Berkshire Beer Brewery!

The next adventure of my studies was the section so hilariously titled by Jason "Proof that the Creator (of this class) wants you to be happy...Wine, Beer, and Distilled Spirits". 
Too good. Haha


Anyways, since I am currently underage and unfortunately I couldn't do any sort of sampling or anything like that, instead of brewing my own beer I chose to go to a local beer brewery about 20 minutes away to see how beer is made in bulk! I went with Danny and my friend/housemate Alex. Here is the company's website:


http://www.berkshirebrewingcompany.com/navigation.html


First of all, our tour guide was hilaarriouus. It made the experience a whole lot more fun. He was cracking jokes the whole way, appropriate for a business that was making and providing alcohol. For those that were old enough, several cups of complimentary freshly brewed beer were provided to sip along the way. By the end of the tour, peoples spirits were high and a they were a little more outspoken haha


The tour began with the guide explaining how the beer is distributed. Berkshire Brewing Company has a mainly self-distributed policy to assure that the beer is fresh. They do this mainly because it's faster and they have found that their beer doesn't travel well. 


Berkshire brewery exports 20,585 barrels every year. Sounds like a lot, right? Well, it is, but to show that this is a smaller independent company, in comparison, Budweiser sells 110,000,000 barrels of beer per year. According to our guide, there are 1700+ breweries in the United States.

This was the first part of our tour. We were given a sample of the barley that they use to brew many of their beers. It was sweet, dry, smokey and airy. The tour guide explained that when you eat a piece of barley, the heat from your mouth and the wetness of your saliva causes an enzyme reaction in the grain that results in the sweet flavor. He said that the best grain they use (the kind that produces the best beer) is the Canadian barley.

In this picture, you can see the first step of the beer-making process. The grain is poured into the container that you see in the bottom right corner. The grain then travels downwards and is ground to crumbs between wheel machinery. Hot liquid is then applied. This liquid creates a similar enzyme reaction to evoke the sweetness that we tasted when we chewed the barley in our mouths. The mixture is then pumped up through the pipe that you see in the left-center of the picture. This pipe leads to the large holding container that you see on the left to keep the mashed grain the right consistency until it is ready to go on to the next step. 

After the barley has been crushed and mixed with hot water to bring out that sugary sweetness, the barley sits in the large container for one hour. The mixture is then sifted through a machine to weed out the barley dust because it takes away from the flavor of the beer. The next step is to add very hot water (170 degrees F) to the grain, which ends up absorbing 25% of the water. Adding water reduces the alcohol content to a level that is manageable for the human body to drink a decent amount of beer without getting incredibly drunk or sick too fast. Up until now in the process, they have only been collecting sugar. The process hasn't made the mixture alcoholic yet. 

FUN FACT: Cows cannot get drunk because the alcohol is filtered through their 4 stomachs to the point where it doesn't affect them

To heat up this new mixture they use a 500,000 BTU burner that heats up a kettle to boil the liquid. At this point in the process they can add hops. Hops balance the sweetness of the barley,. Hops not only add a defined flavor, but they also help the beer stay good even if the beer isn't cold. Berkshire Brewery uses whole leaf hops (domestically grown in Oregon, WA) to introduce a genuine and new flavor to the beer. Hops act like a tea. They smell musky and, like tea, their bitterness is correlated with the amount of time they steep in the brew. After about 1 hour, Berkshire Brewery chooses to shut off burner and leak the brew into a smaller vat to add hops.

After the hops are added, the 215 degree F beer is cooled in a matter of 2 seconds by feeding through cold city water pipes and plates that lead to the MAGIC room! The beer is fed into giant tanks where 1/2 a pound of yeast is added per barrel. This means 30 pounds of yeast is added per tank. By the end of the process, the yeast will have grown to a matter of 250 pounds per tank! The yeast grows because the yeast eats the sugar of the mixture and turns to CO2. The yeast then sinks to the bottom of the tank. The timing and temperature of this step depends on what brew they are creating. If they were brewing an ale, the would let the liquid reach 70 degrees F. The longer the beer sits, the colder the temperature needs to be. For ale, the yeast will float to the top by the end of the process. For a lager, the yeast should stay at the bottom. 

The beer is then transferred to a 30 degree room called the "conditioning room". In this room the beer is fully flavored. If there is a seasonal flavor, they will do this at this step in the game. Non-pastuerized beer brewing is too expensive for this small company, and they don't do non-filtered because this removes something good from the fermented flavor of the beer. Have you ever wondered what a malt beverage actually is? Well, I can tell you! I learned that a malt beverage is actually just a very filtered beer.

In this room, all-natural vegan-friendly gelatin is added. The remaining yeast then clings to the gelatin and sinks to the bottom. Brewer sheets of B12 vitamins are added, as well. At this point someone uses a porous piece of metal that acts like a bubbler in a fish tank (and can be even more expensive than a car!) to add CO2 to the beer. 

It takes 3 hours or so to go through about 2100 gallons of beer in this step. The guide explained to us that adding bubbles is an art. You don't want to add too much so that it's the texture of champagne, but you don't want to not add enough because then your beer will be flat.

Next thing we know, we round the corner out of the cold room and we're back where we started. There was a big wall of stickers with funny sayings/bumper stickers/pictures. Some of them seemed pretty old and historical...

Not this one...haha...

But this one did! ^^^ 

The next part of the tour was to see the way the beer is packaged. Oxygen helps the beer ferment and keep its flavor, so when it is packaged, one "poof" of oxygen is added to each bottle. Trick of the trade: according to our guide, green bottles suck. Why? They let ultra0-violet light through the bottle, which changes the freshness in the flavor of the beer. The riboflavin in the yeast reacts with UV light, oxidizing. Our guide recommended buying beer with oxygen absorbing caps, as well as beer in darker bottles. Apparently to get the freshest beer you should actually buy beer in cans! Yep, you heard me, cans! Believe it or not. Brown bottles are second runners up, and green bottles are the worst. 

If anyone's interested in trying something new, our guide said that Dale's pale ale was fantastic. I feel like it must be pretty good if he chose to give a huge compliment to his business competition on a public tour. 

Alright folks, that's all for now! Hope you enjoyed your tour today.