Meet Your New Brewery!

We’ve discussed it in passing during tours and sit-downs, but I think it’s time to fully unveil the Black Star Co-op brewing equipment. Breweries are complicated systems with various tanks intended to heat, cool, and transfer large batches of liquids from one tank to the next. Often your type of brewing equipment can make a huge difference in the quality of the beer. Good Equipment + Good Brewer = Good Beer. What is good equipment? When the system is well engineered for efficiency, control, and sanitary considerations, you get a good brewery. When the brewer is strong, agile, mentally adept, and witty, you get a good brewer…unfortunately, you’re stuck with me:) But let’s focus on the brewing equipment.

We have purchased a new brewing system from Premier Stainless Systems. Here’s some of the details:
10 BBL Direct Fired Brewhouse (1 BBL = 1 barrel = 31 gallons = 2 sanke kegs full)
(4) 10 BBL Uni-tanks (for fermentation)
(5) 10 BBL Serving Tanks
Cellar Control Panel
5 hp Glycol Chiller Package
Malt Mill / Auger
750lb capacity Grist Hopper
2 hp Sanitary Portable Pump w SS cart & VFD control
Georg Fisher COOL-FIT ABS Plus glycol piping throughout
All the fixin’s

The system is currently being manufactured and should be delivered around the same time that the pub will open. This means we most likely won’t have house beers on tap right when we open (but we’ll still have commercial beer…so don’t freak out!), but you will get the added benefit of being able to see the brewery being assembled and watching the brewer frantically run around while the first couple batches are being produced. That’s almost as fun as drinking one of our house beers, eh?! After the brewery equipment is installed, inspected and TABC/TTB give us the thumbs-up, we’ll be brewing the heck out of our rational beers so we can start enjoying our community owned beer!