Week 12 Progress Pictures

I found the panoramic function on the camera on my phone. Makes the place look a little small though.

The week started with what we called 'Piss up in a Brewery' last Saturday, which involved inviting a small group of people along to the brewery for a kind of soft launch.

 Thanks Andy Parker for the picture

The kit isn't up and running yet, but most things are in place, and we wanted to share our vision and a few potential core beers with some people who have helped us out massively along the way. From my memory of the evening, I can quite confidently say Weird Beard Brew Co. CAN organise a piss up in a brewery.

Other things that happened around the brewery are mostly plumbing, electrical work and generally preparing for the installers to arrive next week.

We did have some friends on site building our cool room, which is built from prefabricated insulated wall panels and an industrial chiller unit. You can see where this is in the brewery in later pictures.

For some reason Mike Ellenberg decided to order something like 4 months of grain, which is about 6 tonnes. This arrive on 6 pallets on the back a rather large lorry that had to reverse down to the unit off the main road. This was taken off the lorry and put into the main brewery, then carefully loaded onto the mezzanine storage area.

As the brewery starts to take shape, the usual set of pictures I have been taking are starting not to tell the full story.  The brewery itself, and the new cool room are obscuing a lot of what's going on in the two standard pictures taken through the larger roller shutter. So this week, and for the remainder of these blogs, i will be taking one from the left of the brew house, one from the right, and one from behind.

The view from the left looking into the brewery, from the large roller shutter. This shows the new cool room the the left of the kettle. You can see a new set movable steps between the mash tun and the kettle, along with the new steam extraction tubing coming out of the kettle.

The right view shows the steps and the extraction tubing more clearly. You can also see on the far wall a couple of sinks and some helf & saftey and general first aid stuff. The bottling line along the righ wall has been pushed aside to make room while the install continues. 

This picture is taken from the far right corner, behind the bottle labeller and beside the large catering sink on the back wall. On the right you can see the new cool room exterior walls. Sitting in front of that, and behind the mash tun and kettle, is the hot water tank that will be used for the temperature stepped mashes. You also have a good view of the labeller, which is still waiting to be properly set up, which will be fun I'm sure.

The shot looking down from the mezzanine is the same as always. It has got cluttered again after the party, with boxes from small delivers etc. It also gives an interesting view of the extraction tubing.

The two pictures taken on the mezzanine shows just how much malt we have between Weird Beard Brew Co. and Ellenburg's Brewery. There are 8 pallets in total up there, taking up quite a bit of room. We tried to organise them in an efficient way, but this is a learning curve. Hopefully we wont be ordering quite so much in the future, as we do have other things that need storing somewhere.

Not a lot has changed in the back room, except the tables and beers have been cleaned up after the party. There are still only 2 out of 4 fermenters, but hopefully the other 2 will arrive and get installed this coming week.

It is a big week coming up. We expect a visit from the company from whom we sourced, and who will be installing the kit on Mon/Tues, and then expect an army of installers to be here on Wednesday. Hopefully this will be finished at some stage early the following week. As you can see, we are well stocked and ready to brew some beer. So until next week.

As always all views and grammatical errors are those of WeirdBeardBryan and not always the Weird Beard collective.