Casey's Beer

Too much Philip K. Dick? No, something completely different. In brewing the fifth, and often forgotten, ingredient is of course energy.

Energy is necessary for both heating and cooling. Wort boiling and cleaning processes require heating. Cooling is necessary to bring the boiled wort to pitching temperature, to maintain the desired fermentation temperatures, and to make the finished beer easy to handle for filtering and packaging.

Several years ago I received a brochure from a company called SkyCool. The delights of industrial junk mail – it’s much better than a flyer in the letter box for Don’s Dirty Dog Wash, or some such. Skycool produce a membrane which is applied to metal roofs. This membrane not only reflects a high percentage of solar heat, it also draws heat out of the building, acting like a heat pump. SkyCool claim energy savings of 40 to 50% for large commercial buildings.

Things are moving a bit slowly, but that’s fine because it gives me an opportunity to do things like ring up SkyCool to get a rough quote. On the strength of their brochure and their client list I thought it would be a fairly expnesive proposition. I was pleasantly mistaken. For what I was quoted for a 250 square metre roof I reckon I would have recouped the money within 18 months.

The company and technologhy are both Australian and the SkyCool website makes very interesting reading. It’s a shame we don’t do this kind of thing more often rather than just digging holes in the ground and selling rocks to foreigners.

Oh OK, fifth ingredient Fifth Element, as an ex-cab driver I do like the taxi chase sequence.

Yesterday I brewed another black beer – this one is definitely for home. It is much the same as the previous black beer but I have fiddled around with some of the specialty malts, dropping one and upping the others slightly. Hops and yeast are the same.

The black beer of Black Beer Brewing is now on tap at Absolute Homebrew, shop 7 rear 40 Phillip St, St Marys NSW 2760. If you are handy, pop by and have a taste. I will welcome any comments about the beer. The vital question is, of course: Would people pay $57 or so for a carton of it?

Yesterday afternoon a nephew, Keita, from Japan arrived. I went to pour a beer and that keg was empty. However, there was a keg of pilsner ready and waiting. Keita was with me when I opened the empty keg to rinse it out. He was immediately struck by the smell of the yeast deposit in the bottom of the keg. With his brother, Keita grows shitake mushrooms. They grow the shitake by injecting the shitake spores into holes drilled into metre lengths of chestnut logs. Keita said that the yeast smelt exactly like the shitake spores. Very interesting as both yeast and shitake are fungii.

We are heading off for a few days tomorrow morning, including a stop at Mudgee Brewery – of course to check out the floor amongst other things, Andrew Larsen did the installation at Mudgee. I’m looking forward to drinking more of their porter.

I now have a new accountant. Had a first consultation yesterday evening, and received lots of valuable advice. We have outgrown our existing/previous accountant.

This morning I had a lovely surprise. A small parcel arrived from Gartenakzente in Eschenlohe in the far south of Bavaria. In the parcel was a blue Augustiner-Brau Oktoberfest T-shirt. Thank you Wolfi.

Wolfi and I met in Tunisia in January 1984. At the time there was serious civil unrest and a curfew had been imposed. We busted the curfew to go beer drinking at the big French resort across the road from the youth hostel where we were staying. I visited Wolfi later several times in Munich, and Augustiner-Brau became my favourite Munich beer. Wolfi is a wheat beer drinker, later under Wolfi’s diligent tutelage I came to appreciate wheat beer.

In a brief note Wolfi tells me there were 7,000 police in action and 300,000 litres of beer less than average were sold for this year’s Octoberfest because of possible terrorist threats. Amongst various security measures a no fly zone was imposed over Munich in response.

Wolfi also tells me the annual Augustiner Kontrol all went smoothly. I’ve not seen Augustiner for sale here in Australia, a shame as it has a good reputation. It’s not just my nostalgia for the times when I was drinking it.

On Saturday I went to the Brewers’ Market at the Markets Hotel at Flemington (Sydney). If you don’t know the pub has a 600 litre brewery and some very good house beers at  suburban pub prices.

At the Brewers’ Market nine local microbreweries had stands and were selling their beer. It all kicked off at midday. I didn’t finish in the shop until after 4 pm so by the time I arrived most of the beers had finished which means it was a success for both brewers and customers. I hope it becomes a regular event.

I managed to meet up with a few people including birthday boy Dan and family, and a couple of notorious Blackheathens.

After it had all finished I had a lengthy discussion with one brewer about bottling and packaging operations, and of course the ever important topic of floors. Learnt lots. Another brewer has agreed to take me on to work every second or so Monday to help me get some experience.

The next event like this is the Bitter and Twisted which is on the weekend of November 7 and 8. My wife has now returned from Japan – that was Sunday morning – so we’ll go up for the Sunday and stay the night.

Today, Wednesday, I met with Andrew Larsen. The sets of brewing equipment which he had given me information about a couple of months ago has all been sold. This was to be expected. On paper one or two them seemed to be very good value.

If Andrew can find some more sets of possible equipment then he will be going to the US in early November for me. If all goes well then the gear should be shipped late November to arrive in January.

If there is no suitable equipment available then I will just have to be patient. Buying used equipment of any kind is always opportunistic.

Still, we covered a lot of things today. It was a very productive day. Luckily it was fairly quiet in the shop today, yesterday was very busy indeed.

The big point of today was the floor. The brewery floor has to be right. If the floor is not right then it makes brewing and cleaning difficult. The floor needs to slope down to a slit drain. The orientation of both the slope and the slit drain depends on the position of the drain exit, and the placing of equipment and coolroom. Equipment location depends on where the utilities enter the premises. Typically they will enter through an external wall, so the brewhouse ideally needs to be placed close to that external wall to minimise plumbing and electrical work.

Having a drain in a coolroom is neither practicable, in case of freezing,nor permissible because of health and sanitary reasons. Any water on the coolroom floor needs to be able to run out easily to the main floor and into the drain.

Some of the other topics we discussed were packaged steam boilers, glycol chillers, conversion of US electrical gear to Australian voltages, bottles, pressure ratings on fermenting vessels and Australian standards, plus a bit of industry gossip.

It was a very productive day. I just have to wait and see what equipment Andrew can find in the next 3 or so weeks.

Black beer
(with apologies to John Lennon and Paul McCartney)

Black beer brewing in the dead of night
Take these malted grains and learn to mash.
All your life
You were waiting for this moment to convert.

Black beer brewing in the dead of night
Take these Golding hops and learn to boil.
All your life
You were waiting for this moment to cool.

Black beer fly.
Black beer fly into the thirst of a deep, dark throat.

Black beer brewing in the dead of night
Take this yeast and learn to brew.
All your life
You were waiting for this moment to be drunk.

Black beer fly.
Black beer fly into the thirst of a deep, dark throat.

Sunday before last I brewed a black beer as a specimen beer. The grain bill was overly complicated with 6 malts – I will be coy about exactly what. The idea is to see how it comes up and then knock out one or two of the malts to get an approximate working recipe. At this stage there is no point trying to work out detailed recipes because it will not translate exactly when scaled up from 20 odd litres to 1,700 litres, and different sets of equipment will produce different results. For example, the extent of caramelisation in the kettle will be greater with direct heat from a gas flame compared to the indirect heat of steam jackets. Once the beer is worked out then I’ll tell you what’s in it. Secret recipe stuff in brewing is silly – it’s technique and fermentation which really count.

Hops were Northdown and East Kent Goldings.

This beer is now due to be racked. It could end up at home or at St Marys. I am not sure yet.