewing terms that attract spell-check red underlines, shives is one of them. For those that don't know, a shive is a bung that seals part of the cask.