Yankee Brew News Archive

Brew School in Maine: Becoming a Professional Brewer For a Day

Originally Published: 10/96

By: Gregg Glaser

It was a cool, foggy Saturday on the Maine coast last July 27 when I awoke at five in the morning. That's the day I was to brew a seven-barrel batch of beer at the Kennebunkport Brewing Company, the brewery for Federal Jack's Restaurant & Brewpub, and the training ground - Brew School - for customers of Pugsley's Brewing Projects International.

By the end of the day the fog had lifted, the sun had warmed the land and I was exhausted. I worked in the brewery from six in the morning until four in the afternoon. I signed the Brewer's Log. I was a professional brewer. At least for one day.

Pugsley's Brewing Projects International is a brewery consulting business that has established dozens of microbreweries and brewpubs throughout Britain, the United States, Europe and Asia. These include thirty-nine in the United States; nineteen of which are located in New England.

The company was formed in 1992 as a partnership between Alan Pugsley and Fred Forsley. The two are also partners in Federal Jack's and the Kennebunkport and Shipyard Brewing companies. Pugsley's Brewing Projects is a direct outgrowth of Alan Pugsley's previous jobs as a brewer with England's Ringwood Brewery, and as a consultant and then Chairman of Peter Austin & Partners, English brewing consultants.

Current projects for the consulting firm include: a 14-barrel brewpub in 100,000 square feet of space within the largest mall in the world in Edmonton, Alberta; a 10-barrel brewpub in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, in the same building as a 40-lane Brunswick bowling alley; and a 20-barrel brewpub/micro in the Orlando, Florida., airport.

Pugsley's Brewing Projects' clients attend a ten-day Brew School at the seven-barrel Kennebunkport Brewing Company. Some also train at Shipyard's Portland, Maine., brewhouse, where two fifty-barrel brew kettles brew concurrently to fill the brewery's one hundred-barrel and three hundred-barrel fermentation vessels. The purpose of Brew School is for Pugsley's customers to learn the details and specifics of the Peter Austin/Alan Pugsley brewhouse, which differs from other manufacturers' brewing equipment.

Students at Brew School put in long, hard days of hands-on experience, as well as study manuals and texts prepared by Pugsley. They need this training because they will soon be brewing at their own micros or brewpubs. Pugsley's staff is on site at each customer's brewhouse during the installation of the equipment and for the first brews, but after that the student, now a professional brewer, is pretty much on his or her own.

I say, "pretty much," because Pugsley and his staff remain full-time consultants to each brewery they install. Monthly visits are made for help with any problems that may arise. Recipes for each brewery are developed by Pugsley, and they often include several Shipyard beers. As each new brewer develops confidence in his or her abilities, they begin to develop their own beers for their brewery.

In addition to the ten-day Brew School, Pugsley's Brewing Projects also offers prospective clients one-day orientation courses at the Kennebunkport Brewing Company. This is the course I attended. Here's what followed:

6:00 a.m. I arrive at the Kennebunkport Brewing Company (the fog is still as thick as pea soup) and check in. My instructor for the day is Head Brewer Jim Saunders. We immediately go to work.

Let me say this right away, up front. Jim is the nicest, most even tempered fellow you could ever want to learn from and spend time with in a brewhouse.

Just a bit of background about Jim: He began his job at Kennebunkport Brewing on Labor Day weekend, 1995, after working for four years as an assistant brewer at the Indianapolis Brewing Company. He graduated from Indiana University in 1991 with degrees in economics and history, and with the knowledge that brewing would be his life. The first résumé he sent out was to Indianapolis Brewing, and a month after graduation that's where he began working. Jim's a determined guy.

Now to work. The grain mill, an electric-powered mill that grinds the brewing grains sits in a sealed room with glass walls, separate from the brewhouse. Grain dust isn't something you want around fermenting beer and the other equipment. The hopper on top of the mill was filled the day before with a measured amount of grains - over two hundred pounds of pale ale malt, flaked maize and torrified wheat - for the beer we'll brew today.

Our beer, by the way, is Shipyard's Goat Island Light, Batch #1085 for the Kennebunkport Brewing Company.

In the brewhouse, closed off by glass walls and doors from the rest of the brewery, stand three large pieces of equipment, assorted hoses, pumps and switches. The large vessels include a Hot Liquor Back (this is an English brewing term, the first of many for the day, for a 200-plus-gallon hot water tank), a Mash/Lauter Tun (where the crushed grains are first steeped in hot water and then rinsed; this vessel holds about 217 gallons) and the Copper/Whirlpool (another English brewing term, this time for the 217-gallon brew kettle).

The Hot Liquor Back and Mash/Lauter Tun are clad on the outside with vertical wood strips. The Copper/Whirlpool is clad in brick, with a large copper dome on top. An exhaust stack carries the steam from the kettle outside.

The Hot Liquor Back was filled the day before with close to 200 gallons of filtered hot water. Gypsum, calcium chloride and food grade phosphoric acid were added to this water to achieve the correct mineral, chemical and pH balance for the type of beer we'll brew. A timer and thermostat attached to the Hot Liquor Back's heating element brought the water to a specific temperature overnight, and kept it steady until this morning.

6:15 a.m.--We preheat the Mash/Lauter Tun by rinsing it with about ten gallons of hot water from the Hot Liquor Back. A hose and pump connects the two vessels. We left a couple of inches of water in the Mash/Lauter Tun so that the crushed grain won't clump when it enters.

This water just covers the perforated stainless steel plates at the bottom of the Mash/Lauter Tun. These are here so that when the liquid extract obtained from steeping the grains is pumped out, the grains will be left in the Mash/Lauter Tun and not transferred to the Copper/Whirlpool.

On top of the open Mash/Lauter Tun is a metal bracket that holds a sparging arm (more on that later) and a copper hydrator. The hydrator is an eight-to-ten-inch square made of copper tubing, and it's perforated so that water can pass through. A hose from the Hot Liquor Back is attached above the hydrator, and the pump is turned on. Hot water then flows through the hydrator.

The switch for the grain mill is turned on and the grain begins to crush and pass through metal ductwork to an arm, augur, that rests just above the hydrator. The crushed grain pours down through the hydrator, immediately becoming saturated with hot water. This technique prevents the grain from clumping as it enters the Mash/Lauter Tun.

6:30 a.m. All the crushed grain has entered the Mash/Lauter Tun, and the mill is turned off. At this point the Mash In is over. The grain in the Mash/Lauter Tun is not stirred, and it forms a bed that floats on top of the hot (about 162ºF) water. We place two heavy wooden covers on top of the Mash/Lauter Tun, and we let the grain steep, or mash, for 90 minutes. During this time the starches in the grains are converted to sugars that are necessary to the fermentation process.

We leave the brewhouse and enter the fermentation room of the brewery. Here we clean and prepare the Hop Percolator. This is a piece of equipment special to a Peter Austin/Alan Pugsley brewery. It's a 33-gallon stainless steel vessel in which a measured amount of hop flowers are infused in hot water for several hours. When the boil is complete in the Copper/Whirlpool, the unfermented beer, called wort, will pass through the Hop Percolator on its way to a Heat Exchanger and the Fermentation Vessel.

We drain the Hop Percolator of caustic soda, a cleanser, rinse it well with water (all the water used in the brewery is twice-filtered city water) and spray it down liberally with iodophor (a food grade, tasteless, odorless sanitizer). We measure out over a pound of Tettnanger hop flowers and place them in the Hop Percolator, which is then sealed. Finally, water from the Hot Liquor Back is pumped over to fill the Hop Percolator.

The Copper/Whirlpool is partially filled with diluted caustic soda from the day before. We drain this off and thoroughly rinse the vessel. Then, about 60 gallons of hot water is run from the Hot Liquor Back into the Copper/Whirlpool and by hose directly to the Heat Exchanger, which sits outside the brewhouse, next to the Hop Percolator, to clean them of all caustic residue.

7:40 a.m. We go upstairs to Federal Jack's Restaurant & Brewpub for a coffee break.

8:00 a.m. We Set Taps. This is another old English brewing term. What we do is draw off the liquid extract under the grain bed in the Mash/Lauter Tun and pump it into the Copper/Whirlpool. In olden days in England, there were a series of taps to open under the mash tun to accomplish this task. We do the same thing with one drain port at the bottom of the side of the Mash/Lauter Tun. We adjust the flow of extract into the Copper/Whirlpool to the thickness of a pencil. It will take two hours to fill the kettle.

At the same time, we connect a hose from the Hot Liquor Back to the sparging arm above the grain bed in the Mash/Lauter Tun. The sparging arm is perforated, and a steady stream of hot (about 169ºF) water is sprayed over the grain bed. The flow causes the sparging arm to continuously rotate. The reason for sparging is to rinse all the sugars out of the grains. We'll gradually increase the rate of flow of extract and sparging as the two hours go by. We take a sample of the extract flowing into the Copper/Whirlpool, to be later measured for specific gravity (the ratio of sugar to water) and pH.

8:15 a.m. When the extract has reached a certain height in the Copper/Whirlpool, we turn on the whirlpool. This keeps the extract from scalding or scorching when the burners are turned on, which we do next. There are three burners in concentric circles under the Copper/Whirlpool. We light burner #1, the outermost ring. This is done manually, by kneeling on the floor with a hand-held lighter as the gas line is opened and a starter button is pressed for several seconds. All part of letting the student brewer understand exactly what the process is about, Jim tells me.

Next we measure Tettnanger and Willamette hop pellets for later use in the Copper/Whirlpool.

8:30 a.m. The sun is finally shining outside.

9:00 a.m. One hour into transferring the extract from the Mash/Lauter Tun to the Copper/Whirlpool, we take another sample to measure for specific gravity and pH. We then measure the grains needed for the next day's brew, and we load them into the hopper above the grain mill. This involves lugging 25-kilogram sacks of Munton & Fison malt from the inventory room, located outside the brewery. Hard work.

We load the hopper in a specific order, hand mixing pale ale, wheat and crystal malts. The pale ale malt goes in first, then some wheat, more pale, wheat, pale, crystal, pale and so on, ending with a top layer of pale. Hand crafted beer takes on a whole new meaning to me at this point. I'm touching each and every ingredient with my hands, as well as all the brewery tools and every piece of equipment. Nothing is automated.

9:30 a.m. We turn off the pump from the Hot Liquor Back to the Mash/Lauter Tun. The sparging arm stops its rotation. The grain bed in the Mash/Lauter Tun is almost resting on the bottom.

We next prepare the Copper Finings (clarifying agents) that will be added to the Copper/Whirlpool towards the end of the boil. These finings, a powdery substance, aren't really made of copper. The word is used because the English call their brew kettle a Copper. We also prepare a solution of an anti-foaming agent (food grade silicon) that will be added to the Copper/Whirlpool as the boil begins. The anti-foaming agent prevents boil-overs in the Copper/Whirlpool. Both of these are mixed with filtered water in small containers.

10:05 a.m. We take a final sample of extract from the flow into the Copper/Whirlpool, and we shut off the pump from the Mash/Lauter Tun. The Copper/Whirlpool is full. We measure the amount of extract in the Copper/Whirlpool by use of a wooden pole placed in the Copper/Whirlpool. The pole is marked with gallon amounts along its length. The amount is 210 gallons. At some point during the last half hour or so, Jim turned on burners #2 and #3.

10:10 a.m. The boil has begun. We add the anti-foaming agent to the boiling extract in the Copper/Whirlpool, and we also add our Tettnanger hop pellets. These are the beer's bittering hops, used to counter-balance the sweetness of the malt extract. The boil will continue for one hour.

Next comes more hard work. We have to clean the wet, heavy grains out of the Mash/Lauter Tun. First, the sparging rack is removed, placed on the floor and hosed down. Then Jim, standing on the floor, reaches into the Mash/Lauter Tun with a shovel and pushes the grain to one side. I stand on a milk crate next to the Mash/Lauter Tun and reach inside over the edge with a large metal scoop, gathering grains and dumping them into an empty grain bag on the floor.

When the level of grains gets too low for me to reach, I climb into the Mash/Lauter Tun to scoop out the remainder. Did I mention that brewers always wear large, sturdy rubber boots? When I can scoop no more, I use a brush to get all the grains out of the Mash/Lauter Tun.

I then scrub the stainless steel side walls of the Mash/Lauter Tun with a plastic pad, remove the perforated bottom plates, scrub them and the Mash/Lauter Tun floor and thoroughly rinse the insides. When I'm finished, not one speck of grain or husk is left in the Mash/Lauter Tun. I then put it all back together - perforated plates, sparging rack and covers. Finally, the brewhouse floor is completely rinsed down. The floor throughout the brewery is tiled, with center drains. Easy to clean.

The used grain is stored outside behind Federal Jack's dumpsters. About once a week a local farmer picks it up as feed for his pigs. In return, he occasionally brings the restaurant a side of beef or a butchered hog. That's a good deal, in my book.

10:40 a.m. We add the Willamette hops to the boil in the Copper/Whirlpool. These are the flavor hops for our beer.

10:45 a.m. Beer needs yeast for fermentation, and that's our next project. We clean and scrub a five-gallon plastic food grade pail with FSD, a cleaning agent, rinse it well, and spray it with iodophor. This is our yeast bucket, which we fill with five pounds of yeast that has been harvested and stored from previous batches of beer. By the way, the English term for a batch of beer is gyle.

Kennebunkport Brewing's yeast is stored in large plastic pails, about the size of a garbage pail, in the brewery's cold storage room. It's collected when primary fermentation is finished in a Fermenting Vessel. The brewer just scoops off most of the foamy, yeast-rich head on top of the fermenting beer, and places it in the large pail.

Ale yeast, which is what the brewery uses, rises to the top during fermentation. Peter Austin/Alan Pugsley systems use open fermentation, so the wood clad, stainless steel, seven-barrel Fermenting Vessel is open at the top and easy to reach into.

Our clean, sanitized five-gallon bucket is placed on a scale, and five pounds of yeast is added. Lids are put back on the large yeast pail and the five-gallon bucket, and the large pail is returned to the cold room. This is the same room where the finished, filtered beer is kept in about ten storage tanks and pumped directly upstairs to the bar taps at Federal Jack's. The five-gallon yeast bucket is placed in the brewhouse, which is warm from the heat of the Copper/Whirlpool. The rest of the brewery is kept at about 50ºF.

11:05 a.m. It's five minutes before the end of the boil, and we shut down burner #3, the innermost burner. We also add the Copper Finings, which help precipitate out proteins suspended in the boil. Burner #2 is then turned off.

11:10 a.m. The boil is over. Burner #1 is shut down, but the whirlpool is kept going for fifteen minutes in the Copper/Whirlpool. The reason is to collect and form the residual hops and proteins, called trub, into a cone on the kettle's floor. When we transfer the boiled extract, now called wort, out of the Copper/Whirlpool, we'll use a drain port on the bottom side of the Copper/Whirlpool, avoiding the trub.

11:25 a.m. The whirlpool is turned off. The wort rests in the Copper/Whirlpool for forty-five minutes before it's transferred to the Hop Percolator, Heat Exchanger and Fermenting Vessel. Next we scrub, rinse and spray with iodophor the inside of the Fermenting Vessel. There are four seven-barrel Fermenting Vessels in the fermentation room and one fourteen-barrel Fermenting Vessel in an adjoining room.

12:10 p.m. It's time to transfer the wort out of the Copper/Whirlpool. First, we open the drain port for just a second to blow off the small bit of trub that's collected there. It sprays out on the floor, to be rinsed away later. We turn on cold water that feeds into the Heat Exchanger. Hot wort will soon pass through the Heat Exchanger and be chilled as it flows past the cold water on its way to the Fermenting Vessel.

The cold water in the Heat Exchanger, by contrast, is heated. Rather than send this water down the drain, it's pumped through hoses to the Hot Liquor Back, to be used again. Finally, we hook up a hose to the drain port of the Copper/Whirlpool, turn on the pump and transfer the wort to the Hop Percolator.

The wort passes through the "hop tea" that's been steeping all day in the Hop Percolator, picking up the aroma qualities of these hops. As the wort leaves the Hop Percolator, it passes through a seed catcher, a copper mesh screen that we cleaned and sanitized earlier, that is in-line between the Hop Percolator and the Heat Exchanger.

As the wort passes through the Heat Exchanger, Jim tells me we've "started fridging." A hose then transfers the chilled wort, it's now about 69ºF, to the Fermenting Vessel. We clip the end of the hose onto the top edge of the Fermenting Vessel. Earlier, we attached a wide metal spout with a thin opening to the end of this hose. This spout is an aerator. In the initial stage of fermentation yeast requires lots of oxygen to most effectively become active and to do its job of turning the wort sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The wort splashes into the Fermenting Vessel, and is aerated in this manner. A tall stainless steel rousing rod sits in the middle of the Fermenting Vessel. We cleaned, rinsed and sprayed this rod with iodophor earlier, and the wort is additionally aerated by splashing against this rod.

12:50 p.m. We mix up some yeast food, a nutrient to help the yeast do its job better, with some filtered water. The Fermenting Vessel has two ports. One, near the bottom, is the drain port. The other, located halfway up the side, is a sample port. We take our yeast bucket over to this sample port and add some wort to our yeast, an amount equal to the volume of yeast in the bucket. This primes the yeast with fresh wort, and gets it started on fermentation. The lid is replaced on the yeast bucket and we put it to the side.

1:40 p.m. The yeast in our bucket is so fresh that it's begun active fermentation already. So active, in fact, that's it's nearly blown off its lid. So we add, pitch, the yeast into the Fermenting Vessel. Then, in order to get every last drop of yeast out of the yeast bucket, we open the sample port on the Fermenting Vessel, add some wort to the bucket, swirl it around and add this to the Fermenting Vessel. The pump at the Copper/Whirlpool is now shut off because the kettle is empty.

We hook up a filtered water hose to top of the Hop Percolator and run this water through the 33-gallon Hop Percolator in order to push all the "hop tea" through the Heat Exchanger and into the Fermenting Vessel. We watch the color of the spray coming out of the aerator into the Fermenting Vessel, and when it's clear we know that we can turn off the flow. The "hop tea" is slighted colored.

Finally, I rouse the yeast in the Fermenting Vessel by standing on a ladder, grabbing the top of the rousing rod and plunging it up and down a number of times. On the bottom of this rod is a plate, about ten inches square, with four large holes in it. It makes for an effective, and arm numbing, way to get the yeast mixed into the wort in the Fermenting Vessel.

2:15 p.m. We take a sample from the Fermenting Vessel, through the sample port, and put it aside. We then begin cleaning the Hop Percolator and Copper/Whirlpool. The Hop Percolator is my job. Jim tackles the Copper/Whirlpool. I take the Hop Percolator apart, pull out the wet hop flowers and rinse down all the parts. The hop flowers go in the garbage. The farmer's pigs won't eat these. Too bitter, I guess. Jim rinses the Copper/Whirlpool, then climbs in and scrubs every square inch of it.

2:40 p.m. We've completed our respective cleaning jobs. Jim partially fills the Copper/Whirlpool with caustic soda and heats it to 160ºF. This solution is then fed through a hose onto the brewhouse floor, then into the Hop Percolator and Heat Exchanger for twenty minutes. The hoses and Heat Exchanger are next thoroughly rinsed with filtered water. The Hop Percolator sits overnight, filled with a caustic soda solution.

The specific gravity reading we took earlier from the Fermenting Vessel reads 1.036, two points higher than the target gravity for Goat Island Light, so we need to dilute the wort in the Fermenting Vessel. This is done by adding a measured volume of filtered water directly to the Fermenting Vessel. After the dilution, we again take a sample to check the specific gravity. After another addition of filtered water, we hit our target gravity of 1.034.

3:00 p.m. We take pH and specific gravity readings from the extract and wort samples collected throughout the day. We've set them aside on a small lab table in the brewery. The readings are written down in the Brewer's Log. Jim has entered information in this Log all day long. Next, we clean the hose lines from the Mash/Lauter Tun to the Copper/Whirlpool with caustic soda and water. Then, we measure the wort in the Fermenting Vessel. We do this by placing a long wooden pole, with gallon markings written on it, directly into the Fermenting Vessel. Of course, we first scrub, rinse and iodophor spray this pole. I stand on a ladder and dip the pole directly into the Fermenting Vessel. We have 222 gallons of wort

3:35 p.m. All hoses are disconnected, coiled and put aside. The Copper/Whirlpool is partially filled with a solution of diluted caustic soda. Anything that needs to be cleaned up or put away is cleaned up and put away. We're neat in this brewery. Finally, (you thought we'd never get here?) we fill the Hot Liquor Back, take a sample for a pH reading, and add gypsum, calcium chloride and phosphoric acid as needed for the next day's brew.

4:00 p.m. We're finished! We head upstairs to Federal Jack's for a pint. We order another. Then...well, I think you can figure out the rest.

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