A visit to Ried brewery

The second day of our studying began at Ried brewery in Ried im Innkreis. The brewery was founded in 1906 and is owned by local pubs! Annual output is 45,000hl. The have a 300hl pilot brewery where they make things like IPA and honey beer. They also use it when doing beer sommelier courses. 

The pilot brewery

The main brewhouse has a 150hl capacity. 

Three vessel CIP set

They brew to the German beer purity law using mostly Bavarian malt and Austrian hops, with some hops coming from Hallertau. 

The brewhouse

For those of your concerned about danger of overheating due to the large window, as a brewer on the tour was, I checked with my compass and it's north facing. 

They have a brewhouse from Kaspar Shulz dating from 1986, which has a stripping vessel after the whirlpool with -7 mbar air pressure to remove DMS. They get 7% evaporation after 55 minutes in the kettle. Whirlpooling and stripping is 25 minutes, though maybe an hour by the time it's emptied. The wheat beers don't go through the stripper. 

The lauter tun

There was a Brewer's Star on the wall, which refers to alchemical or superstitious nonsense not religious nonsense. 

Another group of three vessels, another CIP set? Not this time, these are hop dosing vessels. 

The old brewhouse was built in 1934.

Checking my notes and pictures we seem to have missed out fermentation and maturation entirely at this brewery, but did spend a lot of time in their flash bottling hall. 

It will do 18,000 bottles an hour.

It of course includes a robot from Profipack.

They have reusable bottles so there's a bottle washer:

A crate washer:

Label debris from the bottle washer:

Bottles:

Crates:

We stopped for refreshments after the tour in the bräustüberl (brewery tap). I can't say I was disappointed the grey sausages ran out before I got to them, the brown sausages I had were fine. They looked like frankfurters to me, but having once caused outrage in Italy by incorrectly calling something salami I'm not taking any chances. 

There was a good range of beers. I was trying to pace myself but still managed to sample a few. The black beer (schwarzmann) was the winner for me.  

A visit to Ottakringer brewery

There was bad timing with the latest CIBD study tour. It came the week after a distilled spirits conference in Edinburgh so my liver was a bit tender before we even started. But it takes more than that to stop me, so I girded my loins and set off to Austria. 

First stop on the study tour was Ottakringer brewery in Vienna. It was founded in 1837. Annoyingly the annual volume is missing from my notes but I think it was 400,000hl. 

Cylindro-conical fermenters

This study tour had sponsorship from Profipack, which saved on the pennies but mean having one of their robots seemed to be a feature all breweries we visited had in common. The one at Ottakringer shifted kegs. 

Packaging at Ottakringer

A gas boiler provides the steam for the brewhouse, which had the look of an old family brewery about it. Which is exactly what it is. It's not fully automated having one brewer working per shift. 

The deionise their water and lower the mash pH using sauergut (wort acidified by lactic acid bacteria). Brews take 7-8 hours and use 7-8 tonnes of malt grist, which gets split between two lauter tuns. Wheat is used in the unfiltered beers, to get a bit of chill haze in them so they look the part. Most brews are around 14°P, slightly above sales gravity. 

A buffer tank after the lauters.

The mash profile is like an infusion mash at 65°C, rising to 75°C for when it goes to the lautering. The lauters have a capacity of 300hl each, the kettle 600hl. The kettle has a Stromboli boiler. 

The Mash Conversion Vessel is inside one of the old copper vessels on the higher level. I think it's stainless inside an old vessel though. 

There's a mash kettle at the back, but they won't be needing that with infusion mashes. 

There are three shifts of one person in the fermentation block, which dates from 1980. Only lager yeast is used, which they propogate, only using it for 3-5 generations.

There are 14 large tanks and 10 smaller. Unitanks aren't used, beer goes from fermentation to lagering tanks where it spents three weeks to two months. Fermentation is mainly at 12°C. There is a warm rest in lagering, before going to -1°C. I would guess that's before getting to the cross flow filter. I heard the diacetyl specification is <0.1 but if that's ppm it would make it the high level of 100ppb so maybe it's <0.01 or 10ppb. I certainly didn't taste any diacetyl when we got to the all important sampling part. 

A visit to Lost and Grounded brewery

I dithered a bit over this CIBD event. Bristol's a bit of a trek and the schedule was Lost and Grounded 1-5pm, then Unwin's brewery 5-10pm, which looked like an excessive amount of time to spend in breweries if you're driving. I looked into getting trains, which would have allowed me to make better use of my drinking time, but they're slow and expensive. I wanted to catch up with people though, and it's always good to visit breweries, so I decided I'd just have to drive. 

Founded in 2016 Lost and Grounded are approaching their tenth anniversary. Output is currently 20,000hl per year, with brewing taking place five days a week.

Taking the German brewing tradition as their main inspiration, they still have the original 25hl Steinecker brewhouse from Krones. The base malt is pilsner malt from Dingeman's in Belgium. We were told Belgian and German maltsters have a different philosophy to British. Which I think means they under modify malt instead of doing their job properly. 

Steinecker brewhouse

It certainly looks that way with the stepped mash temperatures of 52, 62, 67, 72 and 78°C (these steps are for: protein breakdown, beta amylase, alpha amylase, ensuring all starch degraded, denaturing enzymes and speeding up wort separation). The can do decoction mashing as well, but this has to be controlled manually so they only do it for specials. The malt is delivered to an external 30t silo and crushed by a two roller mill.

With the addition of a holding tank after the lauter tun three years ago they've expanded from a three vessel system (mash conversion vessel, lauter tun, whirlpool/kettle with an external wort boiler) to four. The extra vessel means the start the next brew after less than three hours, compared to waiting four hours and 15 minutes before they had it. The first brew starting automatically at 2am (the brewer gets in at 6am!) they can do six brews a day. 

Heat recovery from kettle

The boil is intense for the first 20 minutes, eased off for 20 minutes, and then intense again for 20 minutes, which reduces the thermal load on the wort so less aldehydes are produced. I'm not really up on wort thermal load so I'll have to look into this. The have vapour heat recovery from the kettle stack via a plate heat exchanger, which provides 500L of hot water for the hot liquor tank. The use three hop additions. For the lagers Magnum as a bittering hop at the start of the boil, Perle in the middle and late 5kg of Hallertauer Mittelfrüh for the Keller Pils and 2.5kg Tettnang for the Helles. The kellelr pils has a a bitterness of 30 IBU. Classic American hops like Citra are used for the US style beers. It did make me feel old hearing Citra described as a classic hop! For the IPAs there is a hop addition at whirlpooling. 

Lactobacillus tank

In keeping with their Germanic ways they adjust mash pH for the lagers with 50L of a culture of Lactobacillus grown in wort. This adds more character than just using commercial acid, which is what brewers not bound by the German beer purity law normally do. And indeed it's what Lost and Grounded do for their ales, as the IBC of Murphy's AMS (a mixture of hydrochloric and sulphuric acid) opposite the culture tank testified.

The Lactobacillus is grown in a tank held at 48°C and 5hl of wort goes from  pH 5.5 to 3 in 36 hours. It's a very hop sensitive strain, and is used on the hot side of the brewery, so they've not had any problems with it infecting beer. Surprisingly though they have had problems with wild yeast infecting the Lactobacillus culture. I'd never heard of yeast growing at that high a temperature before. They have been able to solve yeast infections by heating the tank to 54°C and recirculating for 20 minutes.

Two head keg filler

About 85% of beer goes into keg. The keg filler is only two head to is run pretty constantly during working hours, with beers going into 30 and 50L kegs. 

Snazzy keg lifter

They have a snazzy keg lifter that can also invert kegs. 

For small pack they have a 10 head linear can filler, though only five of the heads were being used in the packaging run when we were there. 

Canning line

The fermenting vessels go up to 150hl. Lagers are pitched at 8°C, midway through fermentation temperature is raised to 10°C and they have a warm rest at 13°C to help get rid of diacetyl. Total fermentation time is 10 days. 

Lots of tanks

The beers are then cooled to 4°C for five days before the temperature is dropped to 0°C. The helles is largered for three weeks and the keller pils for four. We tasted the keller pils at two weeks and four weeks maturation and the older beer had lost the harsh, sulphur note of the younger version. Yeast is dumped every other day during lagering. For dry hopped ales 50% of the dry hopping comes from Spectrum hop extract, which doesn't cause hop creep (when enzymes in hops cause further fermentation by breaking down dextrins to sugars). Their beers are not filtered.

The house lager yeast strain is W34/70. They propagate in house, but skip the lab stage so start with a 500ml culture from White Labs in Copenhagen going into 5hl of wort. The lag phase is 12-16 hours then cell numbers double every three hours, starting at 2-3 million cells per ml and reaching 100 million cells per ml after 36 hours. For lagers the 5hl is pitched into 25hl before stepping up to 100hl, for ales 5hl goes into 50hl. Propagation brewer are blended into 125hl of normal brews. 

Yeast propagation vessel

The have CO2 recovery equipment from Dalum they got second hand from Brixton brewery after Heineken closed it. As it was only a few years ago the first small brewery in Britain got CO2 recovery I was surprised there are four breweries just in Bristol with Dalum equipment. Lost and Grounded still have to buy in some of their CO2 but deliveries are now every six to eight weeks instead of every two. The hope to get more CO2 recovery in the future, but having CO2 delivered also provides a useful backup.

Dalum CO2 recovery

They aim to make lagers with character, not too refined but not rustic either. As someone who seldom suckles at the devil's drainpipe out of choice I have to say their lagers are decent. Drinkers of the heathen persuasion could do far worse.

After Lost and Grounded I went on to Unwin's, which looked like it was  part of Bristol's take on the Bermondsey beer mile. The whole driving thing didn't really go with spending more time in a bar though so I didn't stay long. 

Unwin's brewery

No, it's not a Yorkshire square

It's a tradition, or an old charter, or something that wheneven someone who knows a bit about beer sees an open square fermenter they ask "is that a Yorkshire square?". The answer is nearly always, no. 

Open fermenters are the exception not the rule nowadays so it's usually only in old breweries that you see them. The fact that a fermenter is open and not round does not make it a Yorkshire square though. Actual Yorkshire squares are considerably stranger. If you can see a fish tail it might be a Yorkshire square, but only if the vessel is divided by a deck too. 

Diagram of a Yorkshire square fermenter

Cross sectional diagram of a Yorkshire square

They were originally made of stone, and the ones I saw at Sam Smith's were made of slate. They have been made of stainless steel though, which I think they had at Tetley's, and there are stainless round ones (Yorkshire rounds!) at Black Sheep. 

They have a lower level separated from the upper level by a deck. The deck has pipes known as organ pipes running down to the lower level, and a large opening with a flange around it. They were mainly, but not exclusively, used in the north of England. I guess the clue's in the name with that one!

An empty Yorkshire square showing the upper deck

They were developed to work with highly flocculent ale yeasts, i.e. yeasts that rapidly clump together and rise to the top of the fermenter. 

Yorkshire squares being roused at Sam Smith's

The lower compartment of Yorkshire squares is filled with wort and yeast, and so is an inch deep layer on the upper deck. During fermentation yeast rises through the large opening and beer drains back into the lower compartment through the organ pipes. 

Yorkshire square in use

Rousing is used to keep the highly flocculent yeast in contact with the beer - the beer is recirculated by pumping it through the fish tail on to the upper deck. At the end of fermentation the yeast can be skimmed from the deck. 

As well as being a way of fermenting with, and collecting, highly flocculent yeast Yorkshire squares are also said to make beers with a fuller palate than beers fermented more conventionally. 

I'll end on a video one being roused:

Guinness CAN organise a piss up in a brewery

Shortly before I went round Guinness' Open Gate brewery in London The Guardian did a hatchet job on it. For some reason restaurant critics put the boot in more than any other type of reviewer. Though as the only restaurant reviews I ever read are when a scathing one goes viral on social media I guess the reason why is pretty clear. 

I was going to the brewery as part of the CIBD Southern section's AGM, but first we had to do the business part to do at Diageo's HQ. 

It's as posh as a posh thing, but at the bar Guinness is only £2.80 a pint. Don't get ideas though, you have to get past security to get in. And anyway, at CIBD events I normally pay nought pounds and nought pence per pint so it seemed a bit steep to me. 

Before business, Steve Wilkinson, who's worked with and for Guinness, went through a fascinating history of Guinness and his own part in it.

There was a bit of juicy gossip that the Guinness family had wanted to sell the company before Ernest Saunders became the chief executive. But they hadn't controlled enough shares to make it happen. I had read previously that after the takeover of The Distillers Company their shares were diluted to the point they no longer had a seat on the board. They're still immensely wealthy though, the current head of the family lives on an estate over 35 square miles in size. That's 2.6% of Suffolk. I don't think my house is even 2.6% of the bleedin' road!

After business and little light networking (two pints worth for me) we hoofed it over to the Open Gate Brewery. There's quite a lot to it. The parts we saw were the porter's loft, and of course the brewery. 

The brewery is enter AND exit via the gift shop. The brewery is a marketing exercise more than anything else. But hey, marketing budgets are massive!

The 15hl/9bbl brewery from BrauKon had all the bells and whistles. It's four vessel brewing system, but we didn't get near it, so no pictures of the inside of the lauter. They mostly use pellets but have a hop back too if they want to use whole hops. They can also move mash backward and forwards so can do decoction if they want to spend eight hours mashing instead of one. They're currently brewing twice a day, but could double that. 

Brewing vessels at the back there, yeast tanks behind the brewer

There's a four vessel CIP (Clean In Place) set, and an effluent plant for controlling temperature and balancing pH. 

CIP vessels behind the brewers

They have 4 x 15hl, 6 x 30hl and 4x60hl fermenting vessels. Though there is a core range of beers the focus is on innovation and the brewers have a lot of freedom in deciding what is brewed. 

There's a flash pasteuriser (11-15 pasteurisation units), a lenticular filter, a centrifuge and buffer tanks. So unsurprisingly there's no beer served as god intended, it's currently all kegged and will be canned once the canning line is commissioned. 

The centrifuge

There's reverse osmosis treatment for the brewing liquor, with mains water blended back in and salts added as required.

They're currently using the Guinness ale and lager yeasts, but they can propagate yeast from slants if they want to. 

Despite the brewery being large for its modest brewlength it was more a stand and point than a tour, and we didn't stay there long. 

Then it was up the escalator and back to the gift shop. The building used to be an H&M and they've kept the escalators. First time I've seen them in a brewery!

After the brewery tour it was time to see if Guinness could organise a piss up in a brewery. And the answer was of course, yes. 

I don't know what deal the CIBD had done with Diageo or if we were subsidised, but we paid a tenner. This gave us pie and mash, which was nice, and a pint of Guinness (brewed in Dublin). I was keen to have somethng brewed on site though, so I had a hazy IPA next, which was nice enough. I think the ABV was a bit hefty, as on top of the three pints of Guinness I'd had I was defintely feeling pissed by the time I'd fininished it. So there you have it.

The Guardian journo's main complaint seemed to be that you had to take a lift to the toilets. Which did make me wonder what she'd think if she ever went to a Wetherspoons. The building we were in had the fourth floor button in the lift labelled toilets. But the first floor bar we were in had a toilet, so I had no trouble getting rid of the beer I'd rented without using the lift. 

I don't know how my experience and tour at the Open Gate Brewery compared to the ones for you pay for, but I enjoyed myself. Which I guess blows my chance of becoming a restaurant critic.