Week 13 Progress Pictures

The blog is a little late this week, so apologies for that. But what a week it has been.

The installers arrived bright and early on Wednesday morning, and go to work connecting all the different bits of the brewery. And quite frankly making the place look like a bomb has gone off. But that's not all that happened this week.

A while ago we had a vote on twitter and Facebook to decide on the styling of the custom bottle caps we are going to use. I am hugely excited about these, and was a very happy man when they arrived. I think you will agree they look great, and will look even better sealing in some Weird Beard beers. They may even look good attached to a fridge or as a badge.

Anyway, lets get on with this week pictures. You may not be able to see all of this detail, but i will explain what has changed, or what has been added.

Below the mezzanine on the wall you can see the first of about 4 control panels. This one lets us monitor and control what's going on with he liquor tanks on the mezzanine. Between the mash tun and the kettle you can just see the back of the plate chiller, that will cool the freshly boiled wort to a suitable temperature before we transfer it to the fermenters.

Next up, in this picture you can see some stainless steel pipes running across the mezzanine barrier from the liquor tanks down to the brew house. That and general clutter from having around 6 people on site working.

For some reason we have a picture of some squirt cleaner next. Didn't notice that when taking the picture, i was distracted by all the other cool stuff happening. But now its all i can see when looking at this. So let me try and distarct you with 2 large control panels now mounted the the cool room door. These will control the step temperature for the mash tun, the stirring motor in the mash tun and the heating of the kettle. There are also pipes running across walls, ceiling and down to the brew house.

Looking down from the mezzanine dosnet show much, just loads of tools used for bending and cutting pipes.

 

We are still burried in around 8 tonnes of malt on the mezzanine. A lot of work has been done on the plumbing and connecting up of the liquor tanks to the rest of the system. Buit none of that can be seen through all that bloody malt.

I couldn't decide which angle to take the fermentation room pictures from this week, as there is stuff happening in both. So i have added both. Most importantly, there are now 4 fermenters instead of the 2 from last week. On the top picture the fermenters have been moved around a bit to let the installers get to the bits they need. To the very right of the picture you can see one of 2 chillers that will fill the jackets of the fermenters with a temperature controlled mix of water and glycol. The lower pictures shows the 2nd of the these chillers, stashed behind the fridges. You can also see the fermenter control panel mounted on the wall. From here we can set the temperature of each fermenter individually. There are also loads of random pipes going off in all kinds of directions.

It has been hugely exciting around the brewery this week, but we have been dealt a bit of a blow. It looks like someone may have misjudged quite how much welding there was to be done. We have a great guy called Mike in doing the welding, but he has not been able to finish this week, and is not as available as we would like next week. We were hoping to get the first brews under way next week, but this means we will be delayed until at least Monday 11th February. We should be used to this kind of thing by now, but it still a huge disappointment. We are all so desperate to get brewing and get some product out there. Soon people, soon.

All views and grammatical errors are that of @WeirdBeardBryan and not necessarily the whole Weird Beard collective.