Going Large - Today's the Day

[phillc]

I realise this is a home brew forum, but thought it might be interesting to post about my latest adventure.

Myself and a couple of associates here in Austria have been homebrewing for a while now, sharing our beers among ourselves and friends. We decided during COVID lockdown that we're going to have a go at doing something commercial. The key question is how?

We're not loaded enough to finance a craft brewery with all the equipment that entails. We also all currently have full time jobs, which we're not quite ready to step away from (mortgages, kids etc).

Instead, we've found a small local Schloss brewery who will allow us to use their equipment to brew. What's a Schloss brewery? Basically it's a hotel brewery in this case. They normally brew for weddings, parties and events. However, due to lockdown, there's been none of those for the last 12 months or so. We're the first people they've allowed to "contract" brew with them. Of course we're paying for the privilege.

Anyway, today's the day. Our first 300 litre "pilot batch". That's the minimum that can be brewed in the equipment. We may not end up selling this first batch, as the business side of things are not quite fully in place yet. If this brew works out, the next step is 500 litres, which we will aim to sell into bars and pubs in the city. One prominent local craft beer pub have committed to taking 50 litres, so that's a start!

We're brewing Hefeweizen (wheat beer) as we believe there's a market for such a craft product in Austria. The malt and hops are all locally sourced. It's just the yeast which come from elsewhere.

The brewery doesn't want us to start until midday local time, which is about 75 minutes away. I'm about to leave the house. Slightly excited. I hope to post some pictures and updates during the day.

 

[NormanHurst]

Awesome. Good luck!

 

[Sadfield]

Great stuff, good luck.

 

[An Ankoù]

Good luck. Hope it works well. Hefeweizen bier's one of my favourites any time of year and a pox on all those who put slices of lemon in it- the big nancies!
My last wheat beer's a stonker- I substituted all the wheat malt for Bestmalz dark wheat malt at 18 ebc. the flavour's amazing.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Best of luck with your venture.

 

[UKSkydiver]

My last wheat beer's a stonker- I substituted all the wheat malt for Bestmalz dark wheat malt at 18 ebc. the flavour's amazing.

Oooooooooooooooh!

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

Excellent adventure!!

All the best for a great day and a great brew.

 

[user 18729]

Good luck! Pictures are most certainly required...

 

[jceg316]

Awesome, good luck! Does your brewing venture have a name yet?

 

[The Cat]

Sounds exciting best of luck!

 

[phillc]

The day is over and obviously we won't know the end results for a few weeks yet. Things didn't go quite to plan, but that's half the fun and we overcame any challenges.

The original plan was to brew 300 litres. 250 litres would be the "batch", while 50 litres would come home with us to be split into smaller fermenters for more experiments.

Well, when we arrived, the brewer had already filled the mash kettle with 300 litres of water. That wasn't quite the plan, because obviously after sparging there'd be a lot more volume. Quickly we re-calculated our grain bill, which was fine because we'd brought more than we needed (due to laziness really. We just brought with us full, unopened 25kg bags of malt, instead of weighing and putting everything into the correct sized portions in advance).

After the mash, the wort is transferred to the lauter kettle (or tun or whatever you want to call it). At this point we took a gravity reading, which returned 16.5 Plato (1067 SG). That's higher than expected! Basically, we think this commercial equipment is far more efficient than our home brew kits.

The wort was transferred back to the main mash kettle for the boil, leaving all the grains behind in the lauter kettle. At this point, one is supposed to sparge those grains. We didn't, instead we just added another 100 litres of water directly into the mash kettle to dilute the wort down to 13 Plato (1052 SG). Then boil.

After the boil everything is transferred to the fermenter, we took our 60 litres with us, but even after reductions during the boil (which increased the gravity again!) we still had around 320 litres in the fermenter. More beer than we expected. This means the amount of yeast we'd brought with us resulted in an under pitch. Apparently that's good for wheat beer......

The brewer was super casual and some things struck us as maybe not the best practice you'd find in a new commercial brewery. However, it was a fun day, we all learned a lot and the brewer even said that he's happy for us next time to run things on our own. We'll see how this batch turns out first.

Pictures to follow in the following posts. I tried to post as the day progressed, but poor data connection and too much to do meant that didn't happen.

 

[phillc]

Crushing grain. The biggest difference here is speed. Commercial sized kit is much faster than homebrew crushers.

 

[phillc]

Mash kettle inside and out. While the outside is somewhat oxidised copper, inside it's all stainless steel.

 

[phillc]

Yes, it was Austrian wheat malt.

 

[phillc]

Brewing is thirsty work (not me in the picture)

 

[phillc]

Mmmm electric control panel. More sophisticated than on my homebrew kit!

 

[phillc]

Lauterkessel empty and full.

 

[phillc]

That's a lot of used grain. We ended up using 85kg. Was probably a bit much and we might knock it back a bit next time. The lautering was also very slow due to the wheat malt. Less of that will probably help too.

 

[phillc]

Lauterkessel had a nice false bottom. The false bottom completely lifts out. I didn't get a photo of that on my phone. I also took my "proper" camera with and wil check the photos on there later to see if there's anything worth adding.

 

[phillc]

Into the fermenter. The inside of the fermenter doesn't look too clean right? We were assured this was just calcium deposits from the water. We'll see.... Next time, if we're on our own, we might just take the time to scrub the hell out of this until it's all shiny stainless steel again. Let's hope the fermentation goes well.