The Brewery
Our brewery system was built in New Zealand back in the 1980’s and began life as a brewpub system in Tauranga. Sadly, back then craft beer wasn’t as popular as it is today and the system was put up for sale in 1997.
The original owners of the Onetangi Vineyard decided to buy the entire set up and had it shipped over to Waiheke. When I say the entire thing I mean it. We even got the previous brewer’s gumboots, though we decided not to include these in our plans.
The main problem that we faced however was to get a brewery to work on an island that has no reticulated water supply and no sewers. If you run a system like this in a town then the water and effluent issues are simple. There is water whenever it is needed and anything you don’t want goes down the drain and you never have to see it again. As we fitted out the building to get the brewery working we had to develop ways to make beer with less than a third of the water demand that the system was designed to need as well as install tanks to hold brewery waste such as hops, yeast and cleaning and sanitising chemicals. Luckily we managed to find ways to do this and to this day we can proudly claim to be about as clean and green as it’s possible to be in this kind of operation.
The new Waiheke Brewery opened for business on Anniversary weekend 1998 with its Baroona Original beer as the sole product. More beers were added to the range as the years went by bringing us to the present day range of four beers and a non alcoholic Ginger Beer.
The system brews twelve hundred litres per batch and can, at full capacity, produce six batches a month. As breweries go ours is something of a classic. Though old, it works beautifully but can be temperamental. I look after it the same way I’d look after a vintage car, motorbike, jukebox or pinball machine. I listen to the pumps, watch for leaks and even get right inside some of the vessels from time to time just to keep an eye on things. I know every last component and what it can and can’t do. I’ve worked on much flasher breweries over the years but my relationship with this one is something a bit special.
BREWING
An explanation of the process with numerous rambling digressions.
Brewing involves four distinct stages to produce each finished brew. These are;
The Brew
Brewing the beer takes a full day’s work. First, malt is crushed in the grain mill and filtered water is heated in the Hot Liquor Tank. Then, these are mixed very carefully in the Mash/Lauter Tun at very specific temperatures. Once fully mixed, the resulting Mash is left to stand for an hour. During this time, enzymes in the malt break down the starchy interior of the malt into a range of simple and complex sugars. A test is then carried out on a small sample using iodine. If a drop of iodine turns a golden red colour in the test dish then the starches have been fully converted. If the iodine shows any black colour then the mash is left a while longer until the conversion is complete.
This part of the process is pure MAGIC. Oh I know dull chaps in lab coats managed to work out how it actually works ages ago and will tell you that it is simply the breakdown of starch to sugar by enzyme activity and there is no MAGIC involved. But stand and watch a cloudy mash surface turn from dull grey to a beautiful gold and tell me it doesn’t make you believe in just a tiny bit of MAGIC.
That’s the difference between brewers and scientists I suppose. Real Brewers have a dash of sorcery and wild romance in their souls. Scientists just have clipboards and horrible lab coats.
Anyway, enough of that, I was telling you how brewing works...
Once the starch has broken down completely the Lautering begins. The bottom of the vessel has a deck plate with thousands of small holes in it forming a filter. The husks of the malt settle onto this first and add to the effectiveness of the filtration. A valve is opened at the bottom and the sweet liquid, known as Wort, begins to flow out. The first fifty or sixty litres are extremely cloudy and are returned to the top of the grain bed but after that the wort runs clear. The process is a bit like making filter coffee. The part you want is in the solution running from the bottom as hot water is added to the top. The bit left behind is discarded, though as we shall see it has varied uses.
The Lautering process takes between two and three hours with more hot water added to the grains until all the malt sugars have been rinsed out in solution and pumped into the Brew Kettle. By the time the kettle is filled it contains just over twelve hundred litres of wort. But when the electrical elements are covered, somewhere around the four hundred litre mark they are switched on to begin the heating. As the temperature rises the wort begins to stabilise. The enzyme activity stops and the proteins start to form visible clumps of spongy material known as trub. (That’s pronounced ‘Troob’. It’s one of those cool words us brewers get to bandy about) This odd looking stuff gets left behind in the kettle along with the hops which are added as the wort comes to a boil.
Hops. What wonderful things they are. They originated in northern Europe as a wild plant growing mainly on willow trees. The Germans, bless ‘em, first began growing them for use in beer about a thousand years ago. The Roman botanist Pliny the Elder first categorized hops in his Naturalis Historia and called them ‘Lupus Salictarius’ or ‘Wolf among the sheep’, which is a pretty cool name. It lives on in the modern Latin name for hops which is Humulus Lupulus.
Hops have become something of an obsession for brewers and beer fans recently. This is due to the strange way that the flavour of the delightful things grows on you. You might start off by thinking that a robustly hopped beer is a bit much for your palate. But stick with it and you have taken the first step on what may very well be a lifelong addiction. Just ask the Americans. Thirty years ago American beer was rightly derided as some of the worst in the world. Remember the old joke about it being like intimate encounters in small boats? You get the idea. Back then it seemed like every brewery in the USA flavoured their insipid concoctions by merely showing the brew kettle a photo of a hop, then quickly taking it away for fear of any actual FLAVOUR contaminating the beer.
All that changed in the 1980’s as craft brewing exploded across north America. I use the word explosion very carefully here. Any decent explosion causes a lot of noise, a lot of mess and nothing is the same afterwards. So it was with the micro breweries. First it was ‘modest’ amounts of hops. Then ‘significant’ amounts. This seemed to make the beer pretty damn good. So they quickly moved on to amounts such as ‘Insane’, ‘Cataclysmic’ and even ‘Apocalyptic’. The HOP had arrived.
Anyway, the main thing with hops is that they stabilise the brew, add an antioxidant quality, balance the sweetness of the malt and above all make the beer EXCITING. They need boiling in the wort for an average ninety minutes to get the right effect after which the beer is pumped to the fermenter via a cooling system, leaving the hop residue in the kettle along with that Trub I was telling you about.
All of which brings us to;
FERMENTATION
So, we have a fermenter full of perfectly brewed wort. Take it from me that you really wouldn’t want to even sip it at this stage, let alone sit down with a pint of the stuff. It tastes frankly awful and you would be amazed that such a horrible tasting liquid could ever become something as wonderful as beer.
This is where YEAST comes in. Now yeast really is ODD STUFF. Let me see if I can give you some background that will explain it a bit.
Mankind has been fermenting alcohol for many thousands of years. Nobody can say for sure which bright spark first worked it out, although there is now an entire branch of archeology devoted to finding the answer to this. All anyone knew was that grains and fruits could, if you knew the trick of it, be turned into a liquid which, if drunk in sufficient quantities, would make you want to sing, write bad poetry, tell your best mate that; ‘You really, really love him’, get into the odd fight, talk rubbish and above all dance with girls. Then, the next morning you got a headache. It was a good system. A brilliant system in fact. So good that entire civilizations got based on it.
But how did it work? Nobody had a clue. All they could see was that a weird muddy substance seemed to be a vital part of it. But even then it was a mystery where the muddy substance even came from. Small wonder then that the archaic word for yeast was ‘Godisgood’. Understanding of fermentation was what is called ‘empirical’, which is a fancy way of saying; ‘We know this works but we don’t know how.”
Even as recently as a couple of hundred years ago the accepted scientific explanation was that fermentation was some form of chemical reaction with the muddy substance as a sort of catalyst. But then came a clever French chap by the name of Charles Caignard De Latour who suggested in a scientific paper in 1830 that yeast was in fact a microscopic unicellular organism, somewhere between plants and fungus, that ate sugar and excreted alcohol and carbon dioxide.
The fact that his theory was pretty much spot on didn’t stop other prominent scientists of the time from openly mocking him as a fool and De Latour stopped getting invited to all the best scientist parties. Still, he then went on to invent the siren which just goes to show you can’t keep a good boffin down.
Not long afterwards, technology, in the form of decent microscopes, caught up with the issue and proved that the wily Frenchman’s wild theory was correct. The scientific establishment was forced to admit this and once again De Latour got to go to all the best scientist parties where, one hopes, he got to get splendidly drunk and dance with girls.
With the question of what yeast actually was out of the way, various other lab coat wearing types got to work and developed not only perfect pure yeast strains but also managed to get these yeasts to evolve into different types of culture capable of making a vast range of beers and wines.
For our purposes two yeasts are sufficient. Firstly we have our main culture, which is a robust British yeast with fine flavour development and a certain toughness that makes it ideal for use in a brewery that is surrounded on all sides by spoilage organism factories, or ‘Vineyards’ as they are commonly known. Waiheke is well known for it’s vineyards, full of crazed wine hippies babbling about vintages and brix measurements. Their horrible so called ‘grapes’ get coated in any number of aggressive wild yeasts which can be shifted by the lightest breeze and can ruin a good batch of beer in no time at all. Having a brewing yeast with the toughness to stand up to this is a vital part of keeping our beers clean and tidy.
This main culture is used for the Baroona Original, the Malty and the Dark Ale. The Wheat Beer however needs it’s own specialised yeast. This is a very old and well established culture from southern Germany that gives the perfect authentic flavour.
When the yeast is added to the wort the fermentation begins. Slowly at first, with just a few bubbles appearing on the surface. Then, within a few hours the yeast cells, dividing and multiplying at a huge rate, begin to get serious. If the fermenter were made of glass you’d see what looked like a huge storm happening inside. The activity at the height of fermentation is amazing to watch. The swirling activity is so great that it even generates heat. The fermenters have cooling jackets on them to keep this under control. But by the third day the party is running out of steam. The fermentable sugars have been consumed and the yeast, having done it’s work begins to shut down, sinking to the bottom of the tank where it can be harvested and used for the next brew.
The brew is now beer, though quite raw and unfocussed. We call it ‘green beer’ at this point, (Not to be confused with the silly stuff they try and sell you on St Paddy’s Day when you ought to be drinking Stout like a grown up.) To finish the process the beer needs to sleep for a while in the conditioning tanks.
CONDITIONING
(Or Maturation.)
On to step three we go. The beer, having been chilled down to near freezing point is gently moved to the conditioning tank. Over the next three weeks or so it will sit at low temperatures letting the flavour develop and the remaining yeast settle out. The cold will also cause chill haze to form. This is made up of proteins that bond to tannins when cold and become insoluble. Getting them to form in the conditioning tank allows them to be caught by the filter and not cloud the finished product.
The beer can sit quite happily in the conditioning tanks until it is needed. And that brings us to stage four.
FILTRATION
(Or, ‘Getting The Cloudy Bits Out’.)
Clarity in beer looks nice. Admittedly it does nothing for the flavour, in fact it knocks it back a tiny bit, but when you make a brew from pure pilsner malt then you want it to look clean and sparkly in the glass. To do this we run the conditioned beer through a filter.
Now by and large brewing is not rocket science. But filtration comes pretty close. There are a number of ways of doing it and all of them have some inherent difficulties. They can clog up, burst, send huge jets of precious beer in the wrong direction and generally behave vexatiously. For this reason brewers have the Number One Rule of Beer Filtration which is;
“Just because it worked last time doesn’t mean it will work this time.”
Filtration needs the most concentration and attention to detail of any aspect of the process.
Our filter is a complex little set up that we built ourselves. The one that came with the system back in 1997 was so horrible and ancient that we never even tried to use it. It looked like some mediaeval apparatus used for getting heretics to confess to stuff while screaming loudly. Even keeping it as an ornament in the bar was out of the question. We needed something a bit more modern, so various bits of equipment were assembled into a neat little filter that can run a full twelve hundred litres in less than forty minutes.
Basically, what it does is pump the rough beer from the conditioning tank to the filter chamber and from there to the Bright Beer Tank. But on the way it gets dosed with a regular flow of diatomaceous silica which is made from billions of tiny fossil sea creatures. These tiny particles form up on the filter screen making a continuously growing filter medium that traps the yeast and protein particles and strips them out of the beer.
Once the transfer is complete then the beer is ready to go.
However….Let me just add that one beer we NEVER filter is the Wheat Beer. Filtering Wheat Beer is WRONG. Only a complete BASTARD would ever filter a Wheat Beer. The whole POINT of Wheat Beer is that you leave the yeast in it. Take it out and it won’t look right, taste right or feel right. In short, if you filter Wheat Beer or encourage anyone else to do so then you will probably end up having a rotten, miserable life and have only yourself to blame.
And that Dear Reader, (Give or take a few thousand tiny but vital details, Tricks-of-the-Trade, flashes of inspiration, unexpected power outages during the boil, having to stop what I’m doing to show visitors through the brewery and having yeast buckets explode,) is how BEER is made.
