Brewing with Blichmann
As Jeff and I started brewing a batch of our Swashchuckler IPA Saturday, we got word from Joel (still under the spell of the Godzilla virus) that our stainless steel conical fermenters had arrived. Well, what choice did we have? We had to go over there, bring them back to Jeff’s, and use them. And they are oh-so-sweet…
Jeff warily eyes the camera.
They packed these suckers pretty well.
The tops were inverted to save space. Smart.
Our first time using the conical. All goes smoothly.
Ain’t she beautiful?
MNB bites the stainless steel bullet
It takes a lot to get Jeff excited enough to crap himself. Well, he just crapped himself. Why? Because we have two (2) 14.5 gallon stainless steel conical fermenters from Blichmann Engineering arriving on Monday. We’ve been pinching our pennies to splurge on these bad boys, which offer a number of advantages:
- minimal handling of fermenting beer since we won’t have to transfer and can siphon the yeast off the bottom
- easy measurement via access to a ball valve
- no light
- easy cleaning compared to carboys
- badass
The plan is to pilot our first organic beer in one of these conicals. We’ll see if we can get all of the supplies in on time. If so, I do believe Jeff will crap himself AGAIN.
Gravity reigns in our sparging setup
A haiku dedicated to Isaac Newton:
Sir Isaac Newton
You invented gravity
So that we could brew
Hopefully we’ll be getting a pump soon, but until then, we rely on gravity. At least we have a rotating sparge arm, unlike the lame stationary setup that Travis made. Those New Yorkers can’t do anything right…
Business meeting tonight. NOT.
So we’ve been pretty busy lately. Not so much with beer as with our regular jobs. Jeff has been working on some mysterious new deal. I just picture him looking out of the window in his corner office yelling “SELL SELL SELL”! Personally, I’ve been busy organizing and conducting focus groups. We were watching moms bitch about disposable products last night till 10:00PM. It’s pretty much the perfect way to spend a Tuesday evening. Joel was also busy with his job, testing makeup on animals.
In addition to Joel’s 9-to-5, he has also been busy deceiving us. We haven’t had time to meet for our monthly MNB business meeting these past few weeks, so I was looking forward to getting together tonight. Maybe drink a beer. Unfortunately, Joel let us know this morning that this wasn’t going to work.
And so our discussions shall have to wait till after Thanksgiving. The primary agenda items were starting to make some decisions on our pilot brewery (and hopefully make some of the first purchases in the next month) and having some preliminary talks on contract brewing vs. starting with our own brewery. Contract brewing involves “renting” excess capacity from another brewery. The idea was developed by Jim Koch of Sam Adams, but this is also the strategy employed by Chicago’s Half Acre ? and even our own Terrapin, though they’ve recently built their own place in Georgia.
So to sum up: no meeting. Thanks Joel.
New brewery in the works
The time has come. We’re starting to run into the limitations of our current brewing setup, namely temperature control and exposure of the beer to air (which is usually bad). MNB has had a preliminary planning session for what will become our pilot brewery ? and most likely the same brewery that we will use to try out recipes once we open our REAL brewery. One of the things we’re looking into is more control over the temperatures of our fermenting beers.
Since we want to keep the beers in Jeff’s garage (I don’t think Hannah wants them in the bedroom), we need a way to both cool and heat them. We have looked into using hot and cold plates to heat/cool water in copper tubing which we would wrap around stainless steel fermenters, but we’re starting to think that this might be more trouble than it’s worth.
Now we’re looking into building insulated boxes with both cooling and heating elements inside. A few of our favorite setups are 1) this glycol-powered fermentation chamber, 2) this chamber complete with a heat lamp and 3) (because we can dream) this $1700 heated/cooled stainless steel conical fermenter. At this point we’ll probably go with something more like (1), but with the heating capabilities of (2).
If you have any ideas or suggestions, let us know. We’ll keep you updated as our thinking progresses. Not that you care.