Welcome to the Forever Brewery, home of long time prominent Falcons, Bruce Brode and Brian Vessa.
Together these two go on brewing sprees every spring to support a set of parties they throw and to bring beer to the club
festivals. The Forever Brewery was named after the amount of time they thought it would take to finish the brew system.
The big features on the their system is the use of a combination mash tun / boiler and a set of cooler based
lauter tuns. The big kettle they use is unique to their brewery and was ordered from a Midwest manufacturer. The original design was for
the cosmetics industry, but B & B have added an extra valve for running off during the boil. This central feature of the system cost the
pair several hundred dollars. Fortunately, it's been working for them for over a decade.
This is a big gallery of pics from their system and is split across a couple of pages.
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Recirculation is accomplished by a simple pour. No spray arms, no splash devices, just a careful pour.
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Here we see the Y sparge water distributor in action. Exciting? Well, by having the Y they can avoid having to flop hoses around. To even sparge distribution each line has a barrel valve to control flow independently.
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The top of the lauter tuns run the sparge water through these pipes bolted to the lauter tun lids. The pipes are interchangable with the pipes in the bottom of the cooler.
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Brian starts the transfer process. The boys use two small pots to catch the run-off and carefully pour each pot into place.
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Bruce demonstrates his technique with the manual sparge transfer system.
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You can see both the boiler and HLT at full steam as the boil kicks into full gear with a steaming HLT.
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The full kettle is at a tilting boil. You can see where there was a 'foam-over' from the large amounts of albumin protein thrown by the corn.
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Thanks to the amount of corn in the mash and the efficent burner, this beer was in serious need of a scum skim. You can see the protein already in the bowl and in the kettle.
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After a good amount of skimming you can see the results here in Brian's hand. Below the foam cap you can see the solid clumps of protein. In the kettle the chunks of protein were shaped like little brain clumps.
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As a change of pace for the brewing celebrations, Bruce and Brian switched to a clean shot of ice cold frozen vodka
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Late at night, the brewers begin to emerge from their steamy environs. Watch out!
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A well deserved rest break. The boil is going and the carboys are all clean so a quick beer break and a sit down to enjoy the fruits of the day.
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At this point we're 15 gallons into the chilling process. The counter filler chiller is the Heart's Super Chiller that's actually part of my (Drew) system. Bruce and Brian were suitably impressed with the performance of the chiller as we successfully ran out 25 gallons in about 30 minutes. Also in the background is the omnipresent Drew brewing toolkit. (A side note - Bruce and Brian have now added a Heart's chiller to their system)
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Bruce and Brian use an open ferment for their primary. To make sure the foil caps they use are sanitary, Brian flames the foil with the same propane torch used for lighting the kettles. All of the equiptment is sanitized using the old standby of bleach.
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The output of a day's effort, 25 Gallons of fresh Cream Ale wort. This photo was taken a couple minutes after the run off was completed and you can see the amount of break material already dropping out.
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Its long day's worth done, the paddle takes its rest. Actually, the Forever Brewery brewing paddle is a Doug King special.
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The propane torch makes it's last appearance for the evening. Here it's being used to create an updraft while pitching the yeast. This is very good yeast practice.
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This bottle and several of its brethren provided a bottle culture of Coopers yeast. The beer was also pitched with Wyeast 1056, and a Kolsch yeast.
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