Wednesday 19 March 2014

Sunday March 16 -- Mass Production

... To the ASX (100), and Trilemma Craft Brewery ($$TCB$$) would like to report to the Stock Exchange that production levels have increased substantially over the last quarter, with projected revenue expected to increase exponentially ... To sports, ... and Wayne Gardiner ...

A big Sunday with excellent results in both production and execution. The plan was to bottle 50 litres of Brown Ale and 49 litres of Amber Ale. The Pale Ale had been bottle-conditioning for 4 weeks now, and was ready for it's release, and a sly taste.  

Brown is at 1011 (FG should be 1014)

Amber is at 1012 (FG should be 1015)

We'd overshot the gravity a bit, but we don't think it's going to matter.  Also, we would need loads of bottles to handle all of this. Our guesses ranged from 230 to over 300. A long day awaited us with our hands in buckets of PBW and slippery labels stuck to our suits. And that's before we even got to the bottler.

Meanwhile, we thought we'd be able to handle a mash on the same day. And it was Ben's turn to have a crack. We'd looked at lots of recipes from forums and recipe books and The Age Newspaper.

Eventually, we settled on making a Porter. And we want to play around with coffee-infusion. We've got a pretty good-sized glass carboy and we could trial up to 10 litre experiments with different blends and brews. 43 bean fresh!

By the end of the day, the Pale Ale had been relabelled as an APA, and had been taken home for light refreshments at Elevenses Every Tuesday. We'd put a fridge full of bottles of Amber and Brown in for bottle conditioning (but we forgot to count the bottles), and we moved the Porter straight into a fermenter and straight into the fridge. Chucked the explosive yeast in on Monday. We reckon that's just under 200 litres of beer moving through the brewery since Christmas.

Not a bad return for a trio of mugs!


These are the two bins we'll use for washing the bottles. The green guy will hold PBW.
And we needed to clean the pot out for the Porter
Bring the hose over, Michael.
Ah, is that a beer instead?
The dolly table looks bloody great, eh?
Ben arrives with the grain for the Mash-In. Hi Danielle!
Ben's well excited to be finally brewing his recipe of Porter -- hopefully some decent Coffee Porter.
Kisses all 'round from Ben. Good to see ya, brewer! 
Filling the pot to 70 litres
Water looks good!
Water smells good!
So, time for a beer then lads!
Something, something ... beer name here ... something, something
To avoid confusion in the brewery ...
... it's best to label each glass with our initials. Didn't stop Michael from drinking mine, tho!
Not a lot of hops additions for the Porter today.
So that means more time to have another beer
This is our Pale Ale we bottled 4 weeks ago!
Bloody great colour on it! 
Hmmm, looks more like an APA, actually.
Let's check the gravity on the Brown Ale
Ben brought some New Orleans Dixie-Stompin' Old Timey classics for the CD player and a few hot-steps for the floor. Shake it!!
Getting that bag of malt open requires strength. Manly-type-strength
A bloody full pot this time. Maybe the fullest its ever been.
No time to have a seat and watch it boil today. There's bottles to ... um ... bottle.
The colour of the grains was pretty cool
Lots of black in there already
Let's move that Brown Ale into the bottling keg
We're getting bloody sick of these old cubes. Time for some new ones.
How's the mash tasting, guys?
Looks alright!
Smells alright!
Tastes alright!
tastes like ... 

um ... 

it's coming to me, oh lordy! Praise bejeezus!
 Ben, turn that New Orleans jazz off, eh?
I wish we had our floating thermo back. This thing sucks, so I let Michael use it.
Take the strain ...!
Twisting one off!
And up she comes. 
So here's all the bottles we cleaned. 9 boxes, with about 35 bottles in each. That's 315 bottles.
And time for lunch. Ben makes the best steak sandwich possibly in all the Northern Suburbs.
a bit of a mouthful
two hands
full bottle tree
and so we started bottling
and just kept going all afternoon.
Ben really got into the swing of things
Get that beer in there, laddie!
No spillage!
All the way to the top.
Look how full the keg still is!
Go Kangas!
Back to the wort -- and bringing it to the boil
Both immersion heaters are in today as there's heaps of liquid to heat.
Getting there
steamy!
Just in time to finish bottling the Brown Ale and label the lids
Cheers!
Time to get into the Amber Ale
Let's swap positions.
Back breaking work, this.
All those boxes are empty! Hooray!
And into the fridge. The fullest it's ever been!
We put the porter straight into the fermenter barrel. Sick of those cubes!
Taste it!.
So we split up the Pale Ale, which had become an APA now. I chucked one in the fridge.
It was sediment free, had great clarity and a punchy aftertaste,
The gods had shined on this ale.
and they had declared it to be good!