Makin a few hunderd gallons of beer.

First off yes I’m still alive, I’ve been busy working on several projects and have spent every moment in front of a computer working on those. One of the things I was working on was to redesign and program the new AutismLink website which was launched just the other day.I had the coolest opportunity the other day; Scott Smith from East End Brewing Company invited me to join him for a brew day. I had a blast, read on to get all the roasty delicious details.We brewed 8 barrels of Black Strap Stout. When I got there, the water was being heated to boiling so we had enough hot water for making the beer. Scott got me started crushing the grain. Typically for a batch of homebrew I crush less than 10 pounds of grain, this time I crushed around 500 pounds. Thank god that I had a machine that is a little faster than my hand cranked malt mill that I use at home.Once the water was hot it was time to start the mash. This is a pretty easy step. There is a screw auger that moves the grain from the malt room upstairs directly into the mash-tun. Water is then pumped in and the magic of mashing begins. Mashing is where the starches in the barley are converted to sugars by enzymes in the barley the process is activated by water and temperature.During the mash we did things like weighed out the hop additions. At home I add about 4 ounces of hops. Here we are adding around 4 pounds of hops. Sticking my head in the box of hop pellets and taking a big whiff was one of my favorite parts of the day.We also sanitized everything that touched the cooled wort, the fermenter, beer hoses, pumps, etc.After the mash was done we started lautering. Lautering is where water is sprinkled over the grain bed and it washes out all the sugars. The run off is collected in the brew kettle.Once all the wort was collected in the brew kettle we turned on the heat and brought the wort up to a boil once it started to boil we added the bittering hops and let it plug away.While the wort was boiling Scott put me to work washing kegs. The keg washer is a machine with a bunch of valves. To spray water/air/sanitizer into the kegs and get all of the gunk out.After the boiling was complete Scott transferred the wort through the chiller to the fermenter. How ever we had more wort than there was room for in the fermenter. This is where things get crazy. If you don’t know, being a home brewer or a small brewery owner forces you to take a few pages from MacGuyver’s book. A similar situation had occurred with the previous batch of stout. Scott used to half-barrel kegs as fermenters to hold the extra beer last time. This time he didn’t have any other converted kegs that he could use. But now that the beer had fermented out, there was room in the big fermenter for the beer in the keg fermenters. The problem how to get beer from a keg into a fermenter when the fermenters opening is 9 feet off the ground. Keep in mind a full ½ barrel keg weighs 170 pounds.The solution was to move Scott’s chain lift to the rafters over the fermenter. Then to prime the mother of all siphon hoses, this hose is 1” inside diameter. We hooked it up to a valve, and connected it to the racking port on the big fermenter. I was holding the end of the hose higher than the level of beer in the fermenter so it should of stopped at the level of beer but it shot out of the hose like a fire hose, it was one hell of a beer fountain for a second. Scott had forgotten that he had put the fermenter under pressure. Next we locked the valve on the end of the hose and connected it to the top of the fermenter, Jammed the other end in the keg fermenter. Hoisted the keg above the big fermenter and opened the valve. It was a comical display that’s for sure but it worked pretty well.We transferred the remaining wort to the keg fermenters and then it was time to pitch the yeast. At home I pitch around 2 cups of yeast after I stepped it up with the starter; here we used around 3 liters.After that all that needed to be done was cleanup. I got to rake all of the spent grain out of the mash tun, into barrels that was soon to be cow food. I also got to climb inside the brew kettle to scrub it clean, not the most fun part of the day. But hey, that’s part of brewing and I was the new guy. I had expected that I would get those kinds of cleanup tasks anyway.Over all I had a lot of fun, it was a lot of work, the hardest part was getting out of bed at 5:30. I didn’t get to take too many pictures and the ones I did take didn’t turn out very well because my lens kept fogging up. So if you are out and see the Black Strap Stout on tap have a pint. Maybe, just maybe I helped make that for you.