The Brewing Process
The brewing process is thousands of years old, and while there have been innovations, the basic process and chemistry remains the same. Anyone can brew beer, but it takes some skill and experience to brew good quality, award-winning beers. Old Coast Road Brewery prides itself on producing fresh, preservative-free and wholesome beers.
Our brewer, Andrew Harris, doesn\’t mind having a yarn about our brewing process and take sit as a compliment when a home brewer wants to copy one of his beers. Outlined here is a typical bew day.
We brew in batches of 1000L and use a very hands on process. This gives us ultimate control and makes each hand crafted batch slightly different.
We are an all grain malt brewery. We don;t use malt extracts or sugars in our beers. We use a 2 vessel British brewing method rath than the 3 vessel German brewing method. The 2 main vessels are the Mash Tun and the Kettle.
The first step is to mill the malted grain. We use a 2 roller mill and it takes 30 minutes to mill 300kg of malt. We use only top quality malts that are matched to the style of beer we are making. The same goes for hops. We only use filtered, UV sterilised water for our brewing.
After this, the malt is moved via a pencil auger into the Mach Tun along with hot water. The mash temp is around 66C and it takes 90 minutes for all brews. This is called the Single Step Infusion Mash method.
The mash is then sparged (washed) with hot water and the run-off (wort) is transferred to the kettle for boiling. Hop additions occur during the boil depending on the beer. The wort is then run through a heat exchanger system to cool it quickly before being transferred to the fermenter tank.
The wort must be oxygenated and then the yeast goes in. We oxygenate to 9ppm oxygen concentration. Temperature control is extremely important for lagers. This beer is fermented at 12-15C for 7-10 days. Then the beer is racked off into a serving tank, chilled, conditioned and carbonated. It\’s ready to drink in about 2-4 weeks.
