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.