What's in the pipe?

Tea.S.B. - an English bitter brewed with Earl Grey tea and lemon zest. Brewed 12/20/11

Local IPA - 100% locally sourced barley malt. Dry hopped with homegrown cascade hops harvested this fall. Brewed 12/18/11

Nanobrewing for Dummies

After some months of working on our brewing system, Glass Bottom Brewing has finally successfully brewed a nano-sized batch of beer. What is "nano" you ask? Well, nano is a broad category of sizes for brewing equipment somewhere between homebrewing and microbrewing. Nano is the size smaller than micro in metric system. Micro, nano - get it?

Anyway, we brewed a 20 gallon batch of a very basic brown ale just to test out our new equipment, and we're very pleased with everything. Here are a few pictures from the brewday:

 

Set up and ready to brew. We're using 55 gallon stainless steel drums as a mash tun and boil kettle. 15 gallon keg/kettles heat our water initial until we finish off a third 55 gallon tank.

 

 This is our mash screen, which worked phenomenally for us. It's made from a piece of stainless steel that we cut from the top of the drum. A stainless steel mesh is laid over holes that we drilled into it. Sugary liquid passes through the holes, but grain remains behind in the mash tun.

 

 Same vessel filled with 43 lbs of grain and 16 gallons of water. Beer in the making.

 Here we're rinsing the grains with hot sparge water while extracting sugary wort from the bottom of the vessel and pumping it into the boil kettle.

 Close up of our copper manifold sparge arm in action.

 

Close up of the electrical for the 5500 watt heating element that boils our wort. 

 

Chilling and racking into our conical fermenter. 

Glass Bottom Values

"What is Glass Bottom Brewing?" You may ask. Well, definitions can be complicated, and the truth is we're still finding out what shape our organization will take. While we don't know exactly "what" we are, here is a brief list of our core values that we hope distinguishes us from the abundance of craft brewers out there:

- Beer as Art - At Glass Bottom Brewery we think of beer as a form of expression. An empty glass is our canvas, and our ingredients are our medium. Malt, hops, water, yeast - each ingredient that we add is painstakingly chosen in order to contribute to the story we're trying to tell with a given beer. We focus on the details because in the end they amount to more than the sum of their parts. You can’t create a genuine work of art on an assembly line; it comes from the soul of an artist. We work hard to create interesting, well rounded beers that allow the customer a glimpse of the brewer’s vision. 

- Innovation - As brewers we strive to advance the craft of beer by using nontraditional ingredients and practices. We like to think of beer as a constantly evolving organism where innovation spurs success. There is no one right way to brew beer. As a result we’re willing to try ingredients other brewers won’t – just ask enthusiasts of our smoked garlic porter. The bottom line is if it tastes good, we brew it.

- Collaboration – As in most industries, many layers of separation obscure producer from consumer. We see this as one of the great tragedies of the modern brewing landscape. Because drinking beer has always been a social experience, its production should be no different. The goal is to share our passion and knowledge of beer with our customers, and in turn learn from them.

- Local Ingredients, Sustainable Practices - For us living local is not just a marketing strategy; it's a lifestyle. We believe that all of us have a duty to reduce our footprint on the earth regardless of the industry in which we work.  Unfortunately, many other brewers big and small have little regard for local values when they clash with the bottom line. Wherever possible Glass Bottom Brewery will use locally sourced ingredients, and we will actively explore opportunities to make brewing a generally less wasteful enterprise.