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Forge Brewery real ales are made with four natural ingredients, malted barley, hops, yeast and water. Although these ingredients are very simple, in the hands of a skilled brewer they will come together to produce a symphony of colours, aromas and tastes that make our quality real ale and beers extremely popular in North Devon and they can be enjoyed in several local pubs.
It is said when you are in a country you should drink the wine of the country. However, when in Britain, people should drink the beer of the country.
The first step in the brewing process is to re-clean all the equipment and vessels to be used, then sterilise everything. This cleaning and sterilising process can take a couple of hours and uses a few different chemicals but it’s a process that must be carried out every time before commencing the brew.
[step 2] We then ensure we have enough hot water at the required temperature for our brew. The water is heated in a “Hot Liquor Tank” (HLT) as water is referred to as “Liquor” in the brewing world. [photos of HLT, mash tun being filled and grains being added - to follow] The “Mash Tun” (MT) is then filled to the required depth with hot water at the required temperature. The level and temperature of water is determined by the amount of grains (Known as goods), the temperature of the grains and the ambient air temperature. The amount of grains would also be determined by which particular beer is being brewed and the yield of sugars from the particular batch of malted Barley, which in turn can depend on the season and the maltsters etc. The aim is to “mash” at 65 degrees Celsius. This is the ideal temperature to extract the enzymes from the grains that turn the starch to the correct type of sugar for brewing. The sugar we are after is sucrose which ferments quite readily, however if our mash is too hot, the sugar that is extracted is maltose and this ferments much slower. Once we have our correct level and temperature of hot water, we then tip in all the grains. This has a porridge like consistency within the mash tun. This is then left to Mash for a set period with just the temperature being taken periodically to ensure we’re getting the correct sugars.
[step 3] After the goods have mashed we will then transfer the dark sugary liquid (called wort) from the mash tun to the copper. This process is a slow process as we need to extract as much of the sugar as possible.
In order to wash as much sugar through the goods in the mash tun are sparged with hot water. This keeps the mash tun wet and prevents the goods from clogging together as well as rinsing the sugars through. The gravity of the wort is taken periodically during this transfer to check that we are getting the correct levels of sugar. Once the wort has risen above the elements in the “Copper” we then turn the elements on to bring our wort to the boil.
[step 4] With 36,000 watts boiling up our wort, it is starting to get a little warm by now, but the wort must be boiled, the more vigorous the better. Once we had a good boil, we can now add our first hops, called the “bittering hops”, these first hops won’t impart any real flavour to our beers due to the length of time they are to be boiled, instead they give us the bitterness level of the beer, thus we can adjust this level up or down if necessary. After a set period of time, we then put in the second hops, these will give some flavour and some bitterness depending on the type of hop, how long we keep the boil going etc.
The overall result would be the “length” of the beer that these hops would mainly effect. After these second hops have had a good boil, we then come to the best bit – the “aroma hops”. These can be a single hop or a blend of aroma hops, and when these go into the copper, the smells are beautiful. The hops are then left to sweat in the wort to extract their flavours and oils.
[step 5] The hops are then sunk to the bottom of the copper which forms a filter bed to strain the wort as its transferred. The wort is cast over to one of our fermenting vessels (FV) via a heat exchanger, this heat exchanger will drop the temperature of wort to around about 20 degrees celcius which is ideal for fermentation, in doing so it fills our HLT back up with hot water (the heat is extracted from the wort in the heat exchanger and turns cold water into hot ready for the next brew!). Once all our wort has been transferred, we then add our yeast and away we go.
The beer will take about 3 days to ferment to the required gravity at which point we turn the cooler on to arrest the fermentation and then leave the beer for a further 4 days to settle and condition. It is then casked up and left to condition in the cask for a few more days before it can be delivered to your local pub, served at the right temperature and enjoyed by you.
[step 6] Of course the last part of the brewing process is climbing into the mash tun to shovel out the very wet and hot grains, and bagging them up for the local pigs to enjoy, and climbing into the copper to shovel out the spent hops, then cleaning everything including inside the pipelines top to bottom ready to start the next brew!
Brewing Process
