The Bruery – Expansion Update – Part 1 & 2

From The Bruery:

Last week we announced a brand new Kosme bottling line is coming our way this year. This week we’re proud to announce we’ll also be adding the world’s best separator to our brewery in 2014!

The Bruery has always made living beer that is unfiltered and unpasteurized. The choice to do this has lead to some speed bumps along the way.  Up til now, we age completely finished beer cold for an extended period of time to help the flocculation process.  While having a small amount of yeast and bottle conditioning improve beer quality, excess yeast can cause stability issues, such as autolysis, and will result in unwanted haze.

Living beer is much more temperamental than filtered (and less flavorful) beer. Transportation, temperature fluctuation, and storage conditions can damage product more quickly than other beers that have been unnaturally treated to withstand such punishment. As we continue to improve ourselves and make even better beer that excites us, we just can’t compromise the flavor and aroma of unfiltered, bottle-conditioned, delicious craft beer.

To backtrack a bit, most beer is filtered. When a beer is filtered, it passes through a membrane in order to remove excess particulates, yeast, and remaining trub that is less desired in the finished product.  Filtering will also remove positive characteristics that contribute to aroma and flavor.  Pasteurization is a common practice at larger breweries. When beer is pasteurized, it is heated to 140ºF for two to three minutes, which basically cooks to death any remaining bacteria or yeast. Finished beer can also be flash pasteurized, which means a 15 to 30 second hit of 165º F heat that’s thought to be a bit nicer to the beer, but it still kills it!

A living beer that has been unpasteurized comes straight from the brewery without enduring this intense and damaging treatment.  Most kegs from breweries that pasteurize their beer are unpasteurized, which is why you want to keep those guys cold.
There’s no doubt we make many, many tasty beers with some atypical brewing ingredients. Since we have no desire to strip any flavor and aroma out of our beer, filtration is simply not an option. But we certainly want to make beautiful quality beer that is clear of excess yeast and particulates as much as possible. The best way to do this is by using a centrifugal separator.  Not every small craft brewery has one of these babies, as it is quite an investment, but we are thrilled to announce that this year we will be adding a GEA Westfalia Centrifuge Separator to our brewery!

This piece of equipment is made by the best producer of centrifuges in the world. It clarifies beer via the simple concept of centrifugal force. Think of your washing machine once it hits the spin cycle: when it’s finished and you open it up, all your laundry is stuck to the sides and not resting on the bottom because of centrifugal force pushing up while it was spun around super-hyper-fast. This is also the same thing that helps get your spinach so dry in a salad spinner, or what happens when you take a ride on the Gravitron.

Now imagine your washing machine on ‘roids, with beer inside it (only it’s designed much, much better). As the beer is spun around, centrifugal force pushes all those solids out of the liquid, separating the gunk from pretty, clarified beer. The clarified beer comes out, solids are tossed, and that beautiful, living, beer gets bottled, kegged, or racked into a barrel — unfiltered and unpasteurized, bursting with flavor and aroma!

Our production team will be now be able to schedule and package beers without having to wait for yeast to flocculate, we won’t have to dump as much beer to remove solids, and we’ll have a higher level of control over our beer since there is much less non-beer hanging out in our product. The words "more control" and "improved scheduling" are music to all of our ears.

UPDATE 21 Feb 2014:

We’re excited about 2014 for lots of reasons. We’ve been making big strides in improving beer quality, we’re receiving a brand new Westfalia centrifuge separator soon, and we’re adding a Krones Kosme bottling line to our operation during this year. But what may be the most exciting news is we’ve made a big investment in a brand new brewhouse.

This semi-automated GEA Huppmann Craft-Star™ brewhouse is the first of its kind. While the manufacturers typically make brewing systems for much larger projects, this littler guy is just the right size for our place. It has the technology and efficiency that’s normally found at (and only affordable to) bigger breweries. We’ll be retiring our 15 bbl system and replacing it with this 30 bbl, flexible capacity little engine that can, letting us brew batches ranging between 20-35 bbls.

You can see our exact brewhouse being flaunted at the Drinktec 2013 in Munich in the following video:

This system comes to us from the legendary German manufacturers GEA, the makers of the some of the best brewhouses in the world. Its two vessel design has one vessel that functions as a mash and lauter tun and another vessel that functions as wort kettle and whirlpool.
As a refresher, here’s how the brewing process usually looks. You can see how the tanks are separate here, but they won’t be for us on our new system. As you can see in the second visualization of the Craft-Star™ system, there are just two tanks where there would be four.

You can imagine the strides that have been made in brewing technology since our the birth of our original brewhouse that was made in the 1980s. We currently have to do manual grain outs, meaning raking thousands of pounds of wet grain out of the mash tun and into bins which are then manually swapped in and out by forklift.

Our current brewhouse, in all its manual labor glory (as of  January 2014)

This change in brewhouses means much less manual labor for our brewers, better wort quality, and increased efficiency. With rakes that push grain out of the mash tun with a grain discharge pump, spent grain will be conveyed out of the building into bins without much effort.

We’re aiming to get our new system installed as soon as November. We’re moving some things around to accomodate our growth, but we’ll have more news on that next week!
More specs, details, and clips about this brewhouse:

• CRAFT-STAR™ – The new Huppmann brewhouse for artisan craft breweries.
• Craft Brewing Business: New Craft-Star™ brewhouse to be installed at California’s The Bruery
• One Minute Film: Craft-Star™ system with Oliver Jakob (in German)
• Beer Pulse: The Bruery announces expansion to boost production capacity, improve quality

Read more blogs about our ongoing expansion plans for 2014

• Expansion Update 1: Hello New Kosme Bottling Line!
• Expansion Update 2: Clarified Beer is Coming