The Curse, It Has Been Lifted!

Today featured none of the crappy string of pseudo-disasters that bedazzled yesterday's experience, although I have to admit I came home yesterday in just as good of a mood as I have as the other two days that have sandwiched it despite the problems.

Today was the brew day, the whole reason I wanted to do this volunteering thing. I don't mind the other parts, especially given that I know they're all part of what it takes to make beer, but you really can't say you worked in a brewery when you've never helped with the actual brewing. Well, you can, but people will make fun of you when they ask about the brewing and all you did was clean kegs.

Today, I rolled in at 8:30 a.m. on the dot, just as I had planned and we were mashing in by 9 a.m. at the latest. (Mashing in is the process of mixing the dry ground malt into heated water for the mash. The mash is the step in the process where you steep the grains in a certain amount of water somewhere between 148-158 or so. This activates natural enzymes in the barley malt that convert the complex starches, which the yeast can't eat, into simple sugars, which they can. The vessel in which this is done is called the mash tun, more than likely thanks to the Germans.) To help those with less brewing experience than me, I'm going to put definitions of some terms and processes in parentheses throughout this post. I'm not calling any of you stupid, but I've been a homebrewer for about five years now, so the process and terms are all second nature to me, but they aren't exactly in the standard household lexicon.

Now, in my little 10-gallon cooler setup at home, I've mastered the art of mashing in a very low-tech style. I've got the thermal mass of my cooler entered into Promash (great computer program if you're going to brew) and all I have to do is enter in how big of a mash I'm doing, the ratio of water to grain I'm planning on and how hot I want the mash to be and it spits out how hot the water that goes into my cooler needs to be. After that, the technology (other than the plastic of the cooler) is pretty much medieval. I heat to the needed temperature the amount of water I need in the kettle over an outdoor propane burner and then pour that into my mash tun cooler. Then I steadily add in to the tun my ground malt while stirring the water. If you didn't stir the grains into the mash, they'd be like a ball of flour thrown into a bowl of water. You'd end up with a gooey ball that was wet on the outside and dry on the inside, which is hardly what you want to end up with. (Malt can be any of several grains that are soaked, allowed to begin the sprouting process, but then are kiln-dried before they get very far. This begins the process of converting starches into sugars that the mashing continues. Most beers use only malted barley, but malted rye and wheat are available and brewers may use usually small amounts of unmalted barley, wheat, rye, corn, rice, or oats, but malted barley must be present to bring enough of the enzymes for starch conversion.)

Mash in was a little different at this scale. The grain falls from the hopper into a hydrator that combines the grain with a spray of water that then falls into the tun. The similarity is that I still had to stand there and stir the wet grain into the mash as it entered to make sure the grain is evenly spread throughout the mash and to prevent those dough balls than can still occur even with the hydrator.

After we had fully mashed in, it needed to rest for an hour. The tun is insulated by its double walls and the sheer mass of the water and grain inside keep it from dropping too much from the desired temp even over that length of time. During this time we finished cleaning the fermenter and started the loop that would sanitize the heat exchangers (contraptions that transfer heat from the liquid in the kettle to water or some other sort of coolant), pump (to pump the liquid from the boil kettle to the fermenter), and fermenter (the vessel in which the liquid ferments). At the end of the mash we recirculated the mash to settle the grain bed so that it would filter itself and then transferred the liquid part of the mash, now called wort (pronounced as "wert", again those crazy Germans) into the kettle to start the boil. The transfer took about two hours. You want to drain the grain bed in the mash tun slowly while occasionally and gently sparing (adding water to the top of the grain bed). Drain too fast and the water creates channels through the grain leaving large sections of the mash unrinsed and you end up throwing potential beer out with the spent grain. Sparge too hard and the grain bed gets stirred up and you end up with a lot of grain particles in the boil, which can lead to astringency and clogged pumps and filters. I was in charge of this part. After Crawford opened the valves that allowed the wort to flow from the mash tun into the kettle, I had to keep an eye on the water level in the mash tun, turn on the pump that sprayed hot water over the top and then turn it back off when it got back to the level it needed to be.

Apparently I did a good job with the mashing and sparging because the mash efficiency came out great and he seemed pleased with the results. Gold star for me.

Now came the only less than perfect part of the day. For some reason the kettle was heating the wort slowly. The wort went into the kettle at about 150 degrees. We put in our lunch orders and the temperature was in the 170s, Fahrenheit. Lunch arrived and the wort was about 188. We ate lunch upstairs overlooking the brewhouse and when we finished the wort was only about 10 degrees higher. This wasn't causing a major issue except for extending the day's work, but it was a little annoying. We did finally got it up to a good boil after a while, and I got to throw in all of the hop additions (and being an IPA, there were a lot of these). I'll skip the details of the rest of the process, but just know that the wort (it's not beer until it has alcohol, which the yeast create from the sugars they eat) was pumped through the two heat exchangers, mixed with oxygen (which comes out of solution in the boil and the yeast need to reproduce) and yeast and into the fermenter from the bottom. There it'll sit until fermentation ceases and a serving tank opens up for it to move into to be served to the customers.

The hardest part of the day was emptying the mash tun. While the beer boiled and was transferred into the fermenter, the mash tun was allowed to finish draining out the remaining liquid and cool a bit. After the fermenter was sealed, we rolled in a huge bin like a giant plastic wheelbarrow (I'm guessing about 100 gallons) and I set to work scraping the wet grain particles out of the mash tun and into the bin with a hoe. This doesn't sound so hard until you realize that I filled up two of these bins (after tamping down the grain on a regular basis to take up less room) and it was 100 degrees (I have a photo to prove it) in that small, cramped room after about eight hours of steaming mash and rolling boil (and sun coming through the large windowed wall after noon). By the halfway point I felt like I was moving in slow motion and my arms were feeling heavy from reaching in with the hoe and pulling the heavy spent grains toward me. By the end, it looked like I had jumped into a pool. I managed to finish the job without any issues, but I did take regular short breaks to drink water to prevent any potential problems. This was the sort of work that leaves you feeling a little limp at the end of the day but oddly satisfied. It's something I haven't really felt about work since the first month or so working at the newspaper before it all became just a routine.

The thing that really surprised me was just how similar the process of the brew day was to what I do at home, although with less and simpler equipment. My mash tun is a 10-gallon drink cooler like those used to dump Gatorade on victorious football coaches, except with a brass valve replacing the plastic spigot. My kettle is a 10-gallon stainless steel stock pot with a valve at the bottom and it doubles as the heater for the hot liquor tank (the vessel that holds the hot water used for mashing and sparging). My fermenters are 6.5-gallon plastic buckets with air-tight lids and 6- and 5-gallon glass carboys. I use the wonders of gravity and siphons to transfer my water, wort and beer, but the process I helped with today is almost entirely the same. We used a standard infusion mash (getting the mash to the intended mash temperature at the beginning and keeping it there for about an hour) just like I do at home. I go through the same exact steps we used today, just at a smaller scale and with more medieval technology. Too cool.

Sorry for the length of today's post. Tomorrow's will be shorter, mainly because I'm going out with my friend Hank after work instead of coming straight home.