Our beers are “all grain” derived. We crack our Idaho grown malted barley with an Apollo two roll mill. After the grain is cracked we haul it 50 pounds at a time into the Mash Tun. Where we stir and soak the malted barley to extract fermentable and non fermentable sugars for the yeast to use later. This sugar water is known as “wort”.
The wort is then pumped into our boiling kettle. Wort is boiled for a multitude of reasons. The boil kills nearly all microorganisms. A vigorous boil ejects sulfur and other compounds that can lead to “off flavors” in the finished beer. Most notably this is the phase when hops are added to extract the bitterness that helps balance beer. Some of the 75 + varieties of hops have better bittering potential and some have better aroma potential. Essentially the sooner the hops are added to the boil more bittering is achieved the later the more aroma. We use Pacific North West grown whole hops. The hops are added throughout the boil in large hop bags.
Once the wort is boiled we pump the liquid into a cleaned and sanitized fermentation tank. Along the way we cool the wort with a two phase heat exchanger and inject oxygen into the wort. We then “pitch” or pour the live liquid yeast that we harvested from the prior batch into the wort. For the next 3 to 7 days the wort quickly transforms into beer! We currently do not filter our beers. The majority of our select brewers yeast is left behind in the fermentation tanks when we “crash cool” them. After we transfer the beer to our conditioning tanks a small amount of yeast will drop to the bottom of the tank as the beer matures. Our beers pour slightly hazy due to a minute amount of yeast remaining (think vitamin B) and due to a phenomenon known as chill haze.
We have 8, 230 gallon stainless steel conditioning and serving tanks that live in our super efficient custom cooler. Our love of hop aroma has led us down the path of “dry hopping” all of our beers except the Udaho Gold. We stuff hop bags with pounds of hops and let them soak in the conditioning tanks. The cold temperatures extract aroma instead of bitterness. This process takes about 7 to 12 days before its ready to pump into a serving tank. Once the beer is in a serving tank we infuse carbon dioxide into the beer to give it that bubbly effervescence that we all enjoy.
When the bartender opens one of our taps the beer travels from the tank thru our high quality beer lines. The beer lines are kept at cooler temps with the use of a glycol chiller and a super insulated draft trunk line. This insures the freshest cold beer available!
Cheers!!
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