Howard Town Brewery - How to brew Ale in Peak Condition

How do we brew Ales in Peak Condition ?

Click any picture to enlarge

Start with water - from the tap.

We add a small amount of sulphates for consistency and 'mouth-feel'.

1600 litres of water are stored up in the Hot Liquor Tank.

Then we get the malt in 25 kg bags, and put a bag at a time into the Premasher. Water from the Hot Liquor Tank is piped into the premasher, and mixes with the malt, hydrating it. The resulting mix then flows into the Mash Tun.

This is left to 'mash in' for 90 minutes. Like tea, but longer. After mashing in, the liquid (wort) is transferred to the Copper, via the Underback - lots of new words here, and we've hardly started - and at the same time sparging takes place. Sparging rinses off the sugary liquid from the grains of malt, in order to extract as much sugar as possible. Since we're soon going turn lots of this sugar into alcohol, more efficient sparging means more alcohol for your money, or at least more alcohol for our money.

Once this process is completed, we bring the wort in the copper to the boil and add the bittering hops, and armed with an evil smile, stir them around.80 minutes later, we add the flavour hops and 10 minutes later we turn off the boil and add the aroma hops.

All this is very energetic.

Another 40 or 50 minutes passes by. Stuff happens, Gravities are checked,technical things are done, secret ingredients added (not really) and the sweet flavoured yet oddly bitter liquid is transferred to the fermenter via our favourite piece of equipment - the Heat Exchanger.

This wonderful piece of kit allows us to cool the wort from about 98 deg C to 23 deg C, and at the same time deliver mains water to the Hot Liquor Tank at about 69 deg C, and all free. So we save money and save the planet.

More secrets of the Brewers soon ......