Equipment To-Dos @hawksbillbrew

While the licensing was a key hurdle for Hawksbill Brewing Company, it certainly wasn't the only big rock we had to move in order to complete our journey.  So last Saturday, when I came out to the brewery, I met up with David and Kevin, who were in the middle of some key preparation.

The next big milestone for us is commissioning the brew house - our system from Alpha Brewing Operations - and we are working to schedule that for mid-March.  To have a successful commissioning, we still have a few critical items to go, for example:

• grain milling and handling
• fabricating the connecting houses
• final painting and clean up
• new egress door and hardware on loading dock

These are just related to the brewhouse.  We've got to start hiring, start brewing, start reporting, and all of those key details!

In any case, the team has home-brewed a last two pilot batches for recipe testing, and they had got together to use our keg washer so that those batches can be moved into kegs.  Now that the license is in, we've moved the pilot system to the brewery and can brew professionally now on location, and that is our plan.

The other thing they were working on was fabricating the connectors so that we are one step closer to being ready for commissioning.  He're a photo of a couple of the longer hoses that they made on Saturday, along with a money shot of three of the fermenters.

We also took a look around the building and grounds while David reported back some of the details from the ABC inspection - and town building inspection.  These are some not-small hurdles, but they're falling into place.  I'll be posting on them as we continue to make progress towards opening.  

...We're almost ready to announce a date!

Brewhouse Installation @hawksbillbrew

Work in the brewhouse continues - there is just a ton of stuff that has to be done to complete construction, install and commission the equipment, and get the licensing in order before our planned opening, which we hope will be in March.  David shared some photos over the weekend of the equipment getting set into place - I thought I might put them up on the blog today.

Besides the equipment, there is a bit of a story to tell about this development - a few weeks back I wrote about the demo day we had, and then the floor prep.  Actually since then there have been a couple of days of painting, including not just the brewhouse floor, which looks pretty spectacular in these shots, but also the walls, and especially the plaster repairs that had to be done around the new window and that column in the corner.

So now the shiny stuff is all in place, pretty much in the final layout.  Not shown is an additional fermenter and the brite tank, but they're in place too.  And we have some room for expansion, if we are so fortunate as to need to do that!

There's more to do, including the balance of construction and painting the rest of the interior.

But this is a good checkpoint - everything is marching on!

The Hot Liquor Tank Challenge @hawksbillbrew

In yesterday's post I wrote about the appearance of our shiny new tanks and vessels, fresh from Alpha Brewing Operations.  It was a day we had been looking forward to for a few months, and at last it had arrived!  David had the logistics in place to ensure a smooth operation, and we completed unloading the container earlier, well within the window of time we had been allotted by the shipping company.

First off the truck was our 10-barrel hot liquor tank, or HLT.  Now, the term "hot liquor tank" suggests that this vessel has an association with alcohol, but it doesn't.  It has an important role in the brewing process, but its work is actually done well before any fermentation begins.  

Simply put, the HLT is a water heater, used to get water up to temperature for a couple of key early steps in the brewing process, namely striking and sparging.  These steps are part of the process for extracting the fermentable sugars from the grain - that may be a topic for a future post, but today I'm writing about how we got such a big piece of equipment into the building.  Seriously, we were worried that we might have to demo out the loading door a bit to make it fit! 

We'd measured that door a few times and had compared it to the specs we'd rec'd from Alpha, and knew we had the clearances we needed.  Now with the situation at hand, it was clear that this was going to take some complex maneuvering - while we were very comfortable with the tank's diameter , it was actually an inch or two too tall to make it through the door while standing upright, especially riding the forklift.

The brain trust assembled to contemplate the task at hand.  Since we knew the diameter of the tank wasn't a problem, we concluded that the HLT needed to lay on its side to make it through, but how were we to get 700 pounds of shiny stainless down and back up again?

The answer lay in all those strong arms and backs.  Surprisingly, after all the discussion and planning, the team made quick and easy work of it.  And now that the HLT is inside, we'll move it into it's final spot soon as we have the general construction done in that area.  

After an exciting and fun day with all of our new shiny stuff, it was time to get back to work on construction progress.

The Shiny Stuff Arrives @hawksbillbrew

We'd gotten a call the day before Thanksgiving that the container with much of our brewhouse equipment had arrived in Baltimore, and that we should prepare for delivery on Monday morning.  I decided to take a day of leave from my day job and join David and the construction crew for this event - he'd made arrangements for a fork lift and plenty of strong arms and backs to see the day through.  

The truck actually arrived the night before, the driver told us - he didn't share where he'd parked for the evening, but we guessed that he had plenty of creature comforts in the cab.  In any case, at last we had everything in place and cut the customs lock off of the container, unveiling all of our shiny new tanks pretty much in place, just like they were in the photos we were sent when they loaded the container (link here)!

First off was the hot liquor tank - there's a story in itself, and I'll post a bit more about it next time - followed by the brite tank, and four fermentation vessels.  It was amazing to see how tightly everything was packed into that container, and to consider the journey it had all made without any damage.  Things were mounted onto steel frames and then bolted to the container floor, and then strapped into place so they would stay upright with very little shifting or movement.

When the shipping company first contacted us for delivery, they told us we had two hours to land everything.  Thanks to David's logistical coordination, with all the help we had on hand, we finished within that window - in fact, we were 20 minutes early!

At last, with everything offloaded and staged, we signed the delivery papers and sent the driver on his way.  Our next step would be to move all of the tanks inside the building - that's where I'll pick up the story in tomorrow's post.

The Shiny Stuff @hawksbillbrew

We picked Alpha Brewing Operations for our five barrel brewhouse.  They worked closely with us to review our business plan and expectations for the brewery before specifying a system and sending along a proposal.

Almost as much fun are the frequent emails we get about the status of our order.  The big shiny stuff had to be fabricated, but last Friday we got a status report on it, with photos, showing that the tanks were completed and were being loaded into a shipping container.  It's estimated that they will arrive in Baltimore by mid-November.

From there, they will be transported to the brewery in Luray, where they'll be united with the brewhouse, which will arrive separately by early December.

The three tanks shown here each have different functions:

1) The top photo is a five-barrel fermentation vessel.  It is made of stainless steel, as are all of the vessels I'm writing about today.  This is where the sugars in the wort produced by the brewhouse will be converted by yeast into alcohol.  The conical section at the bottom of the tank allows spent yeast and other suspended materials to settle out of the beer before it moves on to the carbonation process.

2)  The second photo is our five-barrel brite tank.  This is the next stop for the beer after fermentation - it is used to carbonate the beer before serving it.  Although breweries can serve directly from the brite tank, that won't typically be the process at Hawksbill Brewing - we'll move the beer to kegs for this purpose.

3) The final photo is our 10-barrel hot liquor tank.  We'll use a lot of hot water during brewing - specifically for the "strike," the water that will be used to soak the grain in order to extract the sugars, and for the "sparge," essentially a rinsing process that allows us to capture the sugars that will eventually be fermented in the beer.

While our system is designed to produce five barrels at a time, we doubled the size of the hot liquor tank to give us some flexibility.  By heating double the requirement of hot water, we can do two brews in quick succession.  This is part of how we will accommodate seasonal fluctuations in demand, and hopefully any growth we experience in our first year or so of operation.

There's plenty of action to come at the brewery, so be sure and follow our Twitter feeds for updates - the brewery is @hawksbillbrew and these blog posts (among other info) is @cabin_jim.

Equipment Updates @hawksbillbrew

I wasn't lucky enough to be out in Luray last week when David and a few others drove some of our new arrivals down Main Street to the brewery: the fan coil and chiller for our brewing system.  These items had shipped from Oregon and arrived in town late last week.

After a few days' storage it was time to pick them up on the skid steer and move them to the brewery.  They got lucky with the weather, certainly - look at that bluebirdy sky!

So what does all this chilling do for us at Hawksbill Brewing Company?  There's a good reference article on glycol systems here, but to summarize, that coolant is safe for use in food and brewing operations.

This equipment, combined with others in the brewhouse system, will help us get temperatures down as low as 25 degrees in our fermentation systems.
Even more important than the temperature is the ability to automate and precisely control temperatures in the process, since some beer styles require fermentation at lower temperatures and some at higher temperatures.

In any case, now that this equipment is here we can get started on installation, so that it will be ready to connect to our brewhouse and fermentation equipment when those items arrive.