All new shiny stuff - can a brewery ever get any more exciting than this?

Been a while since I posted anything - so much been going on over the summer together with my lack of modern computer skills ( ie my old laptop at home where this blog is put together getting outdated with operating system and browser and me being unable to fix it - until now that is).

Been doing a bit of hill walking, contemplating the craft beer scene

There have been quite a few changes at the brewery - new people, new systems, new kit, new van and even a new kettle. A new toaster would be nice but we'll have to wait a bit for that. The underlying theme of all this change isn't in fact change for its own sake but it's more of an emphasis on quality and the delivery of great tasting beer, because, what really matters for me and all of us in the brewery is this - great tasting beer.

There has been a lot of talk over the past year and even more attitudes of all kinds in the press and blogosphere about craft beer, crafty beer, craft vs. keg, craft vs. real ale and micro vs macro. My idea is quite a simple view - is it beer I can be proud of and proud to tell the world about. Everyone has a different spin on craft beer and this one is mine. I has taken me years to learn my craft and I'm still learning. I still want to brew better beer and to brew beer better.

One way of doing this is to have better equipment, so over the last 6 months we've been investing in new kit in the brewery, beginning with the keg machine. This keg cleaner/filler arrived one dreich Saturday morning in April all the way from the manufacturer Comac in Bergamo, near Milan. It's very near where San Pellegrino water (my personal favourite) comes from, and if you know anything about grand opera, it's the town where the composer Donizetti was from.The driver was Bulgarian and spoke no English, let alone Scots, so it was back to my 6th form Russian O-level to dredge up enough Russian to use as a common tongue to unload the kegger safely.

My first day in Scotland - I hope they unwrap me soon

Now the kegger has been installed (after agonising where to place it), it looks great, but much more importantly puts our great tasting beer into kegs much better and safer than we could do it manually. We have been racking our craft beer into kegs for Sweden, USA, Malaysia, Finland and Norway for several years now, but it meant degassing the keg (a pressure vessel), taking out the keg extractor tube or spear. This has to done very carefully after ensuring the keg is completely degassed and contains no pressure as even a very low pressure over atmospheric pressure can cause the spear to fly out of the keg and cause a serious injury. A special key is needed to open up a keg to prevent this happening by un-trained personnel. After this, cleaning and sterilising the keg and spear then refitting, gassing up and filling very slowly to minimise fobbing losses. Four days work for four people to fill 100 kegs, whereas the kegger can clean and fill 100 kegs safely in less than four hours, allowing us to enjoy the fruits of our labours even more!

The left hand side is the cleaning and sterilising head and the right hand side is the filling side. The machine has various cycles it can go through depending what we want done, whether cleaning or cleaning, sterilising and pressurising only (for filling the next day for example) or going through the whole regime of cleaning, sterilising, pressuring and filling right there and then. Comac were very understanding of our requirements and delivered an excellent machine which has already filled since commissioning at the end of April this year over 1500 kegs. 

The kegger needs various services - steam for heating the caustic detergent tank, air pressure for actuating the rams and valves, electricity for powering the PLC (process logic controller) and sensor systems - pressure/flowrate/temperature/fill levels/liquid, CO2 for pressurising kegs, water for rinsing and tank filling.Not least, a drain for de-ullaging or draining out the dregs and rinsings. So plenty of effort was devoted to installing these in March and April.

The service end of the kegger

New steam pipe from the boiler

 We also commissioned a new type of air compressor - a rotary screw compressor, which is so quiet (unlike the reciprocal action compressors of old) that we hardly know if it is on. This delivers the service air at 6 bar to the kegger and to various other bits and pieces in the brewery, more of which later...

We've been using the kegger to fill not only chilled and filtered beer into kegs, but also real ale, unfiltered but treated with isinglass finings to allow the yeast to settle quickly to the bottom of the keg where it sits below the bottom of the extractor tube. We do this by mixing the rough beer with isinglass in a 5 bbl conditioning tank, then pumping it to fill through the kegger. The various pressure and flowrate settings on the kegger we can alter to allow the low level of  carbonation within the keg to stay within our specifications for the ideal conditioning for real ale. In the pub, these kegs are connected to a handpull, which draws the beer from the keg without any external CO2 gas pressure going into the keg as the gas vent on the beerline to keg coupler is open to the atmosphere, which lets air into the keg as the beer is drawn out.

A lovely system and these kegger-filled real ale kegs are being used in over 40 pubs for our beautiful beers. Just thinking about it makes we want to pop out for a pint now, so I'll sign off now and carry on after some 'refreshment'. How about a pint of Thrappledouser?

 

Cheers the noo & Slàinte, Ken

Triple Brewing and How To Go Forth and Multiply

Something we've been doing for quite few years now is triple brewing - not brewing tripel, the Belgian strong blond ale as in Westmalle Tripel or Chimay White - but simply doing three brews consecutively into one fermenting vessel. If one's brewlength (the amount of each brew, i.e., 30 barrels) and FV capacity are the same then there is no need for such extravagant behaviour, however if one has a FV thrice as large as the brewlength, then doing three brews consecutively into said FV will work effectively. The brews can go in three days in a row, which what we do currently with Bigger Bertha (its other name being CT7)  shown below, or straight after each other, without a break, if one is shift brewing around the clock. The first at 8am, the second at 3pm and the third at 10 pm.

Our regular brewlength is 30 bbls (barrels) or in metric speak, 50hl (hectolitres or 100 ltres). We have 4 sizes of FVs - 20, 30, 60 & 120 bbls which means most of our brewing is in 30 bbl aliquots. The two smaller 20 bbl FVs get  brews of 20 bbls and the 30 bbl FVs get the standard 30 bbl brewlengths. But for the two larger FVs (FV8 at 60 bbl and CT7 at 120 bbl, the latter revelling in its status as a dual-purpose vessel - fermenting and conditioning) the dark arts of double and triple brewing must be practised. Those of you with a mathematical bent will be asking yourselves why we don't do quadruple brewing into the largest tank being of four times our standard brewlength of 30 bbls. The answer is we need some freeboard or space above the fermenting wort for the yeast head to rise up. And indeed it does. Especially with the stronger beers. For Blackfriar, our 7% Scotch Ale, for example, we'll brew 3 x 20bbl brews into FV8 and it likes to foam up with serious intent. 

I was reminded of this today by our summer placement student from Heriot-Watt University, Liam, who asked how much yeast we pitch into a double or triple brew. A good question. We pitch 10 litres of yeast slurry to give 18 million cells per ml of wort for the first brew of 30 bbls which is oxygenated for 30 minutes. As the cells take up the nutrients and the oxygen present in the wort, the yeast cells multiply sufficiently to be able to cope with the next brew coming in. This second brew only gets 10 minutes of oxygenation, which allows the now-multiplied yeast to grow even more to be able to ferment the doubled brew in the FV and also, after the third brew is added without any oxygen, to continue the fermentation to completion. A simple tale of yeast going forth into the fermenter and multiplying.

Lia Fail yeast head getting going in style

It's important to get enough yeast cells to ferment out the wort but we don't want too many otherwise the beer will have the wrong flavour, and beer is all about flavour. Having the yeast multiply, generally fourfold during a fermentation, is good for our flavour characteristics, and it's also a lot easier and simple to pitch 15 litres into a brew than 60 litres. 

As far as yeast vessels are concerned, we use simple 25 ltr drums into which yeast is run, merely by opening the valve and letting the yeast slurry flow in gently, from the bottom of the cone of an FV of one of the previous week's fermentations.

The drums are stored in a fridge at 3 degrees C where they sit until needed for brewing over the following 6 days. I wouldn't really want to leave the yeast in the fridge longer than a week as it will begin to lose viability and vitality quite rapidly after then. Pitching involves the yeast being pumped into the FV in-line with the oxygenated wort using our yellow peristaltic pump shown below. 

This pump from the peristaltic experts, Watson-Marlow, works like a hand milking a cow, gently squeezing the milk down a teat into the milk-bucket, by gently squeezing the yeast through a flexible hose (the clear hose coming out of the right-hand side of the pump) into the fast-flowing wort coming from the heat-exchanger and thus into the FV, getting good mixing with the wort in the process. 

Our pitching set above, where wort travels along the green hose and the pale beige yeast slurry is coming in from the left. We find this method of pitching gives consistent results in fermentation and flavour and it certainly beats opening up a fermenter lid and pouring in 15 litres of slurry and helps avoid infections from wild yeasts and bacteria which will do no good for the taste of the beer. And what we're all about is, of course, the taste of the beer! Like in this pint of Thrappledouser...

Slàinte! Ken

Thrappledouser on Tour!

Went down to Hertfordshire this weekend for the wedding of an old pal and managed to find our Thrappledouser on tap in a few places in St. Albans. Also had a scrumptious Sunday Roast at the Crystal Palace, a lovely canalside pub in Berkhamsted after perusing Berkhamsted Castle (above). Thanks to Tina and Pete (below right) for a great afternoon.

Off to St. Albans now and the selection at the Boot - a lovely ancient pub with a well-kent beer in the middle!

I think the expression is '' Dingly-Dell''

Went for a wee touristy jaunt around the town and saw a pub sign for the White Lion up a side street. Intrigued, we headed up and inside and through into the beer garden where there was a beerfest! Yippee!
And Thrappledouser was on the bar inside as well. Huzzah!

To top the whole thing there was also a second beerfest at the White Hart one street away...Oh my goodness...

Slàinte, Ken

Cycling for Beer, Part 17- the Bridges of Almond.

Went on a wee jaunt on the old velocipede with the Lady Arlenka on Sunday following the River Almond upstream from the brewery. Our name, Inveralmond, means the confluence of the Almond and another river, in our case, the mighty Tay only 500 metres downstream. So after doing the FV gravity checks it was on the bikes and Westwards Ho!

The Old Inverness Road bridge, where Mr. Heron likes to gather lunch for his family.

The Railway Bridge

The Auld Brig at South Ardittie

Same bridge but from the South looking towards the Sma' Glen, where lies Ossian's Stone and Grave.

That well known spot most looked for on an ordnance survey map, PH - for Public House. In this case, the Chapelhill Inn, with Don the Landlord who serves great beer (Perth 800 in the glasses) and cooks up really fine dining. We could have spent all afternoon there soaking up the sun from the south looking over Strathalmond. But there was more cycling to do...

The Brig at Buchanty Spout -where there are cataracts which give rise to a huge spout of water when the river is in spate.

The view upstream from the brig westwards to the Spout. It's a lovely spot, great for picnics, but for us it meant a brew up on the camping kettle and a sausage sizzle. Yum yum.

On the homeward run now, looking back towards the Sma' Glen. There's an old Roman signal station on the hill on the left. This was the route in 84BC the Legions under Agricola took to head north to do battle with the Calgacus and his Caledonians at Mons Graupius in the Grampians.

40 minutes later, mostly downhill, with bikes back in the hoose, over the road and into Greyfriars enjoying the fruits of our labours. Arlenka on the Thrappledouser and me on the Perth 800. Yum yum again!

Slainte, Ken