Brewer’s Tools

Yes, I have come to the realization that certain tools are just necessary and I would have a hard time living without these tools to do my job.  There are some necessary tools and other ones that are just (really, really) nice to have.

Tools I have found essential around my brewery:  Screwdriver, crescent wrench, pliers, tape measure, flashlight, shovel, zip-ties, measuring cup, funnel, all sorts of buckets, teflon tape, scissors!, pen/paper, and even my laptop with wifi access. (I didn’t mention some of the standard: hop scale, hydrometers, sanitation spray bottle, mash paddle, etc and focused on ones that aren’t dedicated to breweries)

Tools that are more in the nice to have category: three-hole punch, hose cutter, electrical tape, 7/8” wrench, fans (several of them), and a new tool that I purchased for a whopping $3.95 and I love it! – “retractable cord for belt” of which I keep my flashlight hooked. 

This was actually an LED flashlight that Chris left behind for me (essential in looking in the kettle, fermentors and bright tanks).  I saw how he was always fishing it out of his pockets and it looked inconvenient.  I too, was inconvenienced by the fact that it kept falling out of my shirt pocket when I bent over to pick stuff of the ground.  All I could think was if I accidentally dropped this in a batch of fermenting beer that I would contaminate thousands of dollars of finished beer (and I’d have to buy a new flashlight)…..   So I solved two problems at once – easy to access flashlight, and tether it so it can’t fall into a fermentor…..brilliant!

Prost!

one-half ton and what do you get?

In my previous blog post, I mentioned an improvement project that I was working on completing.  I also mentioned that for every batch of beer I haul approximately a quarter ton downstairs into the basement, mill the malt, and haul the same quarter ton of malt back upstairs into the brewery (thus the answer to the blog title question—one batch of beer).   Hauling grain at most breweries involves a forktruck, hand truck or hoist…..due to the stairs and no elevator I use the Hercules methodology. 

Even before I brewed my first batch of beer at the Yak, one of my top priorities was to take over the garden shed in the back for use as a malt mill room. (sounds really cool to have it’s own room, doesn’t it?).  The only four steps that it involved were:

1. Install 220V receptacle with extension cord
2. bring the grain mill upstairs and outside
3. clean out the garden shed
4. re-organize the saved items back down in the basement, utilizing the old space

Step one, hired an electrician to install…check.  Step two, convince 5 kitchen staff and myself to carry the 500lb+ grain mill up stairs (we did use the dolly during the flat sections which helped immensely.)  Easier said than done…when the 6 of us had difficulty with it at first, I almost resorted to building a wooden sled and getting some ropes so the 6 of us could play tug-o-war with a machine, but I’m glad we didn’t have to resort to that.  Step three, I forgot to take a before photo…bummer, it definitely was disorganized and needed some TLC.  Step four, put the three shelves from the shed into the basement and organized what little we saved onto those shelves or existing shelves.

Now milling grain will entail backing my vehicle within 8 feet of the grain mill room door and then moving the crushed grain approximately 20ft all on the same level (no stairs!!!).  I could even use a dolly if I wanted.  So there you have it, working smarter….not harder. 

Can’t wait to put it to use.

Prost!

I am (was) an Engineer…

Not sure I like the title of this post, but for my new Coloradan followers, this might help them understand my past a little better.   Last week I went back to Iowa to supervise our movers and bring back another load of things that they can’t haul like bleach, acid, and batteries.  While I was in town, I bumped into many familiar faces, as you do in a small town.  One person was from Pella Corporation, specifically from my old department, the Door Plant, in which I worked 4+ years.  She told me there were people in the plant reading this blog on a weekly basis….so, as an update to them, I’m dedicating this post to those at Pella Corp, specifically those in the Door Plant.

I liked my job as an engineer, some days I even loved my job and loved going to work.  When I quit my job to go back to school to become a professional brewer, I had doubts that I would enjoy brewing as much as I enjoyed engineering, or at least would miss trouble-shooting, problem solving, organizing and improving processes.  I didn’t need to be in my new role 8 weeks to be able to write these conclusions, but having done so, I can put more detail to this post.

Except for the fact that I get to taste beer throughout the day (if the task at hand requires it), being a head brewer is like being a engineer, continuous improvement technician, maintenance technician, stockroom keeper, scheduler, marketing coordinator, sales rep, water spider (see below), truck driver, accountant, quality technician, safety coordinator, admin assistant, and chef (final line employee) all in one.  Needless to say, my job keeps me busy, but is super-wicked-awesome-cool at the same time.  Maybe I should expand on these since not everybody reading this post knows what a water spider does….

Engineer: At the Yak and Yeti Brewpub, the management realizes I have the technical skills to assess problems and make logical decisions about how to proceed.  I also have had the opportunity to spec and quote new equipment like my wort/water heat exchanger.  Everyday I get to prioritize all my tasks at hand while keeping SQPD in mind (inside joke). 

Continuous Improvement (C.I.): I’m fortunate that the previous brewer left ample opportunity to improve my surroundings.  Just today I had a light installed in the stairwell so I can see better in the dungeon, err, I call it the fermentation cellar now.  My favorite C.I. improvement involves malt, but that will get its own blog post in a week or two.  It hasn’t been shadowed yet, but I did put up a peg board and have a lot of my fittings and quick-change parts hanging near point-of-use.

Maintenance technician: At the bigger craft breweries like New Belgium most of these roles have been specialized just like at Pella, but here I get to turn wrenches, fix leaks (like the CO2 leak and beer leak I fixed today), and troubleshoot pumps, coolers, temperature controllers, fans, valves and the like.   I have even used my multi-meter!  Maybe if brewing doesn’t work out I will become a maintenance tech at a big brewery, it’s a blast!  I guess another responsibility that falls under maintenance scheduler or engineer is hiring/resourcing sub-contractors to do jobs.  At Pella Corp this would have been MES, construction crew or central maintenance and here I have outside contractors that I hire for electrical, plumbing, heating/cooling, etc. Example: the electrician who hooked up my keg washer to 220V today (you remember Karla, don’t you?).

Stockroom Keeper: Well it is more like inventory management of malt, hops, chemicals, cleaners and other brewery things like fining agents, yeast nutrients and kettle additions.  I take a beer inventory and ingredient inventory every month.  As much as I’d like to Kanban and FIFO my chemicals, I don’t use them enough, so right now I just buy more when I’m around 1/4 left.

Scheduler:  This is probably my least favorite, but somebody has to be responsible when we run out of beer.  I would prefer to have enough bright tanks (serving tanks) so I could have 2 tanks for each flavor, so that I never run out.  That is wishful thinking and I just need to try to guess 4 weeks out what beer will run out next and then transfer it 3 days before I can physically tap it.   I guess like marketing people predicting sales figures.  Which is a segue to:

Marketing coordinator:  This is one of my favorite tasks.  I get to buy screen-printed glasses/mugs, coasters, labels for our growlers, business cards, consult on websites, Facebook and promote the brand in general.  I’ve put together table top advertisements and beer descriptions to enhance the customer’s experience.  I even get to write this blog!

Sales: Now that I have Karla, I need to get out to bars and restaurants and sell kegs of my product.  Dol (the owner) is actually going to do the brunt of this task for me, so I guess that makes me an assistant sales rep.

Water-Spider: Non-Pella people would be interested to know that this is a person who delivers parts to assembly line workers so employees do not have to leave their station.  Technically impossible since I leave my station to do this job task, but I do get a lot of my own supplies….all the time.  Up the stairs, down the stairs, oops, I forgot something, repeat!

Truck driver: same as water-spider, but Lowes and Home Depot (yes, I can shop at HD if I want to now!!!!) are only 1.3 miles away from the brewery.  Also refer to sales….those kegs can’t be faxed to Boulder, CO.

Accountant: The real accountant at the Yak is training me to do my own alcohol taxes with the state and federal governments.  I also have to save all my receipts for anything I purchase from Home Depot (LOL) with my own money for reimbursement. 

Quality technician:  I have the start of a lab.  I need some more supplies to get it rolling, but at some point my goal is to take yeast counts for batches of beer and to classify any undesirable microbes that I find or run across.  I clean the tap lines, kegs, bright tanks, fermentors, etc (I guess this would be a sanitation worker, but in the brewery business….this definitely falls under quality). This job also involves tasting, bummer.

Safety coordinator:  one of my first purchases was a set of goggles for handling the chemicals.  I already have several pair of heat and chemical resistant gloves, and a pair of brewing boots—brewer’s PPE!  There are some other tasks I need to do at some point too like printing out MSDS sheets and writing up some LOTO procedures.

Administrative Assistant:  The ink cartridge in our printer didn’t change itself, my table tents didn’t print themselves and my cell phone doesn’t answer itself (well with voice mail, it kinda does).

Chef (brewer): I correlate this to a final-line employee at Pella Corp as it is the job that does the most Value-added activities.  If you want to know more about these job tasks…..ask or become a homebrewer.  It might fall under Marketing, but I get to be creative and develop my own recipes, which actually involve a lot of formulas, so technically that falls under engineering too.

Even though I enjoy brewing, I have come to love all the other roles I am responsible for here at the brewery as much, if not more.  I guess I don’t need to stop being an engineer even though my title is “Head Brewer.”

Mashing it, Old School…

  When I was in Munich for classes, we were shown an old drawing of a person “stirring the mash” (grain and water mixture for you non-brewing types) This drawing was of a stick man using the top-edge of his wooden tun as a fulcrum and prying the thick mash away by pulling the end of his mash paddle towards himself.   We laughed outloud because this is so antiquated, especially with automatic mash stirring paddles and such.  I guess I laughed too soon.

This post is to show you my new workout program to keeping me in shape, or “how I mash, old school.”

 

After I order the grain, I need to pick it up myself (it is extremely cost-prohibitive to have it shipped across town to me).  I then unload the bags of grain and haul them into the brewery, down the stairs, past my office, across the room to my grain mill.  A typical batch might have 10 bags of grain at 50lb each, so 500lbs or a quarter ton!

      Then after I crush the grain, I put it in blue tubs (you know the Walmart kind) and haul the grain across the room, past my office, up the stairs to my brew house.  Did I mention this is like a quarter ton?

When I’m ready to “dough-in” (brewery lingo for adding the crushed grain to the water, or vice versa) I manually dump the tubs into the mash tun. (so that’s why they call it a “tun/ton”!)

I probably forgot to mention that our brewery has no air movement and even though it is dry in Colorado, when you are boiling water in a closed room, you have perfect conditions for emulating the humidity of the Midwest.   I try to combat my sweating by using a bandana headband.  (not shown in pictures since I look too scary with my headband on.)  I then swap it with a dry one after a 1/2 hour, rinse the drenched one and put it outside to dry.  A half hour later it is dry and ready to swap (can’t do that in 95% humid Midwest climates)

This looks awful familiar.  Photos showing me with my stainless steel mash paddle (extremely high tech since it is made out of stainless) and hovering over a 152 degF steaming tun of mash.  This is the hottest of the all the jobs I do and keeps me in shape stirring over one ton of grain/water mixture manually.

After doing my normal brewing duties of vorloffing, sparging and lautering the wort into the kettle, I drain the remaining weak wort and then mash out.  In a typical brewery this involves putting a large skid-sized crate under the mash tun and opening the man-way and you either have an automatic pusher to push out the grain or you use a big squeegy and pull/push it out the man-way.  Notice my mash tun doesn’t have a man-way.  This requires a special tool I call a “brewer’s shovel.”  How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Toosie Pop?…..answer, the same number of scoops it takes to empty my mash tun with spent grains.  I put them into large Rubbermaid garbage cans and haul them outside using another brewer’s tool—the hand-truck. There is about a 2.5” step that I have to go up in order to exit the brewery.  As soon as I have my tools at home I’m going to make myself a little wooden ramp that will help ease my pain.

Where does all this spent grain go?  I call a phone number and leave a message for some guy named John (I don’t know his last name) and he comes and picks up the grain for cattle feed. 

So there you have it, mashing it old school.  Isn’t there any other way?  There really isn’t a way to justify a new or used mash tun, so I’m stuck with most of this process until my volume is like hexa-duple-tuples or something.  But I did come up with the idea to move the grain mill to a shed outside, all I need is a 220V receptacle.  So that will save me hauling a quarter ton of grain down and back up the steps again (not only is it time consuming, labor-intensive, and un-ergonomic, it is also quite unsafe)  So that will be one of my next brewery improvements coming up.

Isn't she a beaut?!

Meet Karla the Keg Washer. Karla has some sort of corrosion on her surface, but it's just esthetics...I'll get her up and running in no time.

We just purchased this used washer from a brewery near my old stomping grounds in Iowa. This keg washer is outfitted to be able to clean standard Sanke as well as well Cornelius kegs, which will be nice because we tend to use the Corny kegs a lot at the Yak.

She is currently sitting in her resting place, but needs H2O, CO2 and electrons (220VAC worth) hooked up to her. I have all the chemicals ready put her to use, just waiting on the utilities.

This will allow us to clean kegs for filling/sale to other bars and restaurants in the Denver metro area.

Isn't she a beaut?!

I can't remember my first brewery tour

My wife probably has been on more brewery tours than most beer lovers only because I've dragged her to the lion's share of them. It's too bad but for the life of me I can't seem to remember my first one.

On the other hand, I gave my first brewery tour about two weeks ago to a homebrew buddy of mine from Des Moines, IA and today I gave a tour of the Yak to a group of 10 people! I fielded my fair share of brewing newbie questions and it felt strange being on the other side of the tour for a change. I remember at least two of the attendees saying to me that this was their first brewery tour ever. Hmmm, I'll toast to that...

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Prost!
Adam, das braumeister and tour guide extraordinaire