Pittsburgh Brewing Company

Yesterday I was given a tour of the Pittsburgh Brewing Company by Brewer Mark Davis. It was really cool to be able to see a brewing operation of that size. Pittsburgh Brewing’s maximum capacity is 1.2 million barrels a year. Thanks Mark for taking the time for the tour.I forgot that the tour was yesterday so I didn't have time to stop home and get my camera, and it's really too bad, I could spend a week in there shooting photographs.The two grains that the brewery uses are corn and malted barley. The brewery gets the grain via railcars, which is pretty darn cool. The cars pull up along side the brewery and grain is taken to the silos by conveyer belt. We couldn’t really see the size of the silos as they were inside a building, we were standing underneath them and there wasn’t any open space to see the sides of them. The corn and the barley are transferred by pipes to the milling machines that crack the grains so they are not protected by their husks when brewingSince they use corn there is an extra step in the brewing process that I never heard of before. They put the corn in a cooker which, us guessed it, cooks the corn. This gelatinizes the starch in the corn. The enzymes that are in the barley can’t convert the corn starch unless it is gelatinized.After the corn is cooked it is put into the mash tun along with the barley malt. The grain mixture (mash) is soaked in hot water for a while to convert the starches into sugar. This is where the barley enzymes do their job. The sugar is the food for the yeast during fermentation. They have this old beast of a computer that runs the brewing process, it’s a Honeywell from that looks like it is from the 1970’s but despite of how old and clunky it looks, it is able to do some pretty cool things. It controls all the aspects of cooking, mashing and lautering. It measures the water and grain, it transfers the material, it fine tunes temperatures like in the mash it can like add 0.77 of a degree a minute for x minutes, Imagine trying to do that on your gas fired turkey fryer.After the grains are mashed the computer transfers them over to the lauter tun. This is another tank that is basically a beer shower. The wort (un fermented beer) is drawn from the bottom the lauter tun and is sprinkled on top of the grains. This has two effects, it causes sugar that is still in the grains to dissolve in the wort, and the grain bed acts like a filter, clearing material suspended in the wort. Here the wort is circulated over the grain bed for 3 hours. That seems long to me, but I never sparged 700 barrels, that’s for sure.The wort is then transferred to kettle for the boil. The kettles are steam powered; the brewery has its own steam plant. Steam is ideal for brewing because the steam is 240 degrees and can’t scorch the beer like a gas flame can. During the 1 hour boil they lose 14 barrels of water due to boil off, that’s 448 gallons.One room houses the mash tun, 2 lauter tuns, and 2 brew kettles, each of which have a volume of 700 barrels. 700 barrels is 22,400 gallons, just to compare in the past year I brewed 35 gallons of beer, just over one barrel.Once the boil is complete the wort is cooled in a heat exchanger it’s the size of 4 refrigerators side by side. The heat exchanges cools the wort from near boiling to near freezing. I didn’t ask what the flow rate was, but it sure puts my immersion chiller to shame. Then the beer is put into the fermenters, these beasts hold 1400 barrels of beer. That’s 477,867 bottles of beer! They were completely different than the conical fermenters that you are used to seeing at a micro brewery. They looked like a shipping container but were bigger. I’d guess 12-15 feet square on the front and 40-50 feet deep.After the yeast is pitched and fermentation starts the beer is allowed to warm up to 60 degrees and then is chilled again to cause the yeast to settle out. Their primary fermentation takes about 12 days. The beer is then transferred to conditioning tanks for another 2 weeks before it is ready for keging, bottling, and canning.They keep the yeast in large hoppers 4x4x3 feet. It was crazy to see this huge bucket of yeast. I didn’t ask about how they wash the yeast, or create new batches. He just told us that he typically used yeast for 8 generations.Pittsburgh Brewing has half barrel and tall quarter barrel kegs. The half barrel kegs are the old round ones with the wooden bung in the side. There was a guy filling kegs when we were there and it looks like a dirty and tiring job. The new quarter barrel kegs are really nice they had a new kegging machine for these, and they don’t look nearly as tedious to fill.The bottling and canning lines were both off when we toured, so we didn’t get to see it in action, it looked like a normal bottling line, I didn’t ask what it’s packing rate was.When we went through their warehouse I learned that they make tons of beer under different labels, American, Night Flight, Sterling, Dirt Cheap Beer, and many others.I was really impressed with the tour; it was cool to see the scale of all the stuff that they brew; now it’s just too bad they have to use so much corn. I thought they were stuck doing what they were doing without being able to experiment with anything new, but then they re-release Hop N’ Gator. What the hell, they should have put out a half decent pale ale and not some crappy malt beverage.