A brewery or homebrewing brewery is a small-scale business that produces and sells beer on a commercial scale. Typically the location where beer is commercially produced is called a beer house, or a brewery, where different sets of commercial brewing equipment are generally called in to service. It could be located indoors, or outdoors, depending on your preference. However, both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. Here are some things to consider when setting up a brewery, direct from the owners of Arcade Brewery.
Many beers are better kept at room temperature, so you would have to take that into consideration when considering temperature control for the brewery. For instance, Belgian strong brewed with adjunct yeast from the farm, is a good example of a beer best kept cold. That’s because the beer takes longer to ferment, and it is also made with high adjunct content yeast. The downside to this is that if the temperature drops below freezing, then the whole batch would have to be thawed out – which is not favorable for microbrews. The opposite is true for brewing with cold water, wherein the beer can be made as cold as -12 degrees C. If you’re using bottled water, make sure the tap water is chilled before you run the water through the brewing system.
When you have a home brew brewery, you will need to boil the wort, or liquid left from the brewing process, before storing it. Before boiling, check the gravity reading for that day, and add a tablespoon of gypsum and 2 teaspoons of calcium sulfate. This aids in the bottling process, and prevents the formation of hard water. If the wort is stored for an extended period of time in a dark bottle, you’ll have a run-down tasting beer – however, since the bottling bucket has no way of removing the calcium sulfate, this will never happen.
If you have a restaurant attached to your brewery, be sure to keep the fermenting beer in separate containers from the other ingredients. There’s nothing more frustrating than a stale taste in your pub beer, as well as a messy one at the brewery. For restaurant owners, you should store the beer in kegs and do not brew additional batches of beer from the same keg.
At this point, you may feel that your home brewed beer is too limited in flavor or variety to compete with the microbreweries. However, as mentioned earlier, there are three primary differences between home brewers and nano breweries. First, micro breweries do not need to age their brew. Second, they can take shortcuts like applying RO to get the job done faster. And third, they use barrels for fermentation instead of bottling tanks.
Now that you know the differences between small breweries and big breweries, you must learn about how each method of production works. Next time you’re sitting in your living room enjoying a brewski, take some time to reflect on how the suds were made. Small breweries typically start with a traditional, German-style brewing system. Kegging and bottle conditioning allow brewers to make small batches without taking on the extra costs. They may, however, prefer to bottle condition all of their beers. Kegging brewers will generally choose a German style fermentation system, or an indirect fermentation system to allow their beer to “carbonate” while resting in the bottles.