Me and my father finished our jobs and started a brewery (Ireland) pt. 2

After the huge response to last weeks post I thought people might want to see a few more photos of our brewery. Briefly, me and father always had a passion for beer and science and in the last few months we took our dream and turned it into a reality. It took a lot of hard work and time but finally our beer is in pubs in the area. Here's the beautiful walk we get to make each morning from our house to the brewery (100 m). Previous post: http://imgur.com/gallery/w2bks

The whole process starts with this, malted barley. Malting grains involves allowing them to partially germinate before drying them out. This causes the barley to produce enzymes which are responsible for converting the starch in the grain into sugar, ready for fermentation.

We go through quite a lot of it, over 200 kg of it per batch.

This is us and our 200 L grain cooking vessel (mash tun). It is basically a giant pot, with another smaller pot with a sieve bottom inside of it. This allows us to cook the grain and then separate the grain from the liquid which is required further on in the process. (We also have a 1200L version of this but I didn't take photos)

Here we're pumping hot water out the bottom of our mash tun and pump it over the top, this process allows the enzymes to extract as much sugar as possible from the grain.

A sight glass allows us to see what colour the liquid is and if there is much sediment.

Once all the sugar is extracted from the grain, the liquid is separated from the grain solids and the sweet liquid is then brought to the boil. At this stage a variety of different hops can be added for bitterness and aroma.

Before the sweet liquid (wort) can be combined with the yeast we first need to cool it down after boiling. This piece of equipment in the foreground is a pipe-chiller. Its basically a long pipe surrounded by another pipe. By passing your hot sweet liquid through the internal pipe and cold water through the external pipe you can cool the wort quickly ready for fermentation.

Once the wort is cool its transferred to one of these tanks for fermentation and conditioning. It takes the beer about 3/4 weeks to reach maturity. These tanks also allow us to chill and carbonate our beer ready for kegging.

Sanitation is very important in a brewery, so we have our mobile CIP (clean in place) unit. By cycling a series of caustic / acid solutions through the tanks you can clean / sanitize them quite easily

Our brewery from the outside, we live in the west of Ireland so we get 100% of our water requirements for the brewery from the roof of the building. We pass the rainwater through filters and UV light sterilisation before entering one of these 15,000 L tanks.

View out the back of our house, just waiting for the beer to be finished and the sun to pick up.

Finished product in all it's glory!! I glossed over a lot in this, but if people like it I can do some more brewery posts! Hope you enjoy! Previous post: http://imgur.com/gallery/w2bks

In case anyone wants to follow our progress: https://www.facebook.com/LoudonsBrewing/