Our New Automated German Brewhouse - Post Four

In this series of posts, we'll offer some insight into how our new two-vessel automated brewhouse will significantly change our brewing process — and, in turn, the final product — by highlighting each of the steps of brewday workflow from start to finish.

Stage 4 - The Boil

Before we get to the boil itself, it's worth mentioning what happens right after lautering wraps up: the spent grain is pumped straight out of the vessel through a pipe to a bin outside the brewhouse. It's now a completely hands-off process and a huge improvement over how we used to do things (shoveling the mash tun out by hand at the end of every brew day, hauling out thousands of pounds of wet, sticky grain throughout the week).

Once the spent grain is gone and the wort is collected from the lauter tun, it's transferred back to the same vessel where the mash was created — a combined mash mixer/kettle, since our new BrauKon uses one vessel for both steps. This is where hop bitterness, flavor, and aroma get built into the beer, proteins coagulate and drop out for a clearer finished product, and the wort gets sterilized and concentrated down to its final target gravity. Hop additions are still added by hand, but the system tracks and prompts those additions so nothing gets missed or mistimed. 

The new kettle is home to one of the most dramatic upgrades in the entire brewery.

In our old system, the boil was created via submerged electric elements in direct contact with the wort. In contrast, the BrauKon heats through an internal calandria (a steam-heated tube bundle - see photo) for a gentler, more even boil across the whole volume. This also does away with the caramelization risk that electric heating elements posed (which we were constantly monitoring and fighting on the old system) and with it, a real source of potential off-flavors in the finished beer.

This improved heating system is an enormous upgrade which will have an effect on the finished beer that cannot be overstated. It’s accurate to say that the desire to move away from the old element-heated kettle was the impetus for upgrading our brewhouse in the first place.

What we now have attained is a much cleaner, more consistent boil from batch to batch…one more step in the process where the new system gi

ves us the means to make a more flavorful final product, and also takes some of the guesswork and manual attention off our hands.