Traditional Brewing Process

The brewing process begins in the grain room where bags of premium malted grains are poured into the grain hopper and carried by auger forty feet up to the grist mill.The mill crushes the grain and is collected in a large hopper at the top of the tower.Meanwhile, down in the brewery, everything is being cleaned and sanitized, and water is being heated in preparation for the grain. About 700 gallons of deep rock well water are pumped into the mash tun and once it is at the proper temperature, a valve is opened up in the tower and the grain is gravity fed into the mash tun where it is mixed thoroughly with the water.

The mashing process takes one hour, during which the naturally present enzymes are activated by the water and begin converting the complex starches into simple sugars. This is important because only simple sugars are fermentable.

The mixture is drained to the lauter tun. This is where we separate all the grain husks from the sweet wort. The false bottom in a lauter tun has thin slits to hold back the solids and allow liquids to pass through. The spent grains form a layer at the bottom of the lauter tun and we circulate the wort through the grain bed, out the bottom and then back to the top until it starts to run clear. Then the wort gets pumped to the boiling kettle. We also sparge the grain bed with clean hot water to extract residual sugars. This is also sent to the kettle. The spent grain will later be removed, but this is heavy, hard work. We give this away to a local dairy farmer for his cattle.

The wort is brought to a full rolling boil in the kettle. During this time, several additions of whole flower hops are poured in to produce bitterness, flavor and aroma. The boil continues for 90 minutes.

The wort and hop mixture is then drained into the hopback which strains out all the hop flowers and the liquid is passed on through the heat exchanger. This rapidly cools the wort from 212° to 70°. Oxygen is added to replace what is lost during boiling.

It then is sent to the awaiting fermentation tank. Next, fresh active yeast is added and fermentation begins within 12 to 24 hours. Top fermenting ale yeasts work at about 70° for two weeks, and then the ale is cold conditioned for a week to enhance the flavor and naturally clarify the beer. Bottom fermenting lager yeasts require a much lower temperature (50°) and are cold conditioned for about four weeks. The fermentation process for ales takes approximately three weeks and lagers at least six weeks.

After draining some of the yeast until the beer runs clear, the beer is ready to be kegged. Our beer is not pasteurized or filtered, but is sent directly to the Keg-Boy kegging system. Here the kegs are sterilized with high pressure steam and filled in a two step process which takes about three minutes per keg.