January 21 – Beer Blog No.2
I mentioned brewing in a small space, in blog no. 1. It’s a problem many will face and when my family became fed up with me blocking the kitchen and odourising the house with wort smell and then boiling hops, a solution had to be found. The smell isn’t that bad so don’t panic, but we know how judgemental the friends of teenage daughters can be! Thus, we built a tiny brewhouse, which also served as a pantry, so I was allocated the sink and about 1 ½ m2 space – or about 16 sq foot for US readers.
Our planning department kept my plans to prove to incoming colleagues how wacky some residents in our town can be.
Why call it a macrobrewery? Large commercial breweries give their annual production figures in millions of hectolitres, microbreweries probably talk in thousands and I don’t quite manage 4 hectolitres or 90 gallons per year. But that serves me and the immediate family and friends.
Photographing my brewery is problematic with space and light considerations, but here is a diagram I made from a 19th century sketch. The process is described in the Craft of House Brewing.
- Avoid polypropylene (plastic) buckets. If they fail, you could be showered with boiling water. They were once considered OK, but I always had reservations. Cheap, cheerful and dangerous. Stainless steel boilers must take plastic from the boiling side of the brewery. A 2.6 kW tea boiler is perfect for preheating the mash liquor.
- You can make your mash tun, or buy a converted insulated cool box.
- 4kW is better for boiling the wort in the 50 litre stainless steel vessel. It will need a gas burner, to avoid point heating and some tricky wiring.
- I haven’t used a purpose fermenter for years. I cool the wort in the boiler, adjust the gravity with cold water, pitch the yeast, cover and leave in a cool place until fermented out. I get away with this because I don’t brew so often and it is OK if my boiler is tied up for 10 days whilst fermenting.
- Cool – I live in a temperate part of the world and could brew with care throughout the year. I don’t! Traditionally, one brewed between October and March, hence the occurrence in brewing history of March and October beers – the first and last brew of the season. Humid summer days are deadly for the sugary wort, the smell attracting fruit flies from the whole county.
And this is what it might look like.
This is what you could be brewing. Get building.
Clive and Eva La Pensée 