A 5 barrel brew day! Warning: lots of brewery pr0n pix.

Oh! Another neat thing I forgot. While cleaning out the MLT, we got to talking about grain and sugar extraction. Dave told me to taste some of the grain, which I did. It tasted like pretty much nothing.

Then he found a little dough ball that hadn't been broken up during the mash. When I tasted that, I was amazed at how sweet it was. It was actually really tasty

It's one of those things you know in your head - the grain has sugar in it - but when you see it demonstrated like that it's just cool.

-Joe

That was awesome. Thanks for all of the pics, must have been an great day. I'm jealous.

A GREAT read! Thanks!!

I'm another that was particular fond of the pipe patch panel

Laughing_Gnome_Invisible said:

A GREAT read! Thanks!!

I'm another that was particular fond of the pipe patch panel

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Agreed. That thing is sick.

Very very cool pictures. Sounds like you had a great day. Thanks for sharing. :rockin:

Makes 5 gallon batches look pretty puny however its cool to see much of the process is identical except for the scale. I'm not sure about you guys but I could definitely see how prepping and brewing such large batches every day could suck the fun out of brewing quite quickly.

Best thread all week! Thanks for sharing.
Cheers
JJ

I had that "field trip" feeling I used to get in grade school the whole time while reading.. Awesome thread! thanks!

nostalgia said:

Heehee. Let me know when you're in the area and I'll buy the first round

I started by asking if they do a brewery tour, then mentioned I'm a homebrewer and would love to see an active brew day. I figured if it was OK, they'd offer. If not, oh well, I can still drink their beer

-Joe

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Be careful I might take you up on that lol. The brewpub in question is Harvest Moon in New Brunswick...I guess a good start would be spending some more time at the bar huh.

Ahh, that makes me miss the brewery. I hated mucking out the mash tun, talk about making your sack sweat. Great pictures, I know you had to have an awesome time. It was some of the most fun days I ever spent working, that is for sure. I think everyone should get the opportunity to see it and talk to a brewer like that first hand.

Now, I'm going back to look at the pictures again.

Awesome thread. Thanks for sharing the pics.

Very interesting, great job with the pics and the narration!

Great Brew Pub I have been there a few times only becasue it is so far from Bergen County where I live otherwise I would be there constantly. Looks like you had a great time and learned a few things along the way. Great post

sweet writeup.

Did anyone else notice the controller was made by DME? I thought these guys were pros!

hahahah

B

magnj said:

Be careful I might take you up on that lol. The brewpub in question is Harvest Moon in New Brunswick...I guess a good start would be spending some more time at the bar huh.

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Nice place, I've been there many times.

Yeah, spend time at the bar and make friends with the bartenders and servers. Be polite, be friendly. Tip well Once you start to talk about homebrewing you'll usually find someone who's interested enough to ask questions, and you're in.

-Joe

Well i must say, that is rather impressive! Looks like you had an awfully terrific time!

Long-Haired_Brewer said:

Well i must say, that is rather impressive! Looks like you had an awfully terrific time!

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I did have a wonderful time. They showed wonderful hospitality.

The fact that the food and service there are consistently excellent doesn't hurt, either I had a really nice blackened catfish for lunch.

-Joe

My puny brain keeps trying to think of a way to build a practical PVC pipe patch just for sh!tz and giggles. Totally stupid and unecessary idea, but I can't stop thinking about one!.....Fess up, anyone else been wondering?

magnj said:

Be careful I might take you up on that lol. The brewpub in question is Harvest Moon in New Brunswick...I guess a good start would be spending some more time at the bar huh.

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Being a member of a local homebrew club certainly helps. They recently held a homebrew contest where the winner would get to scale up the batch and brew along side with Matt. I think the Whales represented 10 of the 11 entries so one of the guys will be brewing a Braggot at Harvest Moon next Friday.

Bobby_M said:

Being a member of a local homebrew club certainly helps. They recently held a homebrew contest where the winner would get to scale up the batch and brew along side with Matt. I think the Whales represented 10 of the 11 entries so one of the guys will be brewing a Braggot at Harvest Moon next Friday.

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I'll look into the club...not sure I'm up to snuff though. I was more daydreaming than anything, about how nice it would be to do an "internship" type deal at Harvest between semesters if I end up in grad school.

My puny brain keeps trying to think of a way to build a practical PVC pipe patch just for sh!tz and giggles. Totally stupid and unecessary idea, but I can't stop thinking about one!.....Fess up, anyone else been wondering?

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Guilty as charged... though I was thinking stainless...

thorongil said:

Guilty as charged... though I was thinking stainless...

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Mr Fancy bloody Pants!

This thread has 12 prosts so far on it's first day. Well deserved too!

Going back to look at the beer pron now.

Very cool pics

GREAT job on the pics and narration, I really enjoyed it!

Laughing_Gnome_Invisible said:

My puny brain keeps trying to think of a way to build a practical PVC pipe patch just for sh!tz and giggles. Totally stupid and unecessary idea, but I can't stop thinking about one!.....Fess up, anyone else been wondering?

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or copper... or really you could just use some silicone or whatever and make a few small patch hoses and still run everything to a common manifold like that... probably using a couple short hoses with QD's and a common manifold like that would be easiest and still look pretty sweet/be really functional.... then you could hardline everything and just use the patch hoses....

Good deal! The first time I saw the system at work in operation I was equally blown away. The efficiency with which the pros do everything is crazy, like the plumbing patch panel. So easy to transfer everything.

Nice pics and write up. Great job!

Speaking of equipment, another thing I forgot. I asked how the kettle was heated. It's natural gas, but not direct-fired. It's got two steam jackets: one in the bottom and one around the sides.

The wort transferred in around 165F and he was heating it as it came into the kettle. At the start just the bottom steam jacket was turned on. Once it got up to about 3bbl in the kettle he turned on the side jacket. It was boiling in a matter of minutes. Really amazing.

-Joe

That is amazing!

Awesome pictures! Some of the tech in that place is pretty nice.

The plumbing panel is great. We have one of those where I work too (although a bit simpler and with no labels ) and it can make a lot of tasks a lot easier. Close a few ball valves, throw on a pipe, flip a switch, open the valves, and now all your wort goes from the mash tun to the lauter. Switch another pipe and flip another switch and it all goes through the heat exchanger to the next-door room into our fermentation tanks.

I definitely don't miss the cleanup though. Shoveling that steaming hot grain out of the lauter tun is a lot of work. Our head chef also has a farm and really likes loading his truck up with our 4 20-gallon trashcans full of spent beer grain every time we brew. What does he do with all his spent grain? On that note, what about the yeast? Sometimes the owner where I'm at lets a few homebrewers grab some yeast if we're at the end of a brewing cycle and he harvests a lot off the last batch of beer.

We do an open fermentation so it's really interesting to see just how much co2 would be produced in a closed system.

I also drooled over the stainless jackets over the copper tuns... Our mash and lauter tuns are just copper on the outside and after finishing a brew cycle it takes a whole day just to polish them back up!

Glad you got to see how the breweries do it. Surprisingly, it's not really all that different.

Laughing_Gnome_Invisible said:

My puny brain keeps trying to think of a way to build a practical PVC pipe patch just for sh!tz and giggles. Totally stupid and unecessary idea, but I can't stop thinking about one!.....Fess up, anyone else been wondering?

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CPC disconnects and silicone hose.

Effective, yes.

Cheap, No f'ing way.

but it's in the back of the head for my brew sculpture...

B

monkeychef said:

What does he do with all his spent grain? On that note, what about the yeast?

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He has a local farmer pick them up for animal feed. The yeast gets stored in the corny and re-used until 10 generations when I'm assuming he rinses it down the drain with everything else

Glad everyone has enjoyed the tour almost as much as I did

-Joe

nostalgia said:

One other thing I thought was interesting: we were talking about the fermenter bubbling into the blowoff bucket. Dave said he was going to cap it in a day or two. "Cap it?" I asked. He lets the yeast finish fermenting in a sealed vessel to partially carbonate the beer naturally.

To finish/adjust the carbonation, he uses a carbonation stone (like for the O2 aeration) with CO2 inline during the transfer to the serving tanks.

I wonder if this could be duplicated at the homebrew level? Imagine transferring your wort from primary/secondary into your keg and carbonating it en route?

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I did my first keg to keg transfer the other day and was impressed at the amount of carbonation developed in the transfer even at 5psi and room temp. A slow transfer at cool temps and 10-12 PSI would certainly do the job nicely. A pressure relief valve regulates the flow rate on the destination side.

nostalgia said:

One other thing I thought was interesting: we were talking about the fermenter bubbling into the blowoff bucket. Dave said he was going to cap it in a day or two. "Cap it?" I asked. He lets the yeast finish fermenting in a sealed vessel to partially carbonate the beer naturally.

To finish/adjust the carbonation, he uses a carbonation stone (like for the O2 aeration) with CO2 inline during the transfer to the serving tanks.

I wonder if this could be duplicated at the homebrew level? Imagine transferring your wort from primary/secondary into your keg and carbonating it en route?

-Joe

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Toured Flying Fish in Cherry Hill on Saturday and they are doing much the same. They filter out almost all the yeast and push CO2 using a carbonation stone in the bright tank before moving to packaging.

Man...glad I found this thread...makes everything look so easy. I can't wait to get a large system like that.

Thank you for posting this. To think I am trying to find the time to make 5 gallons of coffee stout!

Amazing!!! Thanks for sharing your day with us!!!

Dear Santa, Please read this post when you're working on my list . :rockin:

oh yeah ... thanks for the thread! looks like good times!

Seeing such a similar process on such a bigger scale makes me feel like my brew days are so insignificant. But then again seeing such similarities with my process makes me feel like I know this super big secret called brewing.

Thanks for the awesome pics!

I'm glad someone bumped this thread, I had somehow missed it.
Thanks for sharing your day with us, it was very interesting.