Sardinian "home" collab...

Some photos from the recent collab between us, Waen, Raw and the guys from Trulla of Sardinia!  A fig & honey milkshake IPA anyone?

5th Birthday!!

Happy birthday to us!

Well, we've managed to reach 5 years in production here in Pontyclun and to celebrate we had some lovely Red Velvet cake and a cup of Yorkshire tea!

We also brewed version 6 of "Statement of Intent" which was the very first beer brewed on the 18th June 2013 and tradition now dictates we brew this year's version as close to that date as we can, which in 2018 was the 21st!   

This year's version (each year we choose our favourite hops) is a bit of a departure as we felt it was getting a touch "samey" with the usual suspects of hops in every year, and so we've gone for old fave Columbus, newcomer Slovenian Wolf, a touch of luscious Citra (because we all love it) and finally floral, peachy Amarillo... sounds a dream team we reckon!

Look out for it in a few weeks, and to everyone who buys our beer, drinks our beer or supports us in any way, shape or form may we offer a huge sincere thanks and big Valleys cwtch; cheers and carry on carrying on... !

Blueberry Cheesecake pale....

What's going on at Hopcraft then?  It used to be all beer that tasted of beer (hops, mainly) but now they've gone all Hipster?

Well, we've been brewing pale and hoppy beers (plus some dark ones) for the last 4.5 years as Gazza like them and doesn't want to brew beer he doesn't like - fair enough, thinks the editor.  However, the signs were on the wall when "Campania", our Neapolitan milk stout, made it's appearance a year or so back, and it's now being surpassed in strangeness and interest by some of the new brews!

So, next up is an extremely pale ale (Carling coloured but, luckily, not with the same character!) dosed with 80kg of (very expensive) Blueberry puree and lots of (by volume even more expensive) Indian vanilla extract which gives a vivid purple colour and a fruity, vanillary taste which is both complex and interesting, although it's the colour which is the first draw here!

This is being kegged and casked next week so, if you'd like to try it, better get a move on and order some / persuade your pub to get hold of some as it won't hang around.....

It's that time of year again!

What time of year?  Gorse time, of course!

Gazza and Sue have currently got severe finger punctures from picking gorse flowers from South and Mid Wales for use in our Spring seasonal beer "Bumper to Bumper" which contains gorse flowers to add a complex and unusual coconutty character aided and abetted by the bizarre Sorachi Ace hop which originated in Japan and is surely one of the most unusual hops available with aromas of coconut and dill!

So, please appreciate our hard work and pricked fingers (why does gorse have to be SO bloody spiky?) by drinking Bumper to Bumper; cheers :) 

I love brewing, but....

I always loved brewing, still do, but don't think running a brewery is about brewing.  If you're reading this as an industry outsider you're probably wondering how that can be... after all, you make beer, it goes to pubs, then you make more, surely?

Well yes, that's about as broad brush as the process gets, but there's a bit more to it...

It's about - as many have said before - much more than the line above, and this needs broadcasting as a lot of people think running a brewery is easy!

• paperwork, 
• more paperwork, 
• fixing shit that breaks, 
• spending money you don't have, 
• chasing invoices, 
• chasing wholesalers / pubs / every man and his dog for money, 
• trying to sell beer in a marketplace increasingly slanted to cost and not quality, 
• trying to think of beer names and branding (if you're not a rich boy who just pays for all this kind of thing), 
• learning antiquated free graphics software to do said "artwork", 
• begging people to pay an invoice early so you can buy malt to brew, 
• lying in bed wondering how you're going to pay the beer duty / VAT / pumpclip people / electric / gas / water / anyone else who you owe money to, 
• fixing more stuff that's inexplicably broken just when you need it, 
• duty returns, 
• more futile attempts at selling beer, 
• trying to get yeast to attenuate properly, 
• waiting in a queue at the bank for the privilege of paying them to pay in money which you've bust a gut to earn, 
• changing your brewing schedule at the last minute as you got sent the wrong hops, 
• racking beer, 
• dry-hopping and sweeping up the resulting green foamy ooze, 
• collecting empties, 
• delivering beer whilst trying to find somewhere to park without getting a ticket, 
• making a cup of tea and forgetting you've left the HLT filling and flooding the place (again),
• trying to get your empties back from Inverness or Penzance,
• dealing with cretins like kegwatch, HMRC, the bank, Glen Balls.... 

and so it goes on. 

You get the idea? You want to brew, get a job at a brewery, if you want all this shit too then go for it but never say you weren't warned.

The tentacles of big beer... the very real threat to Progressive Beer Duty.

(Just to clarify - PBD (progressive beer duty) or SBDR (small brewer duty relief) provides brewers producing under 5000 hectolitres (500,000 litres) a year with a 50% duty reduction of the "headline rate" and then a sliding scale of reduction from 5000hl to 60000hl (6 million litres) which is a lot of beer.... )  With duty relief the duty paid on a 9 gallon cask of 4% beer is around £15, £30 without it.  The EU position is described here as it was originally implemented in Bavaria and is now part of official EU policy although it's discretionary and governments can interpret it as they wish to a certain extent.

As you may have noticed we don't generally blog - or talk - about CAMRA much as we're not particularly enamoured with them, but predictably some of the motions at the 2018 AGM have only served to strengthen our opinion. One in particular, no.8, is calling for the reduction in "progressive beer duty" which us small brewers receive from the government to help us compete with larger brewers and their economies of scale. The motion says "This Conference believes that CAMRA should campaign for a reduction in the level of Small Brewery Duty Relief coupled with an increase in the barrelage on which it is granted"

The proposer seems to be a typical CAMRA "twigosaurus" who likes old-fashioned regional brown beers (he lists in a recent London Drinker a list of regional brewers he likes), but if only it were nothing serious and we could just laugh at him/them...  But this isn't funny, it's deadly serious, because if passed this motion would mean CAMRA tacitly, or directly, supporting the call (from big brewers who want their market share back which us pesky micros have "stolen" from them) to reduce or scrap the progressive beer duty reduction for brewers producing under 5000hl a year, or around a million pounds' turnover.

CAMRA, claiming to support microbreweries, cannot be seen to support such a review which may well result in the reduction or abolition of the small brewer's relief and this result in the closure of hundreds of brewers, setting brewing and the beer scene in the UK back 20 years and putting thousands out of work; if CAMRA decisively defeat this it will at least show there isn't cross party support for such a review.

Of course, turnover is vanity and all that and I'm not suggesting that all brewers turning over a million quid are raking it in, but it still stands that this reduction was designed to help the smallest brewers compete with the bigger ones and, so the argument goes, once you've expanded to a certain size you don't need the duty reduction any more... you may want it, but you don't need it! Once a brewer makes over 5000hl a year they are turning over around a million pounds per annum which, in my opinion, means they don't need the benefits of progressive beer duty reductions any more although obviously a tapered cutoff - as we currently have - could be reviewed as long as the results don't impact in any loss for the smallest brewers who need the relief most.

Back to the CAMRA motion... which is dangerous because, if the government believe there is cross-industry support for reforming progressive beer duty, then they will go ahead and listen to those who shout loudest which are - surprise, surprise - the rich big brewers who presumably went to the same posh schools as those making the decisions. So, I'd guess they would reduce the rebate to small brewers under 5000hl from 50% to maybe 25% and increase the threshold to maybe 15000hl per year. 

This will mean those who need, and in many cases depend, on the reduction to keep their business afloat in very challenging times will have to either absorb the smaller relief or charge extra for a container of beer; exactly how much extra will depend on the amendments to the scheme, but if we assume a 50% cut of the current 50% reduction (meaning small brewers would receive a 25% reduction to the full duty rate rather than the 50% they currently receive) then that will mean adding £7.50 to EACH CASK of 4% beer, more to stronger ones, whilst those who don't need it due to economies of scale will pocket it or theoretically "invest" it to squeeze out those they have taken it from...  as you can see, in the main this "review" is being driven by greed, pure and simple, to have something to which they are not entitled but somehow feel entitled to.

The whole idea of PBD (see the decription at the top of the page) is to give SMALL brewers a leg-up to compete then, once they grow big enough, the theory goes that they no longer need the help and can grow organically. Nothing has changed, this is still the case, but now avarice is coming into play and bigger brewers want money which they shouldn't be entitled to and, to achieve this, they are hell-bent on infiltrating the bodies which will enable them to give the illusion of "cross-party" support among the beer industry... that's how big beer works and it stinks of hypocrisy, turncoatism (is that a word?) and stabbing the little guys in the back.

I'd guess that if PDB was halved then maybe 200 (maybe more) brewers would close within a few months, if it were scrapped completely then who knows? Carnage would be my guess as you simply can't add £15+ to a container of beer, it's not affordable, especially when the bigger brewers will be pressing their advantage to recapture the market share lost. This really proves some people in CAMRA have no idea about the beer industry and, if this passes, CAMRA will become a total pariah within the small brewer sector for supporting what will probably become the death of small brewers in the UK. 

There is a "pressure group" of brewers, mostly the names you'd expect to be there but - sadly - some who have benefited from PBD but now seem to have forgotten why it's in existence, called the Small Brewers Duty Reform Coalition (see graphic below for a list of the members) who are pushing for reform of PBD which, presumably, means sod the little guys and give us big/bigger guys a slice of the free cake on offer... this group is well connected and will do well with giving the Government advice and so it's essential that CAMRA motion 8 doesn't pass as that will play right into the hands of this group.

The whole story needs telling and my fear is that at the CAMRA AGM there will be a lot of the type of member who like regional beer and see "craft" beer as Watneys all over again, so without knowing both sides of the story, i.e. the full facts, will vote for it as they think it will mean less "fizz" and more cheap brown bitter! Which is what it will mean, but also carnage in the brewing industry and many, many businesses ruined... do you want that?  No, I didn't think so, so let's make sure motion 8 gets thrown back to the dark ages where it belongs.

A final thought... If motion 8 does go through you can say goodbye to many of the innovative smaller brewers and the bigger/richer ones will gladly take up the slack setting the beer market back decades.. to me, and many people who love beer and work in the industry, this is something that doesn't bear thinking about, and that's as both a drinker of modern beer and a brewer of it too, and will mean the closure of swathes of the UK microbrewing sector and less choice coupled with more expensive beer all round and also the increased dominance of large brewers, hence less choice and lower quality beer.

We all know what happened the last time big brewers were in charge of the UK beer scene back in the 1960s and it didn't go very well until, ironically, CAMRA was set up to campaign against things and saved cask ale as we know it... so they need to look back at their history and realise that this is a moment where they will be judged on how they react to this motion; get it wrong and there will be a lot of blood on their hands.

I'm not hyping this up, not using hyperbole, it really is this serious and I'm talking as a small brewer who gets this 50% rebate on duty which makes it viable for us to compete with the bigger brewers. Without it I'd not reckon we would last long in what would become a bloodbath market with the big and rich winning out so, please, everyone who cares about small brewers and the boom in UK brewing, make sure motion 8 is defeated and CAMRA support no change in PBD, not even reform, as that is a slippery slope which is greased by the big brewers with their huge reserves and will only end one way.

Parti-gyling... what's that all about then?

Parti-gyling is one of those "brewery speak" terms which a lot of people have heard of but not many know what it means... but bloody hell, it sounds great, like a big foam party in Ibiza or summat, innit?

Well, not quite! It was originally a brewing method used by brewers to get the maximum efficiency from an amount of grain; the mash was made, run off, then the same grain was mashed again which obviously gave much less extract than the first collection.  These worts were sometimes blended together after mashing either fully or partly, sometimes fermented separately then blended, or sometimes never blended and sold as different beers; for example, a brewery might mash a 9% old ale, run off the wort, then remash and collect wort for a second, weaker, beer giving two beers from one load of grain.

OK, fine, you may reply, but what's that got to do with modern brewing?  Nowadays you just brew what you like, surely?  Well, yes and no!  Most brewers do so, 99% of the time, but sometimes we may split a brew of beer and treat the different parts separately, for example a different dry-hop to create a different beer from one "mother" beer...  We employ the technique of Parti-gyling fairly frequently including in this, our latest beer, and one which sees the return of one of the Pixie Spring originals!

We followed an updated (but very similar to the original Pontyclun brew) recipe for Deliverance right up until the beer was ready to be transferred to conditioning tank and racked to cask.  At that point we ran off two tanks of the beer which would become "Change Alone Endures" (which was double dry-hopped, so called because the beer had already been dry-hopped in the fermenter), whereas the remainder of the fermenter was filled into casks and became "Deliverance"!

See, two beers from one brew... easy! 

First solo brew!

We 'd planned to do 2 days brewing but we'd reckoned without the "Beast from the East" followed by Storm Emma... it snowed, a lot for South Wales, and so Gazza was in the position of having to decide whether to abandon both brewdays with Gav unable to get in, or going for a solo brew!

A lot of brewers will wonder what the issue is here as, in most breweries of our size, brewers routinely brew themselves... but they've not seen our kit!  Being the Heath Robinson type affair it is, never designed for single brewing with lots of reasons why it's difficult such as the FVs are really hard to clean owing to their shape, so two people are preferable when brewing.... 

About to mash in!

So, Gazza bravely, in the spirit of the gladiators of ancient times, decided to plough on and meet the brew challenge face on ... ! Actually, it wasn't too bad and the various choke points envisaged were surmounted by either a) some clever manipulation of cables/pipes/other stuff, or b) extra time was taken to make sure everything was done and the brew was safely into FV3 albeit a touch cool so needed warming up in order to ferment properly, but hey.... that's a minor point!

This has meant that mashing in single-manned is now defacto for brewdays meaning we can theoretically get finished at a reasonable time!

Trying to work out how to do the cleaning single-manned....

Fuck it, let's have a cup of rosie next to some hops...

Digging the copper

I could thus reach the pump control for cleaning the fermenter!

Wort flowing through the aerator into FV3

A truly global beer...

Think of Chinook hops and you'll undoubtedly first consider the American fruity, aromatic variety with it's distinctively huge cones.  Nowadays, however, this quintessentially American hop, almost as 'Murican as lax gun control and non-existent healthcare, is being test-grown all around Europe and is finding new homes in the old world.

Chinook has been grown in the UK for a number of years although, from reports I've heard off other brewers and hop merchants, the results haven't been that great.  Now, however, there are two new contenders to the Chinook throne in the form of Poland and Slovenia and, again from other brewers, I'd heard that these two were worth a shot.... so we got some!

So, here we have a beer made with British and German malt and hopped with lovely Chinook hops from the USA (in the copper) and then dry-hopped with the Polish and Slovenian varieties.  At present the beer has just been brewed so we've not got any concrete tasting notes for how it'll eventually turn out, but we're very hopeful that the European Chinook will impart their herbaceous and fruity character making this a beer to search out; it's smelling pretty damn good in FV4 at the moment so I've 110% confidence in it being another blinder of a one-off brew.

Stay tuned to find out more! 

Dry-hopping in the FV.... a messy activity!

Well it can be!  We've recently moved from dry-hopping all our beers in CT to dry-hopping in FV primarily with some beers getting a second dose in CT as well... double dry-hopping they call it nowadays I hear!

The issue with FV dry-hopping is that it's done with the beer is at fermentation temperature when it is still fermenting, albeit activity is tailing off and is around 20c.  OK, you may think, what does that matter?  Well, quite a lot....

If you look at the graph below you'll see that CO2 is much less soluble in warm liquids than cold ones, meaning, basically, that the liquid can hold less CO2 in solution at a higher temperature.  As the beer is fermenting there is still a lot of CO2 being produced by the yeast and it's bursting to get out of the liquid one way or another.

This would all be fine, but we're about to add the dry hops; when hop pellets are added to the beer they break down into constituent little bits of hop which create millions of "nucleation points"; these sound great but are actually a massive pain in the arse for a brewer... picture those lager glasses in pubs which have a stream of bubbles coming up from the bottom; if you examine these you'll see there is a printed area or blob of glass which acts as a nucleation point to bring CO2 out of solution and therefore forms the stream of bubbles... now transpose that thought into millions of little nucleation points (the bits of hop) and you can imagine how much CO2 is suddenly brought out of solution, and it's got to go somewhere!

So, with all this CO2 suddenly being released out of solution and the yeast head still sticky and prominent, the beer froths up.  Sometimes it overflows the FV and goes everywhere, at other times it's a bit more subdued!  We tried a new technique today of adding a portion of the hops first (20%) to get things started and then planned to add the rest 10 minutes later but, after nothing happened, we threw the rest of the bag in thinking that was that.... bad mistake!  Suddenly the yeast head on the FV began to churn and bubble alarmingly, then started to rise.... and rise.... and rise.... until it reached the very top of the vessel, but luckily for us any repetition of previous yeast sweeping from the floor below was prevented as the photo below is as far as it got before receding back!

Lesson learned, add a bit first then wait half an hour!

CAMRA, a chance for change?

Gazza, supporting Tiny Rebel? What's that all about then?

OK, we haven't always got on and as companies we don't see eye to eye for various reasons... but here Brad speaks a massive amount of sense (although he's maybe a bit of a moderate for the likes of me 😉) and what he's saying is, in my opinion, pretty much exactly what the brown beer society - aka CAMRA - need to do in order to survive in the current fast-moving and, to them, increasingly alien - and fizzy - beer world.

I'd vote for Brad if I was in CAMRA and I am actually vaguely considering rejoining just to vote for him, a la Corbyn... So, please read his manifesto, ALL of it, and then tell me it doesn't make a huge amount of sense to start from zero over again rather than doff the cap to the hardliners who don't want change and consider anything more modern than 4.2% brown beer with a few fuggles in heresy.

As a vaguely progressive brewer I love cask ale and feel that most of the beers we brew, which are mainly hoppy pale ales in the 4.5-5.5% range - are best served from a (well looked after) cask, but freely acknowledge that keg/can/bottle all have their place and there are plenty of beer styles which just don't work in cask but shouldn't be shunned because they are packaged in keg/can/bottle and, in the case of most small brewers, unfined/unpasteurised and tick all the "real" boxes except for containing the dreaded "bad" CO2 (force carbed rather than container conditioned!)

Fundamentally, IMO and that of many others who know what's going on in the industry, beer quality is the key to cask beer's survival as if it's no good people simply won't drink it, and sad to say there are just too many ropey beers (and brewers!) around.  This can be blamed, in the main, on the lemming-like rush to the bottom quality-wise in the current cutthroat price war being waged in the brewing industry due to overcapacity and it'll all end in tears, mark my words...  the big boys are sitting on the sidelines watching us rip each other to bits and, when the gory scrap has finished, they'll step in and take what they want; welcome to the dystopian future of brewing and beer.. divide and conquer as I'm sure AmBev, Heineken and their ilk are thinking looking at us fighting under the table for their crumbs.

Quality beer - in general - costs money to make and CAMRA should be explaining that if you want more hops in your beer then someone's going to have to pay for said hops and it shouldn't be the brewer!  Conversely, the Wetherspoon vouchers are a total anachronism for an organisation proclaiming itself to be independent and, IMO, gives the chain an unfair advantage at the expense of other pubs, plus with the laughably low prices Wetherspoon pays us brewers for beer, how are these vouchers encouraging the consumption of quality beer when all more trade for the chain encourages is more brewers selling beer at or below cost because the 'spoons is the only option left in town with other pubs closed down?

With regards to CAMRA, listening to the stuck-in-the-80s mantra many of them (and usually head office) regurgitate, it's evident that something needs to be done.  CAMRA doesn't represent the current beer drinker, the modern brewer, the modern publican or anything apart from old men moaning about how much beer costs, how they saved real ale and how "Red Barrel" (whatever that was) has returned.  It's time for an alliance between brewers and CAMRA but, for this to happen, there has to be a lot of conciliation on the CAMRA side as many modern (and semi-modern!) brewers no longer care what CAMRA say and see them as, at best, an irrelevance and at worse a hindrance.

It's time for a clean sweep of the decks and IMO there's not been a chance like this for a long time... of course, even if Brad gets elected it's doubtful he will be allowed to achieve much, but it's worth a try, for the sake of cask ale.

So, have a read of his manifesto here and decide for yourself.

Pennine mild... flat cap and whippet optional....

People often refer to us as a "craft cask" brewery.  Which is nice.  And confusing.  Myself, I've no idea how to categorise us and see no reason to pigeonhole us as anything; we are a small brewery (small being under the 5000hl annual progressive beer duty limit) making modern style beers in, we hope, a "drinkable" style which means they are meant for session drinking, not sipping... which is what beer is all about.

Anyhow, after that self-congratulatory preamble, here's the meat... we have re-brewed one of the beers which is often talked about but rarely requested (surely a paradox?), one which Gazza is intensely proud of, being his little pet project when it first came out!  it's now on brew three and, as is traditional at Hopcraft Towers, slight amendments have been made to the recipe to make it better and "awesomise" it; the base malt is now proper Mild malt, the ratios of melanoidin malts has been increased, and the hopping has been amended slightly... but it's still our interpretation of that incredibly rare but incredibly good style of Pennine Mild.

So, I'm guessing most people know what a mild is... or think they do.  I really can't be bothered to go into the stories, arguments and explanations of what mild is (that's what Google is for) but, suffice it to say, nowadays - if you can find any - it's a 3.5%-ish dark beer with (usually) a roasty taste.  All well and good, but there also exists a much rarer style of mild which is mainly found in the Pennines in the North of England - hence the name - but also appears in the Midlands and, although it's now extinct, once exisited in pockets in the Thames Valley and Solent.... golden mild or, to give it it's best known epithet, Pennine mild.

The only real example left in continuous production is Tim Taylor Golden Best, although Ma Pardoe's in the West Midlands is similar enough to be considered a close relative.  The beer style is sub-4%, with crunchy malts, biscuity flavours and a sweetish, grainy finish.... not very exciting to read, but when done right it's a corker of a style and very, very drinkable, not to mention very rare nowadays.  Some brewers have produced on-off (or occasional) examples of the beer but it's still clinging on to life by it's fingertips.

So, as Gazza likes Pennine Mild, he decided to brew one.  It look a while to get the recipe right (and it's still not right now) but the first brew drew some good reviews, and more importantly it tasted like a Pennine Mild!  We're now on brew 3 and have done a drastic revamp of the malt bill including using proper mild ale malt to give more body and mouthfeel to the brew.  The hops, unusually for us, take a back seat with Polish Magnum and Junga providing a spicy, fruity and sweetshop character to proceedings... but very subtly.

So, brew 3 of a pale mild.  I didn't expect I'd be saying that 5 years ago I can tell you.   

Enjoy!

FV2 foam party

We're pretty lucky with our fermenters..  well, apart from them being right awkward to clean, they're in amazingly good nick for 40+ year old dairy tanks and we rarely have any issues with them or anything connected to them.

We brewed Waen Pamplemousse into FV2 the other week, 2400 litres of it, and everything was going to plan until Gav dry-hopped it with 5kg each of Citra and Cascade... it suddenly went mad and frothed up everywhere!  And, because our FVs are upstairs on the mezz, said froth went cascading down onto the floor below... and all over the steel table which is used for everything from saccharometers to glasses to RJT connectors to connectors to tubes to.. well, just about everything else.  And what a mess it caused!

This happens occasionally in the CTs when we dry hop, and there seems no rhyme nor reason for it happening in there... obviously it's too much dissolved Co2 in the beer and so the pellets, once they break down into ickle hop bits, form nucleation points which attracts the Co2 resulting in lots of foam!  But we've only ever had it happen once in an FV and that was the infamous incident with brew 1 of Snowball and the sugar addition.... 

My theory is that, as Sue's beers are fermented warmer than ours, this higher temperature means the beer can hold less Co2 in saturation so maybe this meant that more came out due to the nucleation points than is normal?  hey, I'm not a scientist so don't know, I'm just bringing my limited experience of "what happens" to the table...

Anyhow, this resultant foam party meant the dry hop charge ended up partly all over the floor and stuck all inside the top of the fermenter necessitating what's trendily called a "deep clean" but in reality meant me getting in to scrub the underside of the FV and getting caustic all over my head and arse.... yeah, cheers then, if more were needed yet another confirmation that brewing isn't the glamorous profession people make out!

Me, in a (now) very shiny FV2

What I base my rather flimsy theory on!

New grain hopper, chute and hydrator installed

After 4 and a half years of service (it was planned as a stop-gap to last a year tops) our old ramshackle malt hopper and mashing in regime has been replaced!

The old one was knocked up quickly to get us brewing but, due to never having enough time or money, we've never got around to replacing it... until now.  We'd become aware that the bottom of the chute, made from marine ply, was becoming increasingly rotten and looked as if it may give way mid-mash depositing up to 300kg of expensive grain all over the floor (and probably Gazza too) so once we'd acquired the old Waen Brewery hopper and hydrator - the device which mixes the grain with hot water - it was time to swap over!

Only, it wasn't.... the new hopper sat in a corner for 6 months until the condition of the old one dictated that we really, really needed to replace it PDQ.... so, the start of 2018 was declared "new mashing in week" and we prepared for the headaches such a project inevitably brings on.  Fortuitously, a Screwfix has recently opened just behind us, so we were confident we could buy any bits needed, making things a lot easier.

In the end, luckily, we got the whole thing done in 3 days and that's including rebuilding the hydrator from scratch!  there are still a few bits and bobs to tidy up, but the upshot of this work is that we now have a completely piped-in pump under the hot liquor tank which can recirculate the tank to mix it and pump water below to the mashing in process at the turn of a lever, not as before where multiple disconnecting and reconnecting of flexible hoses was the order of play.  

The big improvement, however, is in the time saved mashing in - we estimate that the complete process with the old setup would take anything up to 45 minutes, whereas with the lovely new kit it takes 15 minutes maximum!  This saving of 30 minutes on the brewday will be extremely welcome. plus the new hydrator mixes the grain really well making one-man mashing a distinct option now!  The hopper also does something the old one never managed to do which is empty itself without any brushing or goading of grains which is yet another enormous improvement, and finally the hydrator is much lower in the pipe meaning the marine ply of the hopper won't get wet and rot like the old one...

So, win-win all round and a great start to the year for us!

the hopper and chute being bolted together

The completed (nearly) setup with the grain hopper and hot liquor tank

Gav sawing pipe for the new hydrator

looking inside the grain chute

New valve on the sparge arm (which we don't actually need!)

The new grain chute and hydrator in situ with the liquor hose attached to the hydrator

almost done!  Nice pipework....