The First Brews
Only seven days had elapsed before we could commence brewing again. Unfortunately the new mill systems were not quite ready so we had to drag out the old Grange Street malt mill. This took fours hours to crush a tonne of malt for the usual 5000 litre batch on the previous day. Then the bags had to be carried up the stairs to the mash mixer on brewing morning. This went on for six more brews… phew!
We were pleased with the performance of the new Brew house built by the Dunedin Firm, Farra Stainless. Usually we start the brewing day at 6am, firing up the boiler with a pint of freshly brewed coffee in hand. At 7am the milling starts crushing the malt directly into the Mash mixer where it sat for an hour with the malt enzymes converting the malt starch into malt sugars, about 9am, it was pumped over to the Launter.
The Launter is basically a strainer, separating the sweet wort from the grain with some additional spraying of hot water to rinse off the adhering malt sugars. By 12:30pm the kettle would be full, with steam on raising the temperature to a 60-minute rolling boil. The hops are added in several stages depending on the recipe. Usually with Pilsner a large quantity is dropped in at the end of the boil for maximum. By 2pm, we’d be pumping the hot hopped wort from the kettle through the Heat Exchanger. This cooled down to 20 degrees on the way to the 5500 litre Fermenter, which already contained yeast, really to chew down the malt sugars to Carbon Dioxide and alcohol.
By 4:30pm everything is all cleaned up… Aha… it’s Beer O’clock, just enough time to check the previous batches of beers… mmm quality control sure is hard work…