Casey's Beer

I’ve been skeptical about the worth of an excise concession for microbreweries, and the chances of the industry getting one. There has been a concession in place for some time, but it was restricted to microbreweries producing less than 30,000 litres a year. The concession was a refund of 60% of the excise paid by the brewery to a maximum of $10,000 a year.

In last night’s budget the 30,000 litres a year limit was scrapped, and the maximum refund increased to $30,000. The government estimates this will cost $2.5 million a year. For bottled beer $30,000 is roughly the amount of excise on about 20,000 litres of standard full strength beer. For the same beer in 50 litre kegs it’s about 30,000 litres.

I don’t know what the mechanics of the new scheme will be. Breweries pay excise as the beer leaves the brewery. Typically excise is paid each Monday for the previous week’s worth of beer. I suspect the excise refund will be applied to the brewery’s GST payements on its business activity statement (BAS). For the wine industry Wine Equalisation Tax (WET) payments are calculated on the BAS and made with GST payments.

Whether the refund will actually work like this or not, the brewery must pay the full amount of excise first before receiving any refund. This is probably a good thing because it will weed out financially unviable start-up breweries. One problem facing the wine industry is that there are lots of financially unviable small wineries who survive only because of the WET concession scheme.

I am surprised the Government has been so generous, given they are desperate for a surplus and have been rounding up as much money as they can. The budget has been criticised as a crude attempt to buy votes for an unpopular government. Has the Government suddenly discovered there are votes in craft beer? It’s nice to be wrong.

This new excise refund is a long way from what some in the craftbrewing industry have wanted, a lot of that has been blind to political realities. As well, it has been naive to imagine that a generous excise concession scheme will somehow lead to a golden age of craft brewing. It won’t. The real obstacle to a golden age of craft brewing is the anti-competitive arrangements which prevail in the draught beer market.

I hope this new excise rebate is enough to convince the industry to give up chasing government hand-outs and get on with the real job of assembling a strong enough case to take to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) over draught beer distribution. The other job for the industry should be to lobby the Government to reduce the volume division on excise rates. Currently beer in containers greater than 48 litres attracts less excise than the same beer in containers less than 48 litres. Reducing this to say 23 litres would allow small breweries to sell their beer in 25 or 30 litre kegs without any financial disadvantage. This would be good for smaller venues and it would less of a risk for licencees taking on a new product.

All my paperwork is in the with the building certifier. Just waiting on the fire safety schedule from the owner/real estate agent. Already have the annual fire safety statement, but the schedule is a different document. The buliding certifier will issue a new fire safey schedule with the construction certificate.

This is not the house of Dan Murphy, but the site of the former Murphy’s brothel at Morpeth on the Hunter River. It’s an elegant two storey Victorian house.

The Maitland and Morpeth area is lovely, well worth a weekend. There’s even a beer festival at the old prison at East Maitland in November.

Any Les Darcy fans about?

Spoke to the real estate agent this afternoon. The landlord has signed the papers for the construction certificate and they are in the post. Should be able to get all the paper work into the building certifier on Thursday morning.

Should stop at the house of Murphy for a couple of bottles of Landlord Pale Ale to quietly celebrate.

Maybe, just maybe, everything has been worked out with this wretched disabled toilet. The toilet itself is OK – one wall will be demolished and a hole knocked in another. The last sticking point has been access to the toilet. Rather than entering the toilet from the main area of the unit, the entrance will be from the little front entry area – bashing a hole in the wall to do so. The doorway connecting the front entry area to the main area of the unit will be widened to create a clear width of 850 mm through the door. Disabled access to the main area of the unit would be through the front roller door, and through the expanded doorway to the toilet.

Fine, but the roller door does not qualify as the “principal public entrance”, so the front doorway to the unit has to be widened as well.

Paperwork is with the owner to be signed for the construction certificate. The owner has been very good with all of this. So, I should get the construction certificate early next week. And then be able to start.

One of Council’s consent conditions was to install an accessible (disabled) toilet constructed to Australian Standard 1428. It has been driving me insane. I know, why do you need disabled toilets in a factory that will be closed to the public? Fair enough for new bulidings, or where there is building work involving the toilets, but the difficulties of trying to jam a disabled toilet with suitable access into an existing structure argghhh. It’s Council policy.

The toilet itself is no problem, it’s access to it. Matters are complicated by the food premises requirement to have an airlock (double doors) on the toilet. I think it is worked out now, attempt number 3.  The current toilets sit below a concrete floored mezzanine. Already pulling down one small wall to create the toilet space, but there is only so much you can pull down before the concrete slab above gives in to gravity. It now looks like I will have to punch through a different stuctural wall to create a new doorway.

Requirements for disabled toilets are becoming tighter, several changes came into force last May. It is driven partly by the aging of the population. But at what point does it become counter-productive? If the requirements are too onerous how many things will not go ahead?

For example, one customer is involved with a voluntary organisation, they want to run a monthly farmers’ market. They have Council consent to do so, but one of the conditions is a disabled toilet. And with this, it either complies with the standard, or it doesn’t. The fact that you’ve done your best given the circumstances, and it’s pretty close doesn’t matter – it doesn’t comply. For this particular group a compliant disabled toilet is way beyond their resources. So instead of a few people possibly missing out on the market because there won’t be a compliant disabled toilet, everyone will miss out because the market won’t go ahead.

Similarly how many small start-up business won’t go ahead because the requirements to provide AS 1428 compliant disabled access and facilities in existing buildings are just too onerous? Under the Federal legislation mandating the new standard there are hardship provisions, but to get a hardship exemption requires consultants’ reports, submissions to panels etc etc. How many months later will anything happen?

And the big question is whether this is the best use of resources? Great I’ll end up with a lovely disabled toilet, how often will it get properly used?  I can’t see how  a person I would employ to work on the packaging line would also need an AS 1428 compliant accessible toilet. If I employed someone for admin work they’d be doing it on a computer at their home. Of course someone visiting the brewery on business might be in a wheelchair. Overall I think the money would be better spent on a donation to research into motor neurone disease or spinal injuries.

I will of course be brewing a special beer called Disabled Dunny: disablingly stong, and very bitter.

The packaged steam boiler arrived from the US last Friday, Feb 24. It’s a gas fired 20 hp reconditioned unit from Parker.

The boys from Cyrius Media are going to start playing around with the website. There will be some trials of colour schemes – the colours are taken from the labels, and some playing with the structure of the site.

Any comments you have about any of the changes will be very welcome.

Spam for industrial stuff can sometimes be quite interesting, even if it is not that practical. Recently I had an email from a Chinese printer specialising in self-adhesive beer labels. They sent the label below as an example of their work. Fellow Gruen Transfer afficiandoes will share my delight.

How do you calculate the heating requirements for a brewery or anything else?

First up there is the heat capacity, or specific heat of water. It takes 4.2 kilojoules of energy to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree C. Power is energy over time. One kilowatt is one kilojoule per second, or 3,600 kJ an hour. So to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water in one second would require one kilowatt of power.

The brewery has a capacity of 15 US barrels, about 1,750 litres. The amount of mash water will be about 1,000 litres. I want to heat the mash water from 10 degrees to 72 degrees over an hour:

(1000 kilograms x 62 degrees x 4.2 kJ) / 1 hour = 260,400 kJ/hour

Dividing 260,400 kJ per hour by 3,600 gives 73 kilowatts of power required to heat the mash water.

To heat 1300 litres of sparge water from 10 degrees to 80 degrees over the course of an hour would require

(1300 x 70 x 4.2) / (1 x 3,600) = 106 kilowatts

How much power is needed to lift the temperature of the mash 10 degrees over 15 mins? The specific heat of malt is about 40% of that of water. Let’s say the mash is 1000 litres of water and 325 kg of malt.

((1000 kgs of water + 325 kgs of malt x 0.4) x 10 x 4.2) / (0.25 hour x 3,600) = (1130 x 10 x 4.2) / 900 = 53 kilowatts

Once the mash and sparge are finished the next step is to boil the wort. To heat the collected wort of say 1900 litres from 60 degrees to 100 degrees in 45 minutes would require

(1900 x 40 x 4.2) / (0.75 x 3,600) = 319,200/2,700 = 118 kilowatts

This is heating from a standing start, of course as the wort is run into the kettle from the mash and sparge heat would be applied so the actual power required would be somewhat less.

Now heating a liquid is one thing, getting it to boil and change state is another. While it only takes 4.2 kilojoules to lift the temperature of 1 kg of water by one degree, it takes 2260 kilojoules to change the state of the 1 kg water from a liquid at 100 degrees to steam at 100 degrees. Explains why a watched pot never boils. This is the latent heat of vaporisation.

So to boil this 1900 litres of wort with 7% evaporation an hour would require

(1900 x 0.07 x 2260) / 1 x 3600 = 84 kilowatts

So you can see that a 100 kilowatt (10 boiler horsepower) boiler would be the barest minimum. It would allow only one heating task at a time. For example, to raise temperature of the mash for a multi-temperature mash would mean cutting back the heating of sparge water. Lack of boiler power could limit the type of mash regimes and would make for a longer brew day.

A 150 kilowatt boiler would be a lot easier but brewing twice in a day would be quite tricky. Ideally you would want to start the second brew as early as possible, rather than waiting until the first brew is completely finished. Once the run-off is finished you would try to empty the mash tun as quickly as possible – remembering the grain will be hot. During this time you would be heating both the first wort number and mash water for brew number two. Next you would be simultaneously boiling the first wort and heating the second sparge water. If you were not doing a step mash, and with some careful planning and juggling then it might be possible to squeeze two brews out of a long day with a 150 kilowatt boiler. So, in the end it really needs to be a 200 kilowatt boiler.