New Brewery Visits

Let's see... how many breweries have I visited? 

That's really an impossible number to even think of.  I remember in 1996 visiting Miller in Milwaukee.  We visit San Diego as a family ALL the time, inevitably visiting myriad breweries.

Where have I BREWED?  Or... been a "guest brewer", at least having an intimate part in brewing rather than a simple tour...

San Tan Brewing in Chandler, AZ on my 40th birthday - Devil's Ale
Mudshark Brewing in Lake Havasu, AZ - Tangerine Horchata Wit
Lightning Brewing in Poway, CA (San Diego) - Elemental Pils
Grand Canyon Brewery in Williams, AZ - Ruby Red Grapefruit IPA

In September I will be visiting College Street in Lake Havasu, and Joseph James in Henderson, NV.

There is also a chance that James and I will brew at The Bruery in September, but not positive about that one :)

Last weekend, I went on a tour with my friends in the Arizona Society of Homebrewers, to Flagstaff.  On this tour, we visited Wanderlust.  When I saw the system that Nathan was brewing on, I knew that it was the perfect system for The Perch. (I'll have another post about choosing a system...)

We also visited Mother Road, Lumberyard, and Beaver Street.  When you are a homebrewer, brewery tours have a completely different feel than just being a beer fan.  Homebrewers are in the brewery, relating the equipment and processes in the brewery, to the equipment and processes in their home.  Sometimes the items translate directly, sometimes the scale of a brewery changes the process.

For example, Cold liquor tanks.  This is not necessary in a homebrew system.  My system has an inline water filter.  At 3 Gallons per minute, I can fill my HLT in 3 minutes.  In a professional system, that would take 45 minutes.  SO- clearly you would want to have a faster method to fill your HLT.  Instead of just using water pressure to go through a restrictive filter, you simply add a reservoir which fills continually, then pump filtered water from this reservoir, into your HLT at a much faster rate.  This water can also be kept in (in my case) a refrigerator.  This gives cold water which can be used to help with wort cooling after the boil, then circulated back into the HLT for your next brew, already hot, thereby recycling the energy consumed in one brew, into the next brew, while also using the water twice rather than running off the chill water.

There are several things like the above example which a homebrewer simply would not think of, because the scale of homebrewing simply doesn't require the attention to certain things which are important in a professional system.