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Thursday, January 23, 2014

Brewing with Elevation 66

So Last week I, Izzy, Had the wonderful opportunity to brew with the brew masters over at Elevation 66! How did this happen? What did I do? Well, here it is, and sorry, no pictures.

Im currently job hunting (master brewers need some help? lol) So I took my cute little resume up to my local brewery. I tryied to stop by around Noon, hoping to just catch a bar manager or something but I happened upon the Brew Master Dave. He informed me they were not hiring, but if I was interested, I could come in at 5 am and help them brew. Of course I will!! So that Wed, I arrived, its amazing how quiet it as at that time. Also it was weirdly warm, hello global warming. I was greeted by a surprised Dave and some of the other brew employees. They were all super nice, and I was so over whelmed Ive forgotten almost everyones names. I was informed we would be making a Double Rye-PA in collaboration with Coastal Brewing, Cool!

We started out sanitizing equipment, and hooking up hoses and other cool things.The brew masters started loading grain and sparging, while myself and 2 other guys were cleaning fermentors, and then we were asked to transfer yeast from the Kolsch tank to the clean fermentor. I watched the two guys i was shadowing hooked up more hoses and little viewing tanks to the hoses to transfer the yeast. the cool little viewing thing let us watch as the liquid yeast turned to beer so we knew when to turn off pumps and unhook equipment.

After less then 2 hours everything was clean and ready, so we just had to wait for the sparge (running the hot water through the grains to get sugar water). We enjoyed a little beverage while waiting, which was also odd at about 630 am. but hey, its all good. We talked beer and they discussed their upcoming employee BBQ. After about an hour of waiting the Sparge was finally done and we began the boil. We tested the sugar water for its specific gravity and started adding hops. So many hops in this batch! The boil lasted an hour, and they brew masters added all the hops which i watched on. There was a lot of foam, and they used a hose to keep it down, neat!!

After the boil they cooled the wort by running it through a plate chiller, which dropped it from 180 degrees to a chilly 65. We measures the specific gravity again, and they brew masters were thinking this beer is going to be about 11%! Nice big beer. We transfered the beer to the prepared fermentor with all the hoses we had cleaned earlier. Next we shoveled the spent grains out of the mash ton, and filled 5 garbage cans with mash! Lucky for me it was the day a local goat and pig farmer picked it up for his animals! He showed up just as we finished shoveling out the 200+ lbs of wet grains and we loaded it into his trailer. The guys hosed out the boil kettle and cleaned up.by now it was almost 1 in the after noon so i bid them farewell until next time and headed home to get ready for my other job.

It was an amazing adventure, and I cant WAIT to do it again!! and maybe take $teve with me!!

1 comment:

  1. Oh I'm totally going next time. Just let me know when & I'll take a half day :)

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