St Austell Brewery, Cornwall.

I'm a fan of St Austell, and as even my humolphobic brother has been round the brewery, a tour was a must on my Cornwall trip.

The tour guide had a reasonable stab at explaining what was going on but clearly had a few gaps in her brewing knowledge. Never mind though, it was a nice old brewery.



Here's the some sacks of malt.



And here's the malt mill. These things seem to last forever as every old brewery I've been round has an antique mill and St Austell was no exception. 



That's the top of the mash tun. It was in use at the time. They brew twice a day here, 150 barrels at at time.



This was an old mash tun now used for holding hops for the wort to be run through.



Here's the shiny new copper, there was a whirlpool outside as well where the wort is separated from the hop debris and trub.




There were a quite a few shapes of fermenters crammed in the brewery but I thought this one gave the best picture.



Firkins waiting to be filled.



And this one's just been filled.

With CAMRA membership the tour was a fiver (seven quid without), and you got a taste of all their beer and two free halves at the end. We went for the beers we hadn't had before so tried their mild, Black Prince, and bitter, Tinners. They were OK but nothing special. We were starting to flag by this point of the holiday so we left it at that.

Despite our best efforts to be abstemious when we got to the bus station we saw we'd have a 50 minute wait so we were forced to go back into town and pop into the Seven Stars.




This is the original St Austell pub, but it looks a bit run down now. And it didn't have Tribute on so it had to be a pint of Tinners while we whiled away our wait.