You may have seen the article we posted on Facebook yesterday from livability.com on the ‘Top 10 Beer Cities’. They weren’t talking about the obvious (Portland, Asheville, Fort Collins, NYC, and Chicago). They recognized the hidden gems like Landscape Forms’ headquarters home town of Kalamazoo, Michigan which came in a very respectable number 4! Pretty cool considering this is Kalamazoo Beer Week!

One of our very own, Senior Product Engineer, Jim DeBrabander is a home brewer who had an amazing opportunity this past Fall to brew with the professionals at Dark Horse Brewery just down the road in Marshall, Michigan. He wrote about the experience and recently shared it with us.

Here is his story…

Had the best brew session ever yesterday with my Brew Brother David H. Long.

We got an opportunity to brew a 7 Barrel batch of beer (210 gallons) at Dark Horse Brewery. We got to work with their production brew house manager Bryan Wiggs.

Dave and I have gotten to know Wiggs over the past few months and always talk brewing when we get the chance. We finally asked him if we could help brew a batch sometime. Wiggs did one better and let us help create a new recipe that we would brew for the brewpub.

We sat down one night at the brewery and decided it needed to be a fall beer. We threw some ideas around and finally decided it would be a beer made with caramel and apples. The idea was in motion; we picked a date, and had our assignments.

My job was to find the apples. Wiggs estimated we would need ~ 200 lbs of apples. I did some searching and got connected with Steve at Country Mill orchard in Charlotte. Steve told me we would need ~ 5 bushels of apples. He cut me a really good deal and we picked the apples up on Friday.

Saturday September 24, 2011 – Brew Day. It was like fantasy camp for home brewers. We met Wiggs at 9:00 to plan the day. The first step was to finalize our recipe. We used the brewery’s brewing software to calculate what we would need. In the end, we used 650 lbs of grain for our recipe. To compare, the most I have used at home for a 5 gallon batch was 15 lbs.

We then worked out a hop profile. We ended up using a total of 6 lbs of hops. Again, the most I have used in a home recipe is 4 oz. We also had to add a little chocolate malt for color. We weighed out the various grains into barrels and we were ready to start.

Our next step was to grind the grains and mix them with hot water to create the mash. This extracts all of the sugars out of the grain. I manned the grinder while mix-master Dave stirred the mash to make sure the grain was evenly distributed and wetted. We had to account for various lost water in the process, so we mixed out 650 lbs of grain with ~ 9 barrels of water (270 gallons). It was then time for a beer while we let the grains steep for an hour to maximize our extraction.

After the grains finished steeping, we extracted 8 barrels of sweet liquor and pumped it into the boil kettle. Here is the advantage of working with the right equipment. At home it takes me ~45 min to bring 8 gallons of 180° liquid to a boil on my turkey fryer. It took us ~ 30 minutes to bring the whole 240 gallons up to a rolling boil. The boil time for this recipe was 90 minutes, with 3 hop additions.

The 90 minutes gave us time to clean the spent grain out of the mash / lauter tun. It took a while to pull out all of the sticky wet grains, but worth the time. The next brewer will appreciate starting out with clean equipment.

Meanwhile, Wiggs realized we didn’t have an empty fermenter to transfer the wort into after boiling. Fortunately, there was a full fermenter of yummy Dark Horse Amber that was ready to move to the brite tank. More work to do, and more learning.

Wiggs showed us how to clean and sanitize the brite tank and a yeast transfer keg. After everything was clean, we harvested the yeast from the bottom of the Amber fermenter and then transferred the amber beer into the brite tank. Thanks to the power of CO2, most of the work was moving hoses and sanitizing connections.

After the 90 minute boil completed, we cut the burners and turned on the whirlpool pump. This creates a whirlpool inside the kettle and moves most of the solids that settle out of the wort into the center of the kettle. That way they don’t end up in the finished beer. The whirlpool had to run about 30 minutes, so we had time for another beer. We also had to clean and sanitize the now empty fermenter.

We finally had a clean fermenter and some fresh wort to put into it. We pumped the hot wort through a chiller to cool it to room temperature and into the fermenter. Once that transfer started, we collected some of the Dark Horse house yeast to add into the fermenter. Once the beer finished transferring, we could almost see the finish line, but an empty kettle meant more cleaning.

Fortunately, Dark Horse has invested in some really nice equipment. Everything has special piping and valve so they can be cleaned nearly automatically. It still requires a lot of work, but you don’t have to get inside and scrub anything down. Finally, around 5:00, the beer was in the fermenter and the brewery was clean. The three of us sat down with one final beer and discussed the rest of the processing.

Fast forward one week . . .  How do you fit five bushels of apples down a two-inch diameter pipe? One slice at a time.  The next step of the process was to add the apples.

We then let the beer ferment for a week and then transfer it to another tank. We then had 5 bushels of apples to core and slice and add to the beer along with our liquid caramel. The beer took another 2 weeks to absorb and blend all the flavors. We were hopeful we would all be able to hoist a pint of “Carmel Apple Aley” in just a few short weeks.

It was a long, hard day, but worth every minute. I really appreciate how hard all of the brewers work each day to bring us the beers we so dearly love. Best part of all, now Dave and I are among them!

Some highlights of the end result…

• The beer they served in the brewpub (5 barrels = 150 gallons) sold out in two weeks
• They saved some for special events and at each event this beer sold out before all of their other beers

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Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net