There are those in Alberta that when they think Drummond Brewery, at least those who have heard of them… they think cheap swill brewed cheaply. Recently, they hired David Neilly, former brewmaster for Wild Rose Brewery in Calgary, and he has since been changing that perception, and recently, I’ve had the opportunity to see for myself first hand the work that goes into not only converting an adjunct lager into craft beer, but the process of taking my knowledge from the home brew scale to the commercial scale.
First, a little bit on Drummond. The brewery as it exists today is only a few years old, however, the Drummond name lives on for much longer than that. Drummond existed in the 1990′s, going out of business in 1995. Sleeman had purchased the assets and let the trademark on the Drummond name expire. A couple budding entrepreneurs decided to bring the brewery back to life in 2009, and since then, have been selling beer like hotcakes.
That being the long and short of it, they do have a really cool brewery. Since David Neilly has been brought in, he has since removed corn sugar from their premium lager by improving mash efficiency to around 85% (though I think they could hit just north of 90%), and added more flavour and aroma hops. A glass of Drummond Premium lager now has a nice light flavour with noticeable hop aroma and bitterness.
My experience at Drummond was my first experience being involved in the brewing process at a commercial scale, from mash in to transfer to the fermenter, and reloading the malt hopper above the mill. A special thanks for David Neilly for inviting me out to enjoy the experience.
The start of the day began with preparing the mash, as it usually does. In this case, we were mashing in 900 KG of malted 2-row barley to kick out about 5000 litres of wort. This is a lot of malt, and it did take a lot of time to fill the mash tun with both water and malt. During this time, we had filled the kettle with water to mix a caustic solution. Heck, because of how long it took to fill the mash tun, we got a fermenter cleaned up as well to be ready to take in some fresh wort.
The caustic cleaner was heated up in the kettle, then pumped through some of the pipes near the kettle and throughout the brewery to sanitize everything that was going to touch the beer. It was at this point that I finally got to see how fermenters were sanitized given their large scale. This was through a CIP (clean in place) process. It worked in this case by pumping about 1000 litres of caustic into the fermenter. A pump inlet was attached to the bottom of the cone on the fermenter, while the output was attached to the CIP. This allowed the caustic to be circulated through the fermenter, sanitizing everything thoroughly. We had let this run for a few hours.
Of course, during the CIP cycle on the fermenter, we did spend time keeping an eye on the mash. Once the mash tun was full, we had let the mash sit for a bit. Do to the size of the tun though, I’m pretty sure we could have began lautering the moment it was full, but we let it sit another 45 minutes, probably to let some enzymes work to avoid the dreaded protein rest.
As you can see if you are a home brewer, there isn’t really anything out of the ordinary. As a matter of fact, the entire brewing process doesn’t change from the home brew scale to the commercial scale. The main concerns end up being methodologies of moving liquid from point A to point B, the heating of water and the boiling of wort. Typically, water is heated in a hot liquor tank then used for doing the mash infusion. In the case at Drummond, there was a hot and cold liquor tank. This equipment varies from brewery to brewery, but the process is largely the same.
As we were sparging, we were draining the mash tun directly into the kettle. As the kettle was filling, we had the steam jacket on the lower half of the kettle on, heating wort as we fill the kettle. If this wasn’t done, it could have taken hours to get a boil going. Even when running the steam jackets, it still took a while to bring the wort to a boil. The steam jacket is essentially piping within the walls of the boil kettle that carries steam. Some kettles can still be direct fired, but in this case, steam is pushed through to heat the wort.
It took about 20 minutes once the kettle was full before it finally started to boil. This was when we added a kilogram of hops. One thing I will note next that home brewers tend to have a good idea of… boil overs. While there didn’t seem to be an imminent boil over in this case, it did happen about 15 minutes into the boil. Unfortunately, neither David or I were paying attention, and one of the packaging staff ended up finding me. The boil over essentially looked like a foam waterfall coming from the opening of the top of the kettle. Nothing a little spray of water couldn’t take care of. After this, the boil was relatively uneventful.
Like some people do for home brewing, kettle finings were used and yeast nutrient was added. This was in between a couple additions of finishing hops. As the boil was finished, we began to pump the wort into the fermentor.
The process involved with pumping the wort involved two parts. The first was the chilling of the wort down to fermentation temps. The second was infusing oxygen in line, into the wort to aid in effective fermentation. Oxygen is typically a better bet than aeration when it comes to yeast health, and can help the beer ferment to a lower final gravity.
Finally… fermentation. We essentially had a keg ful of yeast ready to pump into the fermentor. Once the wort was in the fermentor, the yeast wasn’t far behind.
It was an interesting experience, and I had the opportunity to kick out about 10,000 litres of beer. It is an experience that does help me out as I continue to study the brewing process, and refine some of my own processes, and maybe someday soon… start a brewery of my own.
