Sunday 8 November 2009

Slowly but Surely

We are getting there. Some of the main brewhouse equipment is now connected and nearly all of our hygienic cladding has gone on the walls. In the picture below you can see our copper on the left almost obscuring the cold liqour tank behind it, with the hot liquor tank to the right, underback in front and heat exchanger in the middle. We do have a mash tun (they come in pretty handy...) but for the time being we need that space to get our fermenters into the fermenting room.



There is still plenty to do and the next task is to get our fermenting room sorted out.

We have 2 twelve barrel fermenters, 1 ten Barrel (we had 2 but decided to use the other as our cold liquor tank) and 4 six barrel fermenters. That basically gives us 58 barrels of fermenting capacity so it will take us a good while until we reach that level of production.

We registered our cask colour bands last week. The colour bands are used to help publicans and other brewers more easily recognise the brewery to whom the casks belong. I had a look on the BBPA website and decided purple and pink will hopefully differentiate us from most other breweries and help reduce the number of our casks which go astray.

8 comments:

  1. Just discovered your blog-exciting stuff!

    I live down the road in Camden and I'm starting out on my first home brews. See someone else has offered, but I'd love to do some voluntary malarky too if you need someone. Work in a school part time, so I have time.

    Email is piefacedkillah @gmail.com (popped a space in there to avoid bots!) Drop me a line if you need a lackey!

    Can't wait to have a glug of your beer!

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  2. Andy, cool blog, keep up the good work and I promise to get to London to try the product. Best of luck. --Tom Hynes (Dempsey's buddy from BAC)

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  3. Thanks Tom - you and Dempsey are my official North American tasting panel!

    Look forward to catching you when you are in London, hope things are going well in the trenches.

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  4. Make sure you only supply pubs that don't leave their empties out on the street - they should stay in the cellar or be kept inside a locked yard.

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  5. Your right Jeff, I have been advised 5% loss of casks per year is not unusual. I'm planning to be reasonably pro-active in picking them up but I guess that's easier said than done especially as initially I am more likely to be a guest rather than a regular.

    Out of interest do you favour any particular make of casks over others? I'm leasing a mixed bag but have also bought some of the tall keystone Maissoneuve.

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  6. I do prefer certain casks over others but couldn't put names to the different types, so can't be helpful!

    Just avoid wooden keystones.

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  7. nice setup - as a homebrewer myself, I'll be reading from now on - good luck fella

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  8. Cheers Leigh, always enjoy reading the Good Stuff, so thanks for checking us out. Hopefully I can find the time to write some more regular posts going forward.

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