Big brewin'

Here's a couple pics of me hanging out in the mashtun and boil kettle and stuff after joining my pal Timmay for a day of big boy brewing in a commercial environment. Timmay works at Cambridge Brew House, if you're not in the know, as the head brewer. He recently took over this joint from the last brewer and is already turning things around there. He took further steps to assure greatness in the finished beer by having me join him the other week, where we brewed up an Octoberfest for the upcoming Fall season. Check some of this out:

We did some milling of grains first, lofting up a few hundred lbs of grains on our shoulders and feeding them into a two stage, one pass, grain mill. That was easy enough.. went through right quick.

Here's me stirrin' the mash in the big tun after the grains were milled up. Yep, they still do it the old fashioned way here.. and that's pretty typical for a lot of brew pubs. Nothing fancy except some generally hard work with a big paddle for this step.

After that, we did some runoff of the wort into the kettle, and then it was time to clean out the spent grains from the mashtun. Dig it:

Me, just shoveling. All went into some big bins and then a farmer from New Hartford came to scoop it up from up to feed to some cows. Lucky cows.

Then, some interior detail work on the same tun:

This shot is taken from the side hatch, looking up out the top of the hatchway where in the first pic I was stirring. That thing I'm polishing there is the spray head thingy, where the hot water comes down out of to spray onto the grain bed to rinse the sugers down into the kettle.

And finally, me, peeking my head out the top of the boil kettle.. didn't get any shots of the interior of this while I was there, but I was able to crawl right in and check the thing out from the inside. Interesting, and slightly claustrophobic experience!

I loved it. It was a great time and very enlightening. The equipment is interesting, configurable, and quite flexible in its operation. Really neat stuff.

Some day..

Till then, carry on..