The Brewing Process...
Now you'll start your brew, with the able assistance
of a staff member. You will be assigned a kettle, which will be pre-filled
with 14.5 gallons of water.
You'll prepare your grains (if using a grain recipe),
and measure out your malt extracts. You'll place the ground grains in a
stainless steel grain basket, and drop them into the kettle to steep, normally
for a half hour.
Bringing your kettle to a rolling boil, you'll slowly
add the first hop (called "boiling" or "bittering" hops).
This provides the quality of acidity which plays against the sweetness of
the malt and extract. The mixture will continue to brew.
About fifteen minutes before the end of the brew,
you will remove a small sample of the liquid from the kettle, allow it to
cool down, and add your yeast to it, which will activate the yeast in preparation
for the fermentation process.
Back at the kettle, shortly before the completion
of the brew, you will add the second ("finishing" or "aroma")
hop to add fragrance to the brew.
When the brew (now properly called "wort") is completed, you're ready to pull it off the kettle. Valves will be opened by the staff member, and the wort will pass through a hop filter (to remove any large pieces of the hops), then run through a heat exchanger served by our glycol chiller unit. The chiller immediately drops the temperature of the wort from around 200 degrees Fahrenheit to near 80 degrees. Our staff member will have a lined, food-grade-plastic fermenting tank standing by, and the wort will be directed into it for storage and fermentation. At this point, you'll add any dry hops the recipe called for, and the re-hydrated yeast. The staff member will take an initial gravity (checking for the level of available fermentable sugars), and air-seal the fermentor. The fermentor will then be stored in our 68Deg. Fermentation room until the yeast has consumed the sugars. A few days before you return to bottle, the brew will be taken to the 36Deg room, allowed to settle, and then be filtered and carbonated. (The only exception to this last step is when the recipe calls for bottle conditioning, which involves no filtration or carbonation, although the beer needs to sit for two weeks after adding priming sugar for carbonation)
In two weeks, you'll return for the final steps: Bottling and Labeling.