Muddy Creek Brewing Co. Brewery Build- Start to Finish Thread

[MuddyCreek]

Approved!

We passed our Manufacturing and retailing health inspection for the brewery.

What does this mean? Well, not much in the greater scheme of the universe except that I am completely legal to make and sell both beer and soft drinks in my brewery now.

I can move my large kettles back into the brewhaus, hook up my transfer hoses, fire up the control panel and get started on manufacturing beer for our opening date.

We're starting to enter the final lap.

 

[MountainP]

Approved!

We passed our Manufacturing and retailing health inspection for the brewery.

What does this mean? Well, not much in the greater scheme of the universe except that I am completely legal to make and sell both beer and soft drinks in my brewery now.

I can move my large kettles back into the brewhaus, hook up my transfer hoses, fire up the control panel and get started on manufacturing beer for our opening date.

We're starting to enter the final lap.

Awesome. Butte's brewhaus scene is getting huge. I hit Butte often, I'll have to pay you a visit next time I come through.

Was the manufacturing inspection separate from the retail part? Was that just an inspection of the equipment/cleaning procedures?

 

[MuddyCreek]

In our case, yes - the manufacturing inspection was separate because I'm a bit ahead of the guys upstairs. They're still doing some painting and work on floor etc.

However they'll make a pretty big jump next week and they have more bodies to throw at it than I did so they can kind of move more quickly than me. I also needed the lead time because I have to let the beer and soft drinks age for a bit before they can be served anyway.

Had our tasting room been ready, the health inspector would have happily gone up and checked it today. However there is still plenty to be done. For the brewery however, we are in a state where we have a provisional license to brew and a permanent licence to make soft-drinks.

I still need the electrical inspector to give us a look-over and I need the fire-marshal to come by but in terms of full licensure the major thing for the brewery side right now is to have the Feds come by and ensure that our walls are where we said they'd be and that the doors open in the direction they're supposed to. Assuming that's the case - we get our full license and we're good to go.

Then we just need to submit our labels for distribution/canning/bottling and once they're accepted we can do everything. Until those are accepted we are limited to in-house retail.

Man, it's been a journey. I am very excited to be getting closer to the finish. We really can't wait to pour our first official pint.

 

[plumber_bob]

It has been a long journey for you and those involved with you.
I just went back to your first post and saw that it is 1 year to the day since you started this thread.

A long hard road, but you'll be loving it once you are up and fully running.:rockin:

pb

 

[MuddyCreek]

I'm going to try to round up the bodies tomorrow to get the brew kettle, HLT and MLT back in the brewhaus. (I got the seal on the floor over the weekend as planned.) Then we'll go for the water test right after Thanksgiving. That will include the HLT and BK tests along with the chiller test. Of course we'll also see the pumps in action.

Our entire brewery process flow chain will be put through it's paces to see how it works. We'll see how the drains handle all the water going through them. We'll see how the elements and the tankless on recirc keep up with the temperature control in the HLT and later in the BK. We'll see how our CIP systems work out.

Meanwhile, they're working like mad upstairs getting the Tasting Room ready for it's health inspection. I'll need to get brewing soon so we can actually start aging some beer. Can't do it though until we've properly water tested the equipment and done some process runs on our brewing pipeline.

 

[MuddyCreek]

Well, as I'd hoped we got the tanks moved back into the brewhaus last night. I need to level them yet and do some polishing. After Thanksgiving we'll do a water test to check for leaks and see how our control panel and elements do heating up the water on the system.

Then we'll check the efficiency of the chiller in terms of cooling things down.

After that's all done we can start seriously considering our first test batch.

I give you, the Muddy Creek 10 bbl Electric Double Herms Hybrid System. (I haven't hooked up the hoses yet. Sorry. It's a bit anti-climatic, I know...)

What's a Double-Herms Hybrid system you ask? If you haven't had a chance to read through EVERYTHING (and I don't blame you,) a double-herms hybrid system is one that uses a regular HERM system along with an extra tankless hot water tank system that will be run inline with both the liquor AND the wort to help achieve hotter temperatures more efficiently. The hybrid part comes in with additional natural gas burners being added as necessary under the tanks (which are rated for natural gas as well) to give us a little bump if I need it.

We're adding black-pipe and natural gas burners for our soft-drink kettles and I figured since I have them I may as well make them "mobile" so I can throw them under my big kettles and get some free heat from them for the 10 bbl system when I want them to help heat my HTL and BK.

So there you have it, the Hybrid Double-HERM

 

[MuddyCreek]

So, I think I've more or less gone over this before. However here's the skinny on the Hybrid Double Herm system.

A) We've got an on-demand Tankless Hot Water Heater that has 15 5500 elements inside it. This can produce water up to 180 degrees (We had it modified slightly, although I don't think we'll run it over 165.) To run it that high though, you can't run the water that quickly.

So, what we do is come in early and start filling our HLT with 165 degree water. The HLT has 2 heating elements in it. If you've followed the thread you know that we are seriously under-powered due to some disagreements with our electricians over who should get usage rights to the service in our building. Ultimately it turns out that electrical code trumps everyone and electricians get to interpret that as they choose. So we lost and we get tiny little elements in our 10 bbl tanks unless we want to spend $40k to upgrade out electrical service.

SO, as the 165 degree water comes into our HLT, we turn on the elements as the water rises above them with our control panel, which I think you'll recognize. We have found that the control panel does little more than maintain the temperature of the water. It doesn't actually do much to increase temp, at least without extra thermal insulation on the HLT.

THEREFORE, we have included [THREE] 32 tip natural gas burners with 3/4 inch inlets and our natural gas line. The tanks we had manufactured are actually built for gas-fired systems, then modified for electrical elements. So, they're perfectly rated for burners underneath them. I'm adding a few burners capable of up to 160,000 btu's each under the tanks to help with my heating needs.

This will get me up to my HLT temperature needs.

Meanwhile, I am patiently filling my MLT with water from the On-demand tankless hot water heater at my strike temperature. Again, using my (Well recognized) control panel I can turn on my pump and start up the HERM coil and circulate the liquor in the HLT until it is precisely at my desired mash in temperature.

Then I mash-in.

The control panel maintains temperature in the HLT, monitors the temperature in the MLT and controls the pump to circulate the wort through the HERM coil as necessary to maintain temperatures as required. All the while I manage the natural gas burners manually. (The only downfall, unfortunately. The good news is that the elements do seem to maintain temperature within the HLT quite nicely so I expect I will be able to reduce the burners quite a bit once the mash has hit proper temperature.)

Once my mash has completed I will crank up the burners again, increase the HLT temp sufficiently to mash-out. Then I'll transfer over to the BK and do the sparge in the MLT. Once finished all the sparged wort will be transferred to the BK and the burners will be moved over as well.

Then the fun will begin. I'll turn on the BK elements as soon as the wort has covered them and get the serious boil going when the burners have been moved. With all three burners turned up I should be able to reach a vigorous boil relatively quickly. Then I can turn down the burners sufficiently to allow the elements and minor to moderate burner help maintain a steady boil and I'm (as they say,) cooking with gas.

So, there you have it. I'm planning on doing our first test batch this weekend. A blonde Ale. Low ABV and mild flavor. Nothing too dramatic.

I'll also make some Teetotaler Lemonade and store up a few kegs of that while I'm waiting on the mash and the boil. Since we've been granted our license for beer and soft-drinks we'll manufacture and eventually distribute both. Teetotaler is unique in that we carbonate it. Makes a very nice shandy.

Pictured is Teetotaler's funky cousin, Raspberry Teetotaler. You can't quite tell due to the lighting and the camera, but it's pink. It's quite tasty. Just the right mix of sweet and sour. We are currently talking with the local distillery and hopefully they'll be using our root beer, lemonade and ginger beer for their mixed drinks in the next month or so.

Special thanks to Kal. Works like a champ. We managed to put it together all by ourselves.

How come you sent so many extra parts though? ;-)

 

[MuddyCreek]

Gas lines are in, Mill is up and running, Tanks are levelled, Today we're calibrating the sight glasses and the thermo-couples.

If I have time I'll also be moving all the kegs from the lagering room where they have been patiently waiting back to the aging room.

This weekend we'll be doing our inaugural test brew. For you trivia buffs out there, it will be Dirty Blonde Ale, chosen because it's our simplest beer. I'll be brewing up 150 gallons of it using the hybrid HERM system.

Wish us luck. I'll do some video of the process and probably put it on our YouTube channel after we edit it.

I'm sure I owe you some photos of the udpated brewhaus. There's still some finishing work to be done in there but we're at a point where we can do the test batches so we're going to start on that and see how the beer making goes on the large tanks.

 

[bobeer]

let her rip man! Good luck!!!

 

[NewJersey]

Amazing!!!

 

[sandyeggoxj]

Looks like I will have somewhere new to stop next time I'm up throwing flies around. It has been a fun journey this year to follow your progress. I hope you keep us updated as business grows! Don't forget your humble roots. It is still just beer. Just a LOT more of it each time and a lot more people drinking it. Cheers!

 

[MuddyCreek]

The Brew Kettle sight glass is calibrated in with 50 gallon increment marks. (We'll refine it a bit more as we go, but for our first test batch that will do nicely, I think.)

Tonight I'm calibrating the thermocouples on the Kal 50 Amp system. We want to make sure our mash is spot on for the blonde ale this weekend. I've got my guy coming in to help clean fermenters tonight. His job will be to scrub out two fermenters for Saturday. If there's extra time I'll also have him get started on the thrilling job of setting aside grain for this weekend.

Tomorrow we mill the grain, clean the tanks and pre-fill the Mash Tun to let the water sit and get some early bed-time. It all starts Saturday at 0:dark thirty. I want to get a very early start so we can compensate for any potential issues that may come up. The goal is to be finished by 6:00 p.m. (So we can actually be finished by 9:00 p.m. if real problems arise...)

We'll have a camera running and I'll edit together some clips of our first batch. Hopefully I'm not electrocuted or burned to death with the natural gas. (Although I'm heavily insured. That WOULD pay off the brewery. So there's that...)

Once I can edit the video we'll put it up on the channel and invite you all to enjoy a pint as you watch our first brew session unfold and the official kick-off of the brewery. I'm rather hoping I hit my numbers, but you can count on me to tell it to you straight if things don't go to well with the first brew session. I want you to be aware of the potential pitfalls you may be facing. After all, it's a community.

In "Upstairs News", the electricians are swarming over the tasting room. We have our fan/lights and hanging lights currently being installed along with our various track lights etc. (the hanging lights are dimmable as are the track lights on the bar, the "tower" where the logo will go and over the stage. However the fan/lights can't be dimmed due to... well the fans.)

The electricians are also installing a ton of outlets with usb ports so you phone junkies can get your silly fixes. The bar top is just about finished except for the eurathane (sp). And we have all the barn wood in for fronting the bar as well as the railroad ties. (We plan on fronting with barn wood, then putting vertical railroad ties every 5 or 6 feet. Then at the bottom of the railroad ties we'll spike in an actual rail for the footrest.) It will be pretty cool.

The lennox heater was installed about a week and a half ago and we punched through the wall to the mens and ladies room so they now have heat too. (The previous owners didn't have a decent heating solution for the upstairs bathrooms.)

We still need to get the dumb-waiter working and that will be one of our big items to get done, along with getting the 220 lines to the cooler behind the bar so we can hook it up and get it ready for the hundreds of gallons of beer I'm about to start brewing.

We also need to start seriously talking about our staffing. I need at least one or two guys in the brewhaus, particularly on weekends and we need several people upstairs in the taproom. In short, things be moving faster and faster.

Fortunately (and unfortunately) I am heading off to my in-laws for the holidays so I need to get some beer in the fermenters and the kegs sooner than later so we can get ahead on the aging process.

 

[MuddyCreek]

The fermenters are cleaned. We'll put a sanitizer rinse through them before we fill on Saturday.

I calibrated the thermocouples. I did both low and high end calibration. Two of them went pretty smoothly, the third gave me quite a bit of grief and I may still need to tweak it a bit. It calibrated fine on the cold end, but showed a huge discrepancy on the hot end. When I adjusted the (literally -15 degrees,) called for it shows fine on the high end and still shows alright on the low end.

EDITED: Got the third thermocouple dialed in. It was my issue. I don't know what I was doing wrong. One day I was off by 15 degrees so I moved the offset by 15 degrees, came in the next day and found myself off by 15 degrees the OTHER direction... so I changed it back... checked it a couple more times throughout the day and it seemed fine. I think I was just tired and had my eyes and brain bugging out. IE, IO error. Incompetent Operator.

That makes me a bit nervous. Kal, any thoughts there? It's a single probe that I'll be using in my HLT. I plan on putting an analog thermometer in the HLT too for backup. (I calibrated them last night as well.)

So, waiting on the final thumbs up from the plumber regarding my burners. They didn't come with any pilot assembly so he's trying to get something put together to safely light the monstrosities. (We built them so they could be moved from one kettle to another, that way I only needed to buy 3. unfortunately the burners I purchased don't have pilot assemblies with them so he's manufacturing something that allows us to both light the burners and safely move them into place since they're so massive.)

Plumber_bob, I'm sure you can appreciate the difficulty here. He's got these massive 32 tip burners that essentially are going to go onto 10 foot flexible gas cables with a quick-disconnect at the wall. However the burner doesn't have any kind of pilot or lighting assembly so he wants to put something together so we can get a pilot light going and then turn on the gas and light the thing "gently" as it were without building up any gas under the tanks.

 

[rlmiller10]

I am seeing a lot of arm hair and eye brows singed in your future. But you really don't need them anyhow. I have one of those 32 tip burners with a 10 ft hose to my natural gas line. If it doesn't light right away under my brew kettle there can be a bit of a whoosh. Never liked the hair on the back of my hands anyhow.

 

[brewshki]

My favorite thread on this site

 

[JINKS]

Subbing this so I don't have to keep tracking it down. Gonna come from Helena to enjoy your beer when the time is right.

 

[MuddyCreek]

So, waiting on the final thumbs up from the plumber regarding my burners. They didn't come with any pilot assembly so he's trying to get something put together to safely light the monstrosities. (We built them so they could be moved from one kettle to another, that way I only needed to buy 3. unfortunately the burners I purchased don't have pilot assemblies with them so he's manufacturing something that allows us to both light the burners and safely move them into place since they're so massive.)

And there lie the rub...

As it turned out my master plumber really felt it was unsafe to move forward without better precautions in place and I agreed we needed to take some time and make sure those monster burners were perfectly safe before we fired them up. We have to make sure we have something in place that meets the plumber's satisfaction that we aren't going to make any "gas bombs" in the brewhaus.

So, I didn't get to brew this weekend, which of course depressed me greatly. However I did get some more work done in the aging room and around the brewery in general. I'll finish moving kegs etc. from the lagering room today back into the aging room tonight and we may get our new brite tanks installed in their new home sometime this week.

I have the plumber working this week to get a safe pilot installation together for the burners. I'll keep you informed. Sigh... the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. I do have children though, as does my plumber and we felt it best if we survived the weekend.

 

[MuddyCreek]

There is a fine line between fishing and just standing on the bank looking like an idiot.

You never look like an idiot when you've got a cooler full of beer and the sun on your back, my friend.

 

[JINKS]

You never look like an idiot when you've got a cooler full of beer and the sun on your back, my friend.

Very true. I'm looking forward to having your beer in my cooler.

 

[MuddyCreek]

For your quick update, I did brew last weekend.

150+ gallons of Dirty Blonde are in the fermenter as I type. I didn't get any decent video out of the day but I had a few photos taken, particularly while we were mashing in and during the boil.

The day was LOOOONG! I started at 8:00 and we didn't get out of there until 10:30 p.m. I found out late in the day that I lacked some fittings for my chiller. (Should have confirmed that MUCH earlier, felt like a real ass there.) So we simply changed gears and used the HLT with cold water to chill the wort through the HERM system. That worked great.

We discovered just what a pain in the butt changing all the hose is going to be so I expect we'll probably be calling the plumber to hard-plumb everything sooner than later.

Of course since I couldn't get our uber: burners going we were using some propane burners. They worked alright but we did take quite a bit longer than was absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, the good news was that at the end of it all we hit our OG dead on. I was pretty excited about that for a first run. I would not have predicted that and I had a bag of DME ready to go assuming we were going to be a bit low. (That's been my trend as I have scaled up through 30, 40 and 50 gallon batches.)

So, we put everything in the fermenter, pitched the yeast and dragged our butts to bed after a REALLY hard day's work. (Cleaning out the mash tun was a real joy.) I'll get a chance to check on the progress of the Dirty Blonde Ale in a day or two, but the fermenting room is already smelling wonderful. Accounting for trub and transfer loss, I expect we'll get around 12 or 13 full kegs and a partial out of this batch.

Tomorrow I'm starting all over again with another 150 gallons of Good Time wheat ale. Then it's off for a few days of Christmas vacation. After that we'll be transferring the Dirty Blonde to our brite tanks for carbonating and then kegging, followed shortly thereafter by the recently cold-crashed Good Time wheat ale.

I'll be doing back to back batches of stout and amber just before the new year and on the 1st I'll brew the ipa.

That will give us a test run of all our beers just as the year ends and we can see how all the batches turn out and tune as necessary for the "real" runs. Then we can focus on opening.

Deck the halls and all that.

I meant to post pics but they aren't coming over from my phone. I'll put them up as soon as I can. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas everyone! I'll be sure to put together a Homebrewtalk special for those of you who come visit the brewery and mention the site. We hope to be open sometime in February, I expect.

 

[TechyDork]

Merry Christmas and congrats on the first batch!!

I have loved following your progress, and will be sure to stop in for a pint, or four when i am in the area!

Cheers to a happy new year for you and yours.

 

[WilliamSlayer]

Merry Christmas and salute to your hard work. Hope you get plenty of time with your friends and family.

 

[ColoHox]

Hey Muddy, congrats on getting this far, we all wish you the greatest success.

I've been following your thread, but I haven't seen you mention yeast prop yet.

Are you going to prop your own cultures or will you purchase pitchable quantities from a supplier?

 

[Heinesands]

I second ColoHox's question on yeast.

 

[MuddyCreek]

Hey, I'm back from vacation and taking care of sick family. And I see an excellent question has been asked.

Let me start by reminding everyone one that one of our partners is a Phd in Chemical Engineering with an emphasis in yeast. That should provide the long-term answer. However the short term answer is less clear cut.

Since Todd (our own Walter White) is not a brewer, we all felt it would be best to purchase our first round of yeast and then propagate from there. That is precisely the tact we've taken. Now we have several batches of slurry in our fridge waiting happily for their next turn.

Our first 5 products use 4 different yeast strains, (IE 2 of them use the same yeast.) In the interest of catching you up, we now have 630 gallons of beer in various stages, either kegged, fermenting or cold-crashing. I have 4 different products brewed and I'll be doing the final (and flagship) beer this weekend if I can get some supplies in. I need some hops.

The brew schedule for this weekend will be our final "test" batch. Of the 4 batches I've done 3 have come in right at the proper OG, and one has come in particularly low. That was because I scaled off a recipe and failed to update the efficiency that I've been getting at the brewery. a true "rookie" mistake. I made up for it with malt extract but I was not very happy about it.

I'm still well below my efficiency expectations. I expect this is due to a number of reasons, mostly based on well... inefficiency. My crush isn't quite perfect yet. I'm still trying to get the mill dialed in just right so I think I'll invite the fellow from a neighboring brewery to take a look at my settings and see if he can't set me right. (They have the same mill.) Furthermore, because I still (yes STILL) don't have my natural gas burners I'm fighting with getting my kettle heat up to par quickly enough. For example, there's a bit of lag between the initial mash, then the mash-out temp raise and finally the sparge. All this needs to move much more quickly.

Of course it takes a good while to get my BK up to a boil as well. So these things are causing me some frustration and I expect dropping my efficiency down a bit. However it's going up little by little each week. In fact our last batch came in high so that was particularly pleasant.

We combat the small issues with super studious note-taking and finding ways to improve our brewery efficiency everywhere we can. But honestly we've only used the big tanks a few times so it will take a bit of time before we're mean and lean. Until then it will be a bit of trial and error and hard work.

Fortunately the beer is coming out alright. No infections so far. (Which is good when you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of gallons.) I did get some under-utilization of my bittering hops when I brewed the IPA which also irritated me. (Mostly it irritates me because I know why I got the under-utilization. Another one of those totally foreseeable and solvable problems.) I'll try to help it out with extra dry hopping, but if I can't save it I'll have a bunch of extra "free beer" from that test batch.

Anyway, this weekend I'm doing our Chocolate Stout. I plan on brewing about 200 gallons. I've ramped up the recipe in a couple different programs and I just need to double check out the hops schedule with a couple guys. As many of you know, Hops math is "mathy".

Meanwhile, our tasting room is really coming together. If you go to the facebook page you can see the bar and how it's coming along. The local homebrew club has asked for dates when they can meet at the brewery and we plan on opening as soon as we have enough beer aged to support the rush the the other local breweries around us experienced when they opened.

At this point it's just me brewing as much beer as fast as I can.

We're actually starting to hire folks. I guess that's as much a sign of the impending apocalypse as anything. I need a brewer's assistant to clean out that damn mash tun. Lord knows I don't want to do it all the time.

 

[sandyeggoxj]

How have you adjusted your hop additions for the size of the equipment? Are you figuring more than 100% utilization?

 

[jiMithing83]

I really love this thread. I'm just over a year into brewing, but I've wanted to do a brewery/brewpub for years and this is a unique opportunity to see what it takes from beginning to end. Rest assured, if I ever make it out to that part of the country I will be sure to stop in to try the fruits of your labor.

 

[smitty8202]

I need a brewer's assistant to clean out that damn mash tun. Lord knows I don't want to do it all the time.

If you can match my salary I will clean your mash tuns for ya haha. It's great reading your story and following your progress. Do you plan on distributing your beers? Would love to give them a try.

Seriously I'll clean em

 

[ColoHox]

Thanks for a great update.

How are you scheduling production? In a way that you can reuse and cone to cone pitch your yeast by brewing the same batch just when the previous batch finishes?

I know you mentioned stored slurry...so do you just make what you need based on demand? Or as fermenters open? I realize it might be kind of early to be settling into a schedule.

Thanks for laying all of this out for us. I have a ton of questions, just trying to pace myself.

 

[Helly]

To piggyback on that question - do you anticipate continuing on with 4 distinct yeast strains? Anecdotally I hear about breweries having one "house strain" that gets used and reused for many/all beers over time and it seems like that would make the scheduling of brews and fermentations a bit simpler, but maybe it's not as complex as I think to keep several going at once.