question about craft breweries, ex. DFH

[metaltim]

so I'm watching brew masters, and I have a couple questions:

Whenever they pour samples from the fermenters to taste, it looks like it's carbonated? is it, and how?
part 2 of that, how do they carbonate? do they have like a 10K pound co2 tank on premises?

does your average craft brewery have a 'yeast' lab like DFH on the show? for a random craft brewery that doesn't experiment much, and does the same brews over and over, is that a bit over the top?

how do they sanitize huge 100BBL tanks? manually? or is automated?

do breweries typically always repitch yeast? whenever they need new yeast, obviously they don't buy little white labs vials. Do they have like a 10 gallon vessel full of yeast?

that's about it.

 

[yodalegomaster]

A large fermentor like they have at DFH has a natural head pressure becasue of it's size and the weight of the beer. That keeps in some of the pressure in and that's where the carbonation comes from. If you listen to the Brewing network "Can you brew it" They have to change the Ferment temp to compensate for the large fermentors.

Most have big brewers have big QA departments, the risks to the brand are too high, they can't sell junk beer and survive.

White labs sells yeasts in any quantity you want. but most brewers save yeasts and re pitch due to the costs. I was on a tour of "capital city brewery in Madison WI". They have smaller brew pilot brew system just to make yeasts.

 

[malkore]

1. fermentation itself carbs the beer...just not to the levels that you perceive as 'carbonated beer'. If you look at priming sugar charts, you'll notice it always has a temperature scale. The colder the beer, the more CO2 it still has in solution so the less sugar you need.

I think some breweries reclaim and scrub the CO2 that was produced in primary and use that for carbing. And yes, most breweries are doing a huge force carb (rapidly) and then its bottled or keg'd fully carb'd.

2. the boulevard brewery in KC did not have a yeast lab...not that they allowed us to see at least. it could be off-site or sourced via a 3rd party. I know the local brew pub here works directly with wyeast and white labs to get commercial quantities of yeast ordered.

3. I know there's a lot of manual cleaning of tanks. I believe they take advantage of all the waste water and use it for steam sanitizing. Boulevard was incredibly automated, even their original brew room, and especially their new 'wing' which was fully touch-screen/PC operated...and shiny!

4. well you can't repitch forever. I'm sure they do repitch slurry for several batches, finding that sweet spot between cost savings and maintaining a good product.
too many yeast generations and you get mutations.

 

[AmandaK]

Schlafly in St. Louis has a small yeast lab. It's nothing on the order of DFH, just a small room in the brewery with some lab equipment and fridges in it. Avery Brewing Co. in Boulder, CO has a 'yeast guy' who works intently on their barrel aging.

And as another note, Schlafly exclusively uses Wyeast and repitches for up to 17 generations.

 

[ReverseApacheMaster]

I went to Shiner a couple years ago and they have a small lab. I assume most breweries with significant distribution have their own labs. Most of the very small breweries and brewpubs probably do not. There is a break point where it is cheaper to do quality control testing/yeast culturing on site rather than sending it out.

 

[remilard]

Boulevard actually has two labs, they are very good from a QC perspective. They handle their own yeast, the master culture is cryogenically stored at UMKC I believe (might be KU Med center, some school in town). I love Boulevard but their tour is horrible for homebrewers.

Almost every good package brewery has a lab. Brewpubs will either not have one or have a basic one but they have the advantage of being able to keep the beer cold until it is served and that will forgive a few minor sins.

Most US craft breweries repitch via bottom cropping 5+ times. You can buy pitchable quantities from the yeast companies. Gordon Biersch does not repitch their wheat beer yeast as it is a poor bottom cropper and I guess they don't want to deal with having fermentors that can be top cropped. The real variance is whether they grown their own yeast for a new pitch or buy it. Growing your own requires at least a basic lab and some dedicated equipment, most large breweries will do this, pubs probably don't.

C02 is typically forced. Boulevard and Sierra Nevada bottle condition. Gordon Biersch probably carbonates naturally in the tanks or adds krausen/speise as I believe they claim to be rheinheitsgebot compliant and Dan Gordon certainly understands what that means.

Mash tuns and kettles always require some manual cleaning (removing the solids anyway). Tanks are mostly CIP at big breweries.

 

[CampfireBrewingCo]

I think I heard on one episode that Dogfish Head utilizes a Steam CIP (clean in place) system. Like everyone else said, they wash and re-use their yeast.

 

[Wayne1]

so I'm watching brew masters, and I have a couple questions:

part 2 of that, how do they carbonate? do they have like a 10K pound co2 tank on premises?

how do they sanitize huge 100BBL tanks? manually? or is automated?

do breweries typically always repitch yeast? whenever they need new yeast, obviously they don't buy little white labs vials. Do they have like a 10 gallon vessel full of yeast?

that's about it.

There are a few ways breweries carbonate beer, depending on the size of the system. One way is to partially carbonate the beer naturally. That is to seal the fermenter to keep the CO2 inside. Pressure is monitored so as not to exceed the tanks rating. The beer is then filtered and run into another pressurized tank.

Carbonation can also be added in-line as the beer is being transferred from one tank to another. Finally in the serving tank (if in a pub) CO2 can be added through a carbonating "stone" (nowadays mostly sintered stainless).

For a 10-20 barrel brewpub system an 800 lb Dewar is used to hold CO2. This is usually left in place and a truck will come a certain number of times a month to refill it. Depending on use, nitrogen is stored in 400 lb Dewars and are swapped out when low. There are usually back-ups of 50 lb tanks of both CO2 and Nitrogen around just in case. Also a couple tanks of Oxygen for in line aeration of the wort during transfer from the wort chiller to the fermenter.

It is a bit hard to physically enter a fermenter. There are lots of safety regulations to meet when it comes to confined space entry. As the tanks have held CO2 from fermentation, there is a risk of them not having enough Oxygen inside them to sustain life. The larger breweries do have Oxygen monitoring gear to make sure it is safe to enter a room.

Most of the brewing vessels are cleaned with a CIP, Clean In Place, system. There is a sprayball located on top of the vessel and cleaning chemicals and water are pumped through it. The chemical mixture is pumped with a fair amount of force to the top and down the sides of the tank. It is held there for a bit and then pumped back up. Usually an alkaline cleaner is used first. Mixed with HOT water it is run for about 30 minutes. This is follow by a warm water rinse. Then an acid cleaner is used. The tanks are left in an acid condition until they are needed again. Then they are rinsed and a sanitizer is run through them.

Some breweries do indeed have yeast labs. Smaller operations and pubs do not. Yeast can be obtained from White Labs or Wyeast or other yeast banks. Usually they do not get fresh yeast in pitchable quantities. They do get larger amount than are in a vial, but they do build them up to a pitchable amount. Start with a 1 gallon starter, build that up to 5 and then 10 and so on. The idea is to get enough clean slurry to pitch at roughly one pound of slurry per barrel of wort.

The yest is cropped,, or collected from each batch and reused over and over again. Most brewers can get 10 -15 generations from each pitch. AB does get fresh yeast sent out from St. Louis every 5 generations.

In one the pubs I worked at, we would store the yeast in a 10 gallon stainless pot. Just like a brewkettle. In another, we used a couple of 10 gallon cornie tanks. We would use a 4 gallon stainless milk pail to hold the yeast that we were going to pitch. We would put the pail on a scale and measure out the amount we needed. We also added a bit of Chlorine dioxide to each pitch to make sure the yeast was clean.

I hoped these answers helped a bit.