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

[watermelon83]

Really excited about the new burners.

Kid in a candy story excited...

Is it weird that I have no association with you or your endeavor, but sitting in my basement in northern Indiana, that I am too?

 

[brewshki]

Is it weird that I have no association with you or your endeavor, but sitting in my basement in northern Indiana, that I am too?

No, I think a few of us are there. Not in Indiana but you get my point

 

[NewJersey]

Just as excited for you from northern NJ. I dream the pro brew dream all the time

 

[MuddyCreek]

So last night, Todd (Our Walter White) and I fired up the 2nd leg of our overnight recirc system.

We use a little chugger pump, fitted with tri-clover valves to our monster hoses. It goes from the bottom of the MLT to the HERMS input on the HLT. The HLT output then, of course goes back into the MLT.

We just wanted to see if a little chugger would move liquor with that great a head, (We're talking 7 feet or so.) at a decent rate.

So, we hooked everything up, opened the valve on the MLT, plugged in the chugger and almost INSTANTLY ... "sploosh" liquor from on high. The darn thing works like a champ.

As I mentioned yesterday, our plumber got our valves set up on the tankless so we can connect our HLT output to the tankless hot water heater. Tonight we'll use our OTHER chugger to connect the bottom of the HLT to the tankless input. Then, using timed outlet controllers, we'll simply "turn on" the pump on the HLT to Tankless at around 3:00 tonight. We'll have the tankless set at around 155 or 160. That will start heating up my HLT nicely. (The output from the tankless will feed right back into the HLT, obviously.)

Around 5:00, the timer for the MLT chugger will go off and the HERMs coil will start happily circulating the MLT liquor through the coil of the now warmed up HLT.

By the time I get in at 8:00 we should have a nice toasty MLT that's just about at strike temperature.

Better yet. I did a test last night on my new burners. I filled my HLT up to it's regular level. It was at 98 degrees when I started and it had about 165 gallons of water in it.

I turned on my electric elements and then fired up the burner. Within 20 minutes the temperature had gone up to 116. (And I only had the burner at about 60%)

Feelin' good.

So, should I show up tomorrow morning at 8:00 and we're not quite to temp yet, it shouldn't take too long to get there with the burner. And once we move to the BK it won't take me forever and a day to get to boil.

I'm feeling like tomorrow could go really really well. We'll see. I'll take photos again. You can see our little chugger in action. It works so nicely I may just keep it on as a full time HERM circ pump. It's THAT handy.

And yes, I'd be happy to accept some endorsement money from Chugger Pumps Inc.

 

[MuddyCreek]

And the results are in...

We did not get the return on investment from the overnight recirc we wanted. The MLT heated to 100 and The HLT had only heated to 120 from the sad little elements inside it. Now this is likely due to the fact that the MLT recirc pump fired up at 4:00 a.m. and started moving the roughly 60 degree water through the heated up HLT to circulate into the MLT. So we were using a couple of very small elements to heat about 400 gallons of water.

Frankly the math just wasn't there. I knew it. I was lying there in bed knowing it. So, I jumped up at around 7:00 got dressed and headed down to the brewery and tossed the monster burner under the HLT by a bit after 8:00.

We were able to get the MLT up to strike temp (155) by 11:11. So I made a wish and we mashed in. That was still a good hour to two hours better than we've done in the past.

We mashed for an hour, then transferred to the BK. I put another burner under the BK as soon as we got wort in the kettle. All together we put 340 gallons of wort in the BK and got ourselves working on getting to boil which we achieved within an hour.

The recipe called for a 90 minute boil, so we clocked our start time at 2:41 after condensing a bit. Added our bittering hops and by just after 4 we were sending the wort through the chiller into the fermenters.

By 5:30 the transfer was finished and I had the yeast pitched and everything buttoned up by 6:00. After some tidying up I was home by 7:00.

We still have room for improvement but it was the first sub-12 hour brew day we've had. At least on this scale and it was our first "full" batch. We didn't completely stretch the system's legs but we did 8.5 barrels which isn't bad.

If we can trim another hour or two next Saturday and get the brewhaus tidied up before close of day, we'll try to do another batch on Sunday as well.

Tonight I'm kegging some of our house I.P.A. and tomorrow we'll be moving the chocolate stout into cold-crash.

Gotta keep things moving.

Our soft-opening is scheduled for sometime near Valentine's day. Likely the Monday or Tuesday following.

 

[MuddyCreek]

I should be clear on my previous post. We aren't giving up on the recirc. We just need to do a bit more engineering. We weren't able to run water through our big tankless because we were using a smaller hose for that end of the loop and we weren't able to get enough water going through the tankless at one time to activate it. (It needs a certain amount of water pressure to fire up the elements or they won't go. Safety mechanism to protect the elements.)

So, I'll need to hook up the larger transfer hoses so we can get more flow going through the tankless which "should" activate it. That ought to heat the water better which (again) "should" heat our water better and make the whole thing work. We'll do a better test before the weekend and see if it all holds water so to speak.

Still I'm much happier with how things went on Saturday. All in all we had a great day and we learned just a bit more. Best of all, we increased our efficiency. I actually had to add a bit of liquor to the fermentors at the end to make sure we hit the right gravity before we pitched. That's a nice problem to have rather than needing to add DME.

Seems we're starting to move in the right direction.

I've currently got 11 bbls in cold-crash (5 of which we'll be kegging tonight) and 15 bbls in my fermenting room.

Next weekend we hope to add another 17 bbls to the fermenting room give or take.

We have a "nitrogenator" which pulls nitrogen out of the air and puts it into a pressurized tank. We also have a line that runs across the brewery into a regulator. We use nitrogen in our keg cleaning system to purge rinse water, cleaner and sanitizer. That gives us an endless supply of pressurized gas. Furthemore, when we're not using the stuff for our cleaning operations, the nitrogen is happily supplying our upstairs taproom so we can have beer on nitro as well. (Giving us a niche in town as nobody else is doing that yet. I'm sure one of the other breweries will scramble to catch up as they'll see the edge this will give us, but we'll be the first. ; - )

We also got our milling room door put on downstairs which makes us completely compliant with the plans we sent in to the state and feds so they can come down and do their inspection anytime. The upstairs guys have some stuff to do yet, but we're ready down below.

 

[brick_haus]

Great job! Thanks for letting us brew professionally vacariously through you. Best of luck!

 

[gl_az]

And the results are in...

We did not get the return on investment from the overnight recirc we wanted. The MLT heated to 100 and The HLT had only heated to 120 from the sad little elements inside it. Now this is likely due to the fact that the MLT recirc pump fired up at 4:00 a.m. and started moving the roughly 60 degree water through the heated up HLT to circulate into the MLT. So we were using a couple of very small elements to heat about 400 gallons of water.

Frankly the math just wasn't there. I knew it. I was lying there in bed knowing it. So, I jumped up at around 7:00 got dressed and headed down to the brewery and tossed the monster burner under the HLT by a bit after 8:00.

We were able to get the MLT up to strike temp (155) by 11:11. So I made a wish and we mashed in. That was still a good hour to two hours better than we've done in the past.

We mashed for an hour, then transferred to the BK. I put another burner under the BK as soon as we got wort in the kettle. All together we put 340 gallons of wort in the BK and got ourselves working on getting to boil which we achieved within an hour.

The recipe called for a 90 minute boil, so we clocked our start time at 2:41 after condensing a bit. Added our bittering hops and by just after 4 we were sending the wort through the chiller into the fermenters.

By 5:30 the transfer was finished and I had the yeast pitched and everything buttoned up by 6:00. After some tidying up I was home by 7:00.

We still have room for improvement but it was the first sub-12 hour brew day we've had. At least on this scale and it was our first "full" batch. We didn't completely stretch the system's legs but we did 8.5 barrels which isn't bad.

If we can trim another hour or two next Saturday and get the brewhaus tidied up before close of day, we'll try to do another batch on Sunday as well.

Tonight I'm kegging some of our house I.P.A. and tomorrow we'll be moving the chocolate stout into cold-crash.

Gotta keep things moving.

Our soft-opening is scheduled for sometime near Valentine's day. Likely the Monday or Tuesday following.

Being a pipe dreamer that would love to follow in your boot-steps there is something that I think you may be missing on the instant hot water heater. I could be totally wrong on this but I believe all of these things, like spa heaters and any other 'inline' type heater that can be damaged by dry firing have a pressure switch. They need a certain amount of 'back pressure' to engage the switch which allows the heater to operate. Running them a full open flow means that there is no back pressure and thus the switch will never be engaged and the device will be disabled. I could be wrong and my wife would agree that I am always wrong but it is something to maybe take a look into.

Best of luck!

 

[MuddyCreek]

We thought about that gl_az.

It does come down to pressure, on both sides. The tankless will shut down if the "out flow" is to great and there isn't enough water pooling over the elements to keep them essentially submerged. However, the digital readout on the tankless lets you know when the outgoing water is hitting the right temperature and you adjust the outflow so you know you're going at the right rate.

In our case, we aren't getting enough water pressure into the "in-flow" to even get started. Essentially the tankless is sensitive enough to know that we won't be able to maintain enough water on the elements when we open up the out-flow valve at all because we aren't getting enough water pressure on the in flow valve.

So, we need to increase pressure on the inflow.

I have a bigger issue however. Since we don't have a automatic valve opener on the tankless yet (like you can get on your automatic sprinkler lines,) we have no way of opening the out-flow valve at a given time.

This means we can't just "turn on" the thing at say 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. and let it go. We have to manually turn it on and open the valve ourselves.

Now the pump running water through the HLT to the MLT can fire up automatically at any time we want it to. That works fine. But the other side... that has to be done manually.

Which means I either have to go and turn the thing on at some point in the middle of the night or I have to turn it on a bit earlier and just let it run through the night.

sigh... This is what happens when your electrician and you don't quite communicate clearly enough in the early goings. You find yourself dickering with the devil.

Nonetheless, I put 3 barrels of Skinny Cow into kegs on Monday. I'm going to put another 5.5 barrels of Amber into kegs probably on Thursday.

Somehow, despite all the hobgoblins, we're forging ahead. (Actually, the somehow can be translated into lots of extra hard work. We work harder, not smarter at Muddy Creek. Over time we hope to transform that model. )

I edited to add some photos from our last brew day...

We have some mashing in... the mash tun from our full batch of Dirty Blonde we brewed last week, and our grain storage bins which we just inventoried. (We currently have 3 tons of grain stored which should be enough to get us through about 5 full batches with a bit of "over-flow" for general over-stocking.)

Enjoy.

Oops... These are apparently duplicate photos. Sorry about that. I'll get something new out. Now I feel badly.

 

[Carlton]

MuddyCreek,

If the tankless heater requires more flow volume than the building mains can supply here is a possible solution that should work without much if any new equipment:

- Disconnect the tankless heater from the building supply.
- Add a solenoid valve to fill the HLT directly from the building supply.
- Add a full level float switch to the HLT if you don't already have one.
- Plumb a loop from your HLT to your brewery pump to tankless then back to the HLT.

Automatic operation:
1) Open HLT solenoid valve and fill until float switch indicates full.
2) Start the pump and tankless heater, possibly triggered by the same float switch.
3) Stop when the full volume of HLT contents are at desired temperature.

Your brewery pump probably has more than enough GPM capacity at low head to keep your tankless heater happy. A throttling valve on tankless output can dial in an optimal flow rate.

The HLT fill rate is now completely independent from tankless flow requirements. The overall time to fill and heat may be longer so just start the process a little earlier. Even at a crummy 5 GPM from your building the HLT should fill in less than 90 minutes. You could even add a float switch at some midpoint level in the HLT and start circulating through the tankless earlier so when the HLT is full it is also at your target temperature.

 

[plumber_bob]

On ya'lls scale, how do you clean your BK? I've been to a local brewery that uses, Five Star acid cleaner No. 5. Is that the chit? Or do you guys have a different resolve? I know that the No. 5 is pretty expensive for the home brewer. I paid like $75 for a gallon!!! And that's not counting shipping.

pb

 

[Michael81]

Great read!!!!

 

[MuddyCreek]

Bob, right now I'm using Shepherd Bros #14. We also have a ton of industrial "PBW" that we use for soaking of clamps, valves, elbows and general parts.

We also have a sanitizer that we use to spray everything with via our CIP balls. (Not deflated...)

I've added a couple photos of our 2 brite tanks which are currently passivating. They'll be ready by Monday to take just about 7 barrels of Muddy Creek. We'll fire up the CO2 and get it carbed in a few days and ready to keg.

The other photo is the current set of kegs with about 10 bbls of beer we have ready for our soft opening. We're going to invite about 30 people up and let them try out the beer, (I'm sure I've already talked about this...) for free. They just have to give us honest opinions about the products, the service and the atmosphere. We'll take notes and make an honest effort to improve upon their comments. Then we'll have another soft-opening with about twice the number of people, (again, invitation only.) However we'll charge this time. Included in the second group will be some of the folks who had some negative feedback and hopefully they will come and see that we made efforts to address their concerns.

After that will be the full opening. It will be about 2 or 3 full weeks before Saint Patrick's day in Butte, which is kind of a big deal...

So, we're getting amped up for that.

 

[ImNoExpert]

Great thread! A+++ Would read again!

 

[MuddyCreek]

If you take a look back to the early stages of the thread you'll see the photos of the tasting room when we first got the building. I have a few pics I took yesterday at lunch. We will be taking the power tools out this weekend and I "should have waited" until Monday to upload some photos but I feel guilty about making everyone go so long without any photos.

So here are some interim photos of the tasting room. We still have some work to do, but you can see the progress being made.

I also kegged another 5.5 barrels of No Paddle Amber last night. I included a photo of the No Paddle out of cold-crash and the No Paddle kegs we put into the aging cooler for those of you interested. That gives us 15.5 barrels of kegged beer, another 6.5 barrels ready to keg by Tuesday and 17 barrels being made over the weekend give or take.

Add to that 5 to 6 barrels of root beer, lemonade and ginger beer and I'm pretty much spent.)

And that is the beer targetted for our initial opening. (That's pretty much all I have kegs for.)

 

[MuddyCreek]

You're probably wondering about those windows... They're actually old-style steel windows that we'll open in the Spring and summer months with screens, however they're obviously too cold in the Winter. Therefore we've shut them and put inserts in. We'll put chalkboard paint over the inserts and use them for menus and for local artists to do chalkboard art in exchange for a pint now and then while they draw.

The "BIG" window will be turned into our display area during the winter months. We'll put in shelving and glass and hang our "Muddy Gear" in there for people to see and hopefully covet.

EDIT:

Went in at lunch today and the windows were painted with the chalkboard paint. Artists with more talent than me, be aware...

 

[MuddyCreek]

Another weekend, another batch of beer. (And some Root Beer and Lemonade!)

So this weekend we made some more Skinny Cow. (Batch 3) and we also put together our first couple kegs of Where's Your Mother root beer and a keg of Teetotaler Lemonade.

Tonight I'll be moving around 8 bbls of Dirty Blonde to cold crash and I'll also move 6.5 bbls of Muddy Creek to our brite tanks to carbonate. (We finally get to use the shiny stuff!)

Below are a couple of photos of the "Brew Rats". Kat is adding some sugar to our root beer and Scott is lugging grain into the milling room for some Good Time ale that we'll be brewing soon.

 

[MuddyCreek]

And the brite tanks WORK!

Last night we put our stout in the tanks. dialed up a low level of carbonation for it and this morning we already have a nice creamy head on it. In fact, I'm letting some of the CO2 levels dissipate this morning as it may be a bit over-carbed. (First time with the brite tanks and all...)

So, we'll let it sit in the tanks for another day and then lower the psi to 3 or so and move the beer into kegs, clean out the brites and do it all over again this weekend with some Dirty Blonde.

I'll also be brewing up some more Good Time this weekend and finally, the news you all REALLY want to hear.

We're going to try to have our final inspection on the 9th and host a small party on the 12 which will serve as a pre-opening function. Then we'll do a soft opening sometime around the 16th with 30 to 40 people. A week later we'll do another soft opening with about twice as many and finally our grand opening at the end of the month complete with live radio hosting for a few hours, some TV folks and all the hoopla and coverage we can get.

Hopefully we can make a splash.

 

[sandyeggoxj]

How do you calculate or measure volumes of co2 for burst carbonating in the bright in a short period of time?

 

[MuddyCreek]

There are a few methods for doing it. It should be noted that our giant oxygen stones do a great deal of the work for us. Our engineer looked up the various ways to accomplish fast-carbing and we decided to try the "binge and purge" method first. There's are plenty of guidelines for how many psi you should put on your beer for a specific style at a given temperature. We've made some modifications to those guidelines for personal preferences but generally speaking we follow them fairly closely.

Blonde Ales are a bit more carbed than an I.P.A. or an Amber. Wheat Ale is quite a bit more carbed than a Stout. Our specific numbers are close to 8 psi when we're carbing at 38 degrees for most of our beers. Some carb at 12, some a little lower.

Basically you dial up your pressure to what you want your volumes of C02 to be for your style, volume and temperature, then you apply the C02 to your sealed tank until you hit your pressure + 5 psi give or take. Then you purge the tank down to 0. This clears the Oxygen. (We have a purge valve at the top so we just turn off the gas, open the purge valve and let er rip.)

When the pressure is down, we open the gas back up set to the pressure we want the beer to go to, let it pressure up again to the proper volume. We let that sit for a specified number of hours, then purge the pressure back down to 0 again. Rinse repeat every 4 or 6 hours.

 

[MuddyCreek]

Doing our next seasonal next week.

I'll be brewing an Irish Red for Saint Patty's day. Exciting stuff. Very exciting.

 

[MuddyCreek]

So we transferred the Muddy Creek to kegs on Thursday last week. That went very well.

Yesterday we moved just under 8 bbls of Dirty Blonde to the brite tanks to carbonate. It should be ready to keg by Tuesday.

We brewed 8 bbls of Wheat ale (Good Time) on Saturday and had our best brew day by far. Our brewhaus efficiency was up, our brew time was down all in all, everything went pretty well.

I did have a stuck fermentation with my Skinny Cow from last week so I had to pitch a bit more yeast. I'm hoping that will fire up the fermentation and finish it out. I would hate to have to pitch 7.5 bbls of I.P.A. (We used a ton of hops on that.) If it doesn't pick up this afternoon, I'll do the stir start and perhaps toss some yeast energizer in there as well.

 

[g-star]

Sorry that I haven't had a chance to go through all 33 pages, but I was wondering if you had previous professional brewing experience or formal training (Siebel, UC Davis, etc.) before starting your brewery?

Thanks and good luck.

 

[todd_k]

Gluten free

thank you! I'm halfway through the thread and I'm scrolling around thinking "what the hell is GF?!?!?"

 

[MuddyCreek]

"GF is Gluten Free."

No, I haven't had formal training. I've been brewing for about 11 years. Surprisingly, things have gone pretty well so far. However we're just getting started. As I mentioned in my last post I'm having a bit of trouble with an I.P.A. and a stuck fermentation but I'm working on getting it going again.

We have a team of fellows helping out and one of them is a chemist with a doctorate in bio-engineering with an emphasis on yeast cultures. He's been a huge help and has really been a big part of our success. I've also leaned heavily on our local brewers who have a great deal of experience in the area.

Admittedly we aren't trying to change the world up front. We are trying to brew good beer that meets BCPA guidelines and stands out with the local breweries and draws people in. Over time we'll expand our horizons and try some more adventurous recipes but right now we are sticking to some standard styles. We make a Stout, a Wheat Ale, a Blonde, an Amber and an I.P.A. I have several rotators but we aren't doing anything particularly crazy.

We have a comfortable industrial-chic feel to our tap house that we think will appeal to people of various ages and we've managed to fall into a great location that's right in the middle of several breweries and our local distillery. Essentially we're right in the thick of it.

We have a great marketing team and we happen to be pretty good at social media so we are great at promoting ourselves. We've gotten nearly 2000 likes on FB and we haven't even opened yet. The tastings we have done have gone very well and people seem to like the products very well.

I've never claimed to be the worlds greatest brewer. In fact I admit that I spend a good amount of my time trying to figure out more efficient ways to do just about everything. This thread was started in order to help other folks figure out better ways to work through the minefield that is starting a professional brewery. We had just about the perfect setup. A mid-sized town with a tremendous appetite for beer with only 1 brewery and several huge festivals each summer.

Despite all the things going our way, it's still taken us a year and a half to get going and way more money than we expected. Nonetheless the taproom partner is just about ready to put a pin in the calendar and state an opening date.

It seems that every week I learn something new about our system and every week I find out that I need to learn something more about the trade. For everything I think I know there are 10 things I either don't know or I forgot about that slow me down or trip me up. Checklists, calendars and organizers are you good friends.

But, like I said last week we had our best ever brew day. We were finished with the transfer to the fermenters by 2:00 which is far and away our best ever. (There have been weeks when we've been at it until 1:00 a.m. so that's a HUGE improvement.) My aging room is practically full and I need to start putting all this beer into people!

That's pretty key also because our bank payments go up to about 2.5k in March and it sure would be nice to have some revenue flowing so I'm not paying that out of my own pocket.

 

[todd_k]

So what is the backup plan for when the dumb-waiter breaks? Also, with all of the snow in the winter and this being an old building, what about water seeping into the basement once the snow starts to melt?

 

[ImNoExpert]

Sounds like you've been able to roll with whatever setbacks have come your way. Keep it up! You're almost there!

 

[MuddyCreek]

Fine questions Todd.

I actually haven't addressed these items in the thread, surprisingly enough. I think I've talked a bit about the dumb waiter, but we are just now having more work done on it.

My neighbor is a welder. He is currently adding some rails from the top of the dumb-waiter to the bottom where some particularly safety-conscious fellows removed the rails long-ago to make the dumb-waiter inoperable. Today that work will be finished. We have already attached a 2000 lb winch and welded a mounting bracket that the winch connects to at the top of the dumb waiter.

Now, admittedly, if the dumb waiter fails, we're in a bit of a pickle. Currently we don't have a backup plan other than using a "stair-climber" dolly to move kegs up the two flights of stairs we need. We have had a couple of engineers look at our winch system and confirm that it is sound so we feel pretty good about it and we plan on getting a back up winch for our current one. However, I admit this IS a point of failure that is probably a fairly critical path for us.

The good news is that we have a pretty big storage room upstairs and we can currently store as many as 30 or 40 bbls of beer in our cooler if we had to. Furthermore, we could purchase some additional 2.5 bbl brite tanks that would fit in our cooler and some pumps that could move beer up the headspace if absolutely necessary so if disaster DID strike I suppose we could figure out a way to pump beer up to some brite tanks into the cooling room for direct serving. Ideally we'd be up and running for a bit so we could afford those brite tanks though. ;-)

As for the snow, well - we've already been through a winter here and we've had to deal with the melting snow. Our sidewalks are vaulted, meaning the rooms extend underneath the sidewalks. Since the building is CRAZY old, the cement is less than spectacular and there is in fact quite a bit of leaking when we have either melting or heavy rain. And the sidewalks are directly over our fermenting and lagering rooms. (Which are heavily insulated and don't like to get wet!)

So we had to cover the tops of the rooms with an angled lid which allowed melt and rain water to drain toward a drain vent which naturally leads toward the floor drains cut into the room.

Good times!

And now for something completely different! Our Graphics Guy has Entered the Building! The logo has been added to what we call "The Tower." Enjoy a bit more eye candy.

 

[kombat]

I've got to admit, I'm a thread-junkie when it comes to this thread. Every time it pops to the top of my "subscribed threads" list, I can't help but click it, hoping for more pictures.

 

[MuddyCreek]

Well then you'll be thrilled tomorrow. We're pouring epoxy on the bar tonight. And we've done one of our test tables too. My camera is a bit crappy as you can see but I'll take a photo or two tonight anyway.