Our New Automated German Brewhouse - Post One

Over the last month our brewery has undergone a massive transformation. With the main phase of construction wrapping up and most of our new BrauKon equipment now stationed in its permanent home, we're moving on to commissioning. Steffen, a Braumeister from BrauKon, has flown here from Germany this week and will be on-site for the rest of July - testing the plumbing & electrical engineering behind the new equipment, getting us trained up on the new workflow, and overseeing the first ~10 batches of beer brewed on the new system.

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 1 - Malt Handling

A brewday now begins the evening before, with all the malt to be milled staged and ready in a hopper. The automation cycle kicks off early the next morning, when the malt is transferred via pipe chain conveyance to our RMS mill. Once milled, it's mixed with any unmilled adjuncts (for instance the flaked oats that go into most of our IPAs) before continuing on through the pipe to our mash mixer (the vessel on the right of the new brewhouse skid).

On our old brewhouse, this stage meant hauling each bag of malt into the mill by hand at the start of the day. Now that entire process happens on its own timeline, kicking off automatically in the wee hours before the team arrives and begins their day - freeing up labor for other prep work, making double batch days significantly shorter, and taking a lot of the physical grind out of a brewday before it even begins.