For the last year I have been working at a brew pub in town. I started off as a dishwasher but quickly moved into the brewery as a tour guide. As a tour guide I get to work in the brewery when there are no tours to give. So it has been a fun year and I thought I would share some pics and info on the brewery itself.
So here is the system. Construction of the brewery was completed a little over a year ago and everything used was brand new. System was built by diversified metal engineering.
The system is 15 bbls and a three vessel system. Mash mixer is in the middle, lauter tun is on the left and boil kettle on the right. The control screen there is an HMI that runs PLC and controls the brewery with pneumatic valves. Every vessel has it's own dedicated pump.
We have a grain silo that stores all of our base malt. We just used Breiss two row
This is our grain room where we store all of our specialty grains and some of the pilsen we use for our pilsner and tripel.
So to get grain from the silo it is augered in through the wall in the pipe on top in the picture below and then loaded into the big silver hopper. The hopper is on a scale so it makes everything really easy to weigh out. Then all the malt runs through our mill which is that yellow guy there. It's just a simple roller mill except the rollers are 10 inch rollers and powered by that large electric motor (the green guy) you see there.
In this picture you can see the scale read out and the buttons to start and stop the auger motor from pouring in malt.
Then all that malt is augered back into the brewery through the pipe you can see under the mill and it is all deposited into our grist case here. and normally we do this process the day before a brew day just so we dont have to worry about that work when we get there in the morning.
To get the brew day started we open that slide gate and the grain starts to fall down the fat section of the pipe which is the grist hydrater, so it's just spraying the grain with water. All in the picture above. The grain and water then come to rest inside of the mash mixer. Here is an inside view of that. The sections of the kettle wall that has that circle print are the two steam zones that add heat. And of course the paddles stir the mash so we don't scorch it and it keeps the temps uniform.
While we're mashing we'll open up the mash mixer screen on the control panel and you can see the two steam zones there.
And of course every recipe has a different mash schedule so we have a couple recipes programmed in to choose from.
And here is the mash schedule for the nut brown we brew. This system will maintain temps on it's own. So the system moves through this schedule by itself without any input from the brewer. We get a lot of consistency from this system. Also this is a break from baby sitting the system so a brewer can go take care of something else in the brewery.
After the mash is over we pump the mixture over to our lauter tun. Here is a view inside the lauter tun. you can see the false bottom and the rakes there. so first we vorlauf to get our grain bed set up and then we begin to fly sparge. We take samples of the run off a couple times during the lauter to measure sugar content. If we see that we arent getting as much sugar as we should be, we stop the sparge and run off and run those rakes there to hopefully stop the channeling that is cutting down on our efficiency.
Once all the wort is gone we need to get all the grain out and we have a hole in the bottom of the lauter tun where we remove the grain. in the picture above you can see the hole near the far side. We open that hole up and we can spin those rakes in reverse and they push a majority of the grain out. There is a local cattle farmer who comes and takes away the grain to feed his cattle with.
Here is a picture of the boil kettle screen.
On here you can see there are three steam zones that are small and independent and this fact allows us to get started heating sooner without wasting energy of an uncovered steam zone. Once we get up to a boil we can turn off the steam zones and turn on the internal calandria. The calandria is a steam jacketed cylinder inside the boil kettle (in the pic below) with a series of tubes that run up and down the cylinder. with the convection current going on during the boil the wort is being forced up through the tubes. We add steam to the cylinder and the heat exchange into the wort is much more efficient because of the increase in surface area while the wort is inside those tubes. As the wort shoots out of the cylinder then it hits a diverter plate and fans back down over the boil to suppress boil overs.
When the boil is over we whirlpool inside the kettle. This is where the wort gets pumped in the start the whirlpool.
Then the wort is run through our plate chiller (blue thing). and luckily in northern MN we have freezing cold water so that makes our chilling very efficient. and the wort gets oxygenated inline with a stainless oxygen stone and gets connected to one of our hard plumbed transfer lines. These run to the cellar area.
The water we use to chill comes out of the chiller around 180 F so theres a lot of energy in there we can reuse. All the water is then put inside our hot liquor tank to be reused for the next batch of beer or just for cleaning the brew house. If enough time has passed between brew days where the water loses too much heat we can heat it up again. The local steam plant that heats a lot of downtown Duluth is just across the street and they have hot water lines that run over to our building. We run our HLT water through a heat exchanger that has their hot water running through it. Here is a pic of the hlt. Really exciting stuff.
The wort then gets put into one of our fermentation vessels. However, before the wort goes in we put yeast inside the FV and we'll pump the wort up through the bottom valve so the yeast gets mixed in really well. The FVs are 18 and a half bbls so they have about 20% head space. Here is a picture of some of the FVs. We have 7 in total.
These vessels are glycol jacketed and we can control fermentations temps by using the cellar page on the control screen. The glycol chiller we have is a repurposed military surplus unit. It was originally intended to chill a missile silo. Here is a pic of the glycol lines going into the fermenters
And here is the cellar page where we can set and monitor temps.
Once fermentation is over we'll pull the beer out off the top of the yeast with a racking cane and the beer is pushed through our filter. its a lenticular filter with tall cylinder shaped filter cartridges. Of course we cant use a pump to move the beer because that would oxygenate the beer so we push the beer through using CO2 pressure. Here is a pic of the filter
The beer is then connected to a transfer line that brings the beer over the heads of the restaurant guests and into our serving tanks that we have behind the bar. once the beer is in there we can begin to carbonate using a stainless carb stone. We can carb a beer in a matter of hours which is pretty cool. We serve right out of those tanks as well. Here is a pic of the tanks.
Here is a pic of all the piping for the gas. We also have a nitrogen system and a blender so we can use 100% CO2, 100% N2 and 85% CO2 55% CO2 and 45% CO2.... those percentages may not be 100% accurate. However the mixer unit got fried because root beer got shot through the main line. We have no idea how or who but the mixer is out of commission until we get it replaced.
Here is another shot of the control screen because it's awesome. Also the gray things on the left side of the panel are variable frequency drives which allow us to dictate how much electricity gets fed to the pumps and rake/ paddle motors. When we as homebrewers dont want our pumps running at full bore we throttle them with ball valves or some other physical means. That pump is still using as much electricity as if it were running at full bore so it is sort of a waste of electricity. With the VFDs we can throttle the pumps output by dictating how much power we feed it. We find that we are almost never running a pump at 100%. The highest we ever really get is 75% and the lowest is around 25% during brewing I suppose. When we're cleaning I suppose we run those pumps full bore.
And finally here is a picture of our master brewer on deck. He now has a more permanent place high above the brewery always watching over us.
Phew that was a lot of pics, but I have learned a ton from this community so this may be a small way for me to thank you all for the knowledge that probably helped me land this job. If you guys have any questions please feel free to ask me. If you want any more pictures of anything in particular I can grab them for you. I hope you enjoy this little virtual tour. And if you ever find yourself in the Duluth, MN area our head brewer has an open door policy that he will usually entertain provided he's not spraying hot caustic at the moment.
So here is the system. Construction of the brewery was completed a little over a year ago and everything used was brand new. System was built by diversified metal engineering.
The system is 15 bbls and a three vessel system. Mash mixer is in the middle, lauter tun is on the left and boil kettle on the right. The control screen there is an HMI that runs PLC and controls the brewery with pneumatic valves. Every vessel has it's own dedicated pump.
We have a grain silo that stores all of our base malt. We just used Breiss two row
This is our grain room where we store all of our specialty grains and some of the pilsen we use for our pilsner and tripel.
So to get grain from the silo it is augered in through the wall in the pipe on top in the picture below and then loaded into the big silver hopper. The hopper is on a scale so it makes everything really easy to weigh out. Then all the malt runs through our mill which is that yellow guy there. It's just a simple roller mill except the rollers are 10 inch rollers and powered by that large electric motor (the green guy) you see there.
In this picture you can see the scale read out and the buttons to start and stop the auger motor from pouring in malt.
Then all that malt is augered back into the brewery through the pipe you can see under the mill and it is all deposited into our grist case here. and normally we do this process the day before a brew day just so we dont have to worry about that work when we get there in the morning.
To get the brew day started we open that slide gate and the grain starts to fall down the fat section of the pipe which is the grist hydrater, so it's just spraying the grain with water. All in the picture above. The grain and water then come to rest inside of the mash mixer. Here is an inside view of that. The sections of the kettle wall that has that circle print are the two steam zones that add heat. And of course the paddles stir the mash so we don't scorch it and it keeps the temps uniform.
While we're mashing we'll open up the mash mixer screen on the control panel and you can see the two steam zones there.
And of course every recipe has a different mash schedule so we have a couple recipes programmed in to choose from.
And here is the mash schedule for the nut brown we brew. This system will maintain temps on it's own. So the system moves through this schedule by itself without any input from the brewer. We get a lot of consistency from this system. Also this is a break from baby sitting the system so a brewer can go take care of something else in the brewery.
After the mash is over we pump the mixture over to our lauter tun. Here is a view inside the lauter tun. you can see the false bottom and the rakes there. so first we vorlauf to get our grain bed set up and then we begin to fly sparge. We take samples of the run off a couple times during the lauter to measure sugar content. If we see that we arent getting as much sugar as we should be, we stop the sparge and run off and run those rakes there to hopefully stop the channeling that is cutting down on our efficiency.
Once all the wort is gone we need to get all the grain out and we have a hole in the bottom of the lauter tun where we remove the grain. in the picture above you can see the hole near the far side. We open that hole up and we can spin those rakes in reverse and they push a majority of the grain out. There is a local cattle farmer who comes and takes away the grain to feed his cattle with.
Here is a picture of the boil kettle screen.
On here you can see there are three steam zones that are small and independent and this fact allows us to get started heating sooner without wasting energy of an uncovered steam zone. Once we get up to a boil we can turn off the steam zones and turn on the internal calandria. The calandria is a steam jacketed cylinder inside the boil kettle (in the pic below) with a series of tubes that run up and down the cylinder. with the convection current going on during the boil the wort is being forced up through the tubes. We add steam to the cylinder and the heat exchange into the wort is much more efficient because of the increase in surface area while the wort is inside those tubes. As the wort shoots out of the cylinder then it hits a diverter plate and fans back down over the boil to suppress boil overs.
When the boil is over we whirlpool inside the kettle. This is where the wort gets pumped in the start the whirlpool.
Then the wort is run through our plate chiller (blue thing). and luckily in northern MN we have freezing cold water so that makes our chilling very efficient. and the wort gets oxygenated inline with a stainless oxygen stone and gets connected to one of our hard plumbed transfer lines. These run to the cellar area.
The water we use to chill comes out of the chiller around 180 F so theres a lot of energy in there we can reuse. All the water is then put inside our hot liquor tank to be reused for the next batch of beer or just for cleaning the brew house. If enough time has passed between brew days where the water loses too much heat we can heat it up again. The local steam plant that heats a lot of downtown Duluth is just across the street and they have hot water lines that run over to our building. We run our HLT water through a heat exchanger that has their hot water running through it. Here is a pic of the hlt. Really exciting stuff.
The wort then gets put into one of our fermentation vessels. However, before the wort goes in we put yeast inside the FV and we'll pump the wort up through the bottom valve so the yeast gets mixed in really well. The FVs are 18 and a half bbls so they have about 20% head space. Here is a picture of some of the FVs. We have 7 in total.
These vessels are glycol jacketed and we can control fermentations temps by using the cellar page on the control screen. The glycol chiller we have is a repurposed military surplus unit. It was originally intended to chill a missile silo. Here is a pic of the glycol lines going into the fermenters
And here is the cellar page where we can set and monitor temps.
Once fermentation is over we'll pull the beer out off the top of the yeast with a racking cane and the beer is pushed through our filter. its a lenticular filter with tall cylinder shaped filter cartridges. Of course we cant use a pump to move the beer because that would oxygenate the beer so we push the beer through using CO2 pressure. Here is a pic of the filter
The beer is then connected to a transfer line that brings the beer over the heads of the restaurant guests and into our serving tanks that we have behind the bar. once the beer is in there we can begin to carbonate using a stainless carb stone. We can carb a beer in a matter of hours which is pretty cool. We serve right out of those tanks as well. Here is a pic of the tanks.
Here is a pic of all the piping for the gas. We also have a nitrogen system and a blender so we can use 100% CO2, 100% N2 and 85% CO2 55% CO2 and 45% CO2.... those percentages may not be 100% accurate. However the mixer unit got fried because root beer got shot through the main line. We have no idea how or who but the mixer is out of commission until we get it replaced.
Here is another shot of the control screen because it's awesome. Also the gray things on the left side of the panel are variable frequency drives which allow us to dictate how much electricity gets fed to the pumps and rake/ paddle motors. When we as homebrewers dont want our pumps running at full bore we throttle them with ball valves or some other physical means. That pump is still using as much electricity as if it were running at full bore so it is sort of a waste of electricity. With the VFDs we can throttle the pumps output by dictating how much power we feed it. We find that we are almost never running a pump at 100%. The highest we ever really get is 75% and the lowest is around 25% during brewing I suppose. When we're cleaning I suppose we run those pumps full bore.
And finally here is a picture of our master brewer on deck. He now has a more permanent place high above the brewery always watching over us.
Phew that was a lot of pics, but I have learned a ton from this community so this may be a small way for me to thank you all for the knowledge that probably helped me land this job. If you guys have any questions please feel free to ask me. If you want any more pictures of anything in particular I can grab them for you. I hope you enjoy this little virtual tour. And if you ever find yourself in the Duluth, MN area our head brewer has an open door policy that he will usually entertain provided he's not spraying hot caustic at the moment.
