Somewhere Between Fairytales and Hell: Turning Pro Part 13
I’d like to say that it was easy, that there were no mistakes made, no equipment issues, and that all the woodland creatures gathered around the mash tun and sang songs while sewing me a gown for the ball. In reality it was somewhere between that and a twenty-two hour descent into hell.
Yes, yes. I hear you chuckling, “Didn’t he say he wasn’t so worried in his last entry?” OK, I deserve that. I put the bad juju on us by writing that, but I wasn’t totally unprepared for trouble. I did say that every brewery has some start-up issues. In our case the 22-hour day was mainly due to a lack of functioning drains and pumps in the brewery. The drains are there, they just don’t like to let things like water go through them. The pumps are there, but only one outlet was wired right to run them.
Our day started with a long drive to the brewery for each of the four of us. Chris Kennedy (our head brewer) and Charlie Essers (our minister of heresy) immediately headed off to heat water for dough-in, while Matt Staley (our Pro Am guest brewer) and I went to the mill room to figure out the mill setting and to start filling the grist case. Everything was going relatively according to plan, but we did run into an issue with the strike water. The way the brewery is set up, we use a heat exchanger and steam to raise the temperature of the water to strike temperature on demand. It turns out the adjustments are quite touchy and getting the right temperature and getting enough filtered water involved a couple of hours.
Everything seemed to go well from there, until we got the bad news that the drains wouldn’t take a Dixie cup of water. When it came time to clean up, we had to separate out all of the solids and then take the liquid by bucket to the one drain that still would run. We didn’t dare put so much as a single grain down that drain, in fear that our only outlet would clog. It took the four of us until the wee hours of the morning to get it done. Everyone worked hard, but Matt and Charlie went above and beyond, with Matt climbing
into the mash tun and kettle to shovel grain and hops out and to scrub them clean.
It was a hot, wet, brutal day of hard work, but we got our first sweet wort into fermenter #1 with some measure of pride. I can’t imagine that day being successful without Matt, Charlie, and Chris. Thinking about it now, I get a little emotional about it. What they did, you can’t pay people to work that hard. People that are there on a whim would have disappeared long before that point. I feel so incredibly lucky to have friends that are so passionate about the success of Heretic that they will work 20 hours with no breaks, just to see us get that first beer into the fermenter. I know one thing: I will never forget that first brew day or those who made it possible. That is the fairytale, people going far beyond what is reasonable for a craft they care about deeply.
